I am in a near-constant debate with a facebook friend who is deeply invested in the Michelle Rhee thing. He finally asked me why I was so opposed to sorely needed education reform. I wrote tthe following. I would love to hear your ideas about making the list more comprehensive. Likewise, if I have oversimplified things, please let me know.
1. There is no reason to believe that reliance on standardized, multiple choice tests reveals anything more about student learning than their ability to take a standardized test. There are strategies for taking those tests to succeed without actually knowing the answers.
2. Those tests do not adequately reflect thinking in the real world and do nothing to help students apply the memorization of factoids to meaningful, real-world situations.
3. Making job security reliant on ever-increasing scores on said tests will encourage fudging of the numbers and teaching to the test.
4. It simplifies education to the point of absurdity, ignoring all of the factors that go into creating the problem.
5. It conflates my desire to have job-protection with some notion that I don't care about the students. Seriously. That's insulting and ridiculous. If I want to make a middle class salary and have due process at my job that means I don't care about the children? Why don't you make an agreement with your boss: he will cut your pay by 20% and give that money to the charter school of your choice. What? Don't you care about the children? If I didn't care about the students and just wanted to make money, why didn't I get a job on wall street? Why did my mom continually buy school supplies for the children in her class who couldn't afford them? Though she worked 12-13 hours a day for the length of the school year for 28k/year (after 30 years of teaching, mind you. She retired at the TOP of the career ladder making 35k/year) you begrudge her the right to strike if they arbitrarily give her 5 more students per class, cut her pay, or lengthen her school day?
6. Why do teachers deserve protection? Teachers are public employees. They need protection from being replaced arbitrarily by new governments. When Rahm comes into office, one of the easiest ways to save money is to fire teachers at the top of the pay scale and replace them with new-hires who make two-thirds as much. Some of them might be better, some of them might be equal, and some of them might be worse for the students. Won't matter though, because it will save money and clear the field for the NEXT education fad. Like abortion, it is the political gift that keeps on giving. As long as you can blame teachers or unions, you can bring in any untested benchmarking system...and when it fails, blame it on the teachers who don't work hard enough. Why would they fire good teachers? Hell, they just did. CPS just fired multiple hundreds of good, qualified teachers who have good track records and replaced them with cheap newhires. In many cases, they put DNR slips in their files despite the fact that they had never been warned or written up about anything. Why did they do this? So when they apply for jobs, they do not have to rehire obviously more qualified teachers at a higher rate than untested noobs. Why else? The job is not stable from semester to semester. All it takes is three willfully disobedient students to screw up an entire class dynamic. I had it happen to me. I couldn't kick them out, they shrugged at punishment, they sneered at reason, and there was no way I could “be cool” them into not disrupting class. Administration would do nothing to help me, and I would have been fired if that class's performance had been the measuring stick of my worth as a teacher.
7. It assumes that market forces are the key to success. But education does not make a product that people buy. In your job, you can make more money by doing something faster or better. In my job, if all of us make better students,we make no more money because there is no demand for good students. That is, no one will pay for them. If I turn out 100 of the best researchers ever minted in Chicago, they will apply for the same jobs that everyone else will, and they might be better prepared for the job, but neither they nor their employer will subsidize the cost of that student's education. And that's a good thing because do you know what would happen if we truly partnered with businesses and they paid us to make students specifically for their job needs? a. Students don't need to know literature, art, history or science. They need to know how to be shift managers and make change. b. yeah, we know you trained these students for the job of ___, but we have replaced those machines and moved the jobs to Thailand where it is cheaper.
8. Education reform pushes breadth over depth. It encourages “covering” many different concepts that will be on the test, but there is not enough time to ever get into the why or the what-if that makes genuine learning meaningful. One of the biggest objections I have heard from public school teachers is that there is no time to teach because they are always preparing for the next benchmark.
9. If you pay for performance, you will always reward the New Triers and wealthy school districts and always punish the poor districts where home instability, gang violence, poor housing quality, food insecurity, and things like lead poisoning will distract many students from their schoolwork in ways that the kids in New Trier will never have to worry about. The solution? Give raises to the teachers at New Trier and fire the teachers in Englewood. Who will want to teach in Englewood? The people who can't get hired anywhere else. The best educators are always going to apply first to the rich schools in good neighborhoods with no gangs, good housing, and wealthy parents.
10. If you ask teachers to solve all of society's ills in the classroom, you better find some way to subsidize our education to include social work, police work, community building, and political organizing.
11. Why do you suppose these hedge fund billionaires decided out of the blue that they suddenly care about how poor kids are doing on the south side? Could it have something to do with the 4 bn dollars that Obama has budgeted for education? While there is not a lot of money in making a good students, there is a boatload of money to be made in testing students, firing teachers, busting unions, and redirecting public money into private schools who can choose who their students will be.
12. What are my solutions? Smaller classes; more writing assignments; more study of the scientific method; more in-depth instruction of mathematics, encouraging questioning; more rigorous teacher evaluations based on benchmarking, but done within the current system of tenure; financial incentives to get better teachers into worse schools; transparency of hiring and firing practices; skills-based student assessment instead of a grades-based student assessment; skills-tracked learning and courses; more robust vo-tech programs and better sorting of students into college prep or vo-tech classes, with the caveat that students can switch tracks with improved effort; creation of student cohorts and group learning, but at the same time, less reliance on peer-review among students; more teachers to provide hands-on assistance and individual instruction.