Education reform is full of good intentions and bad outcomes. Reformers on both sides acknowledge that there are many kids getting inadequate education, and everyone wants to do better, but the recipes for doing better all seem designed to antagonize the other side, and therefore bring opposition and, ultimately, failure. Two recent efforts, No Child Left Behind and Common Core, are no different. It is time for a radically new approach.
A key feature of all the large scale reform efforts is testing. It is the tests that determine which schools and teachers are subject to remediation and/or punishment or reward. And it is the tests that make students’ and teachers’ lives hell.
More and more teachers find themselves teaching to the tests; more and more classroom time is devoted to test learning, test strategy, test practice, test taking. (And, I would point out, all that time is lost for teaching actual new content.)
What strikes me is that all this testing is, at its core, a statement of distrust. The default position is that you are not doing a good job unless you prove that you are. I wonder whether school reform would work any better if we changed the entire paradigm: The default position is that you ARE doing a good job until evidence surfaces that you are not.
The vast majority of teachers, probably more than 90%, are hard-working, dedicated people trying to do the very best they can for the children in their classes. Often they are working under unbelievably difficult conditions, and despite the nominally short workday, they put more hours into their job than most professionals I know. Many are very creative and have great ideas about how to engage their kids. My contention is, in the population of teachers, there are a few at the top who could go into almost any classroom and do better than the previous teacher. There are some at the bottom who would do worse. But the vast majority in the middle could change jobs with any other teacher and do no better or worse than the original.
These teachers are currently chafing under a barrage of tests. What if we set them free?
If there are 10% of teachers that we want to identify as deficient, it is counterproductive to saddle the other 90% with burdensome testing and requirements that make their teaching worse. How’s this for reform: stop telling teachers what to do. Assume that they are teaching well the material they are supposed to teach, and leave them alone. Do not assume that a teacher is doing a poor job until something triggers an alert. Maybe a significant number of students are unable to do the material in the following class; maybe there are complaints from parents or students.
Once teachers are flagged, something happens. This may or may not involve testing, but some evaluation should take place on those who are suspected of being poor teachers. Some will be determined to be fine teachers, perhaps trying something new, perhaps saddled with a flu epidemic that led to extensive absenteeism or some other factor beyond their control. Some will be determined to be doing poorly, but salvageable; presumably some remedial steps will be recommended. Others may be deemed simply to be bad matches for the job of teaching, and these should be replaced.
Teachers are professionals. Let’s trust them to do a good job.