| Posted: 17 October 2010 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | 7
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I think your number 1 issue might be a Kentucky issue as well. In most states, including my own state of Indiana, tenure only provides that teachers have due process rights and can't be fired for frivolous reasons, such as what religion they practice (if any) or whether they belong to a certain political party. That's why tenure was developed in the first place. Most evaluation systems allow an administrator to get rid of a bad teacher. I would disagree with your statemement that the problems can be boiled down to so few things. There are lots of reasons why our educaitonal system is failing. In no particular order: 1. Textbook choice has been limited by the power of the most populous states. Where Texas leads, the rest of the country follows, because they order more textbooks. They have undue influence on the content of textbooks that are used nationwide. By the way, if a textbook is printed in China, China also gets to censor it. They do things like making sure that Taiwan is colored the same color as China on any map. 2. Culture. Ours has become a culture that does not value education. Too many kids will avoid success simply because they don't want to stand out as "nerds." It is not socially acceptable to be too smart. 3. Curriculum. Curriculum mapping (lock-stepping all teachers of the same subject so that they do the same thing on the same day) is becoming the darling of many educational "experts." Never mind that some classes simply take more time to learn certain things. It's become so micromanaged that in our school system we have to check off which teaching strategies we have used on a website every day to ensure that "best practices" are being used. Seriously, it's like following a recipe. 4. Teachers. I know a lot of unqualified teachers coming out of professionalizing programs. Former military personnel are among them. I saw one in my school actually compare parents at back to school night to their own children, saying, "Duh! It's just like first hour. Nobody says anything!" It was embarrassing. 5. Discipline. Students can get away with saying "Fuck you" to a teacher's face and have nothing more than a day in in-school suspension to show for it. I had a laser shined in my eye one time and the student wasn't even punished for it. Schools are now evaluated partially based on how many suspensions they dole out, so administrators will sometimes say that they don't want to "eat" those suspensions for less serious offenses like the ones I mentioned above. 6. No Child Left Behind. When you mandate programs that cost $34.3 billion in 2005 for example, but fund it with $24.9 billion, where is the extra $9.4 billion coming from? Existing programs, which have to be cut. That allows politicians to claim that more is being spent on education than ever before, while at the same time making it actually more difficult to accomplish what educators were failing at already. And the way that adequate yearly progress is measured is an absolute joke. For those of you unfamiliar with it, there are 29 cells that each must show a level of improvement or your entire school is labeled “failing.” Those cells are divided by race, gender, socioeconomic status, language proficiency, special education status, and others. My favorite is Limited English Proficiency. Students who have been identified as having limited English skills are given a test written in English about the English language. One might reasonably expect that they would have difficulty with that. The worst part about it is that once a student is sufficiently proficient to move out of that cell, he or she leaves behind only those people who are still not proficient in English, and might reasonably still have trouble with it. I call it the gift that keeps on giving. 7. The agrarian school calendar. We no longer need 10-week summer breaks, which allows poor students to forget a great deal of what they’ve learned because they generally don’t have the same resources to have summer enrichment to keep their minds engaged. 8. Overmedication. It is estimated that 7% of people get ADHD, yet I’ve seen years more than 20% of students in my school were taking medication for it. That’s criminal. 9. Poverty. In order this would probably be the number one factor of student success. It can be overcome, but it often is not. I could go on and on about this topic, having been a teacher for 24 years. But you begin to get the idea. Sure, teachers are part of the problem. But it’s a complex problem that is not going to be solved by merit pay, charter or private schools, or even legislation. It’s going to take massive reform. I sometimes secretly hope that business people get their wish and take over the education system the way they want to. They will fall flat on their faces. But my cynical side says that they’ll just fudge the numbers Arthur Andersen/Enron style and they’ll do it at the cost of our future.
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