Tomorrow is my last first day of school as a full-time student (the 19th September in a row; no breaks or anything.) From a strictly objective viewpoint, I've had more education than a lot of people. A lot of people have had more education than me; I don't labor under the delusion that my education makes me better or smarter than anyone else, but I've worked pretty hard and done pretty well so far. I have a lot more to learn, for sure, but even so I find the result of all this education a little bit puzzling. When I graduate in May, after completing my coursework and two and a half long days of testing, I'll be a certified teacher with an M.A. in Educational Theatre and English Education. To listen to many people, including a sizable number in the field of education, this means that I will have become a soporific lump of a human being, a barely sentient babysitter, a robot that can only be animated by careful programming with the proper script. Oh, and I'm also selfish and lazy, having entered my profession solely for the job security, great hours, and summers off. In short, I'm a danger to our children and must be carefully controlled and shown the error of my ways. The only thing worse than a teacher, after all, is the teachers' union.
I just read
this article in Newsweek. It's about Michelle Rhee, the head of the school district in Washington, D.C. She's fighting a lot of stagnation and corruption, and I admire a lot of what she's doing. But she seems to have this us vs. them skepticism toward the teachers and the teachers' union that I find alarming. This quote, in particular, seems problematic to me: "It's embarrassing to be a Democrat when you hear Democrats talk about education," she says. "The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party that looks out for poor black kids, yet the kind of rhetoric they spew about … [how the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law is] 'sucking the life out of our teachers'—come on. Get real. I believe that until the Democratic Party breaks ties with the teachers unions, we are not going to see the true reform in this country that we need.
She's trying to sell the union on a plan that would basically weaken tenure and job security for teachers, in exchange for salaries that actually crack six figures. Sounds all right by me. The problem I have with her plan is that she wants to base the evaluations that determine (I guess) who gets the ax and who gets the dough on (wait for it) test scores. Even if I give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she simply would ask teachers to raise test scores for their particular students (in a classroom where kids are testing three or four grade levels behind, setting the bar for continued employment at achieving grade-level scores across the board would reduce the D.C. schools to a one-room schoolhouse) there is a big problem with this. By and large, the tests being administered are tests of a student's ability to take tests. Let's set aside for a moment the repeated reports that standardized tests favor white middle class kids--when, in your workplace, have you ever had to demonstrate your competency via Scantron? Testing is an irrelevant skill. If Rhee's program measured teacher performance with a more comprehensive metric--student work portfolios that span the entire year should be a more than adequate demonstration of the learning that is actually taking place. If I do wind up teaching English to 7th and 8th graders in a year, like I hope to, I would stake my professional reputation on the difference between the essays my kids write in September and the ones they write in June, and on the quality of class discussion, and on the literature they are able to think about. Student writing and videos of class should demonstrate what went on in our classroom that was of real value. But what about the poor administrators and district wonks who have to measure all of this and make those decisions? Looking at actual student work is so much more time consuming than comparing test scores. Computers can't determine what goes on in a video; people have to do that! Well, yeah, they do. Rhee holds up the KIPP charter schools as good models--the teachers there work 12-hour days, they work six days a week, and they're permanently on call to their students. If I commit to that as a teacher--which I am happy to do, since it seems to be working--then I think I am owed administrators who will commit to giving me a meaningful evaluation when my career is on the line.
I know there are terrible teachers out there--a small minority who are visibly, actively bad, who damage kids in big ugly ways, who are in this because it's a power trip or something equally abhorrent, and a much, much larger group who are simply in it because they had to do something but who aren't invested in it, who don't care about new research or best practice or anything outside of their comfort zone or knowledge base. I am as frustrated by those teachers as anyone else--more, probably, because they color the way that I am viewed by parents, students, administrators, and others.
For the record, I don't appreciate that. I know I'm not good at it yet, because I haven't done it yet, and like most things in life, learning is doing. But I'm doing what I can now to hit the ground walking, at least. Will reading John Dewey or Howard Gardner make me a good teacher? Of course not. But will it make me a more thoughtful teacher than if I hadn't read them? Sure. Even reading about new strategies for teaching reading and writing--the practical stuff--won't make me a good teacher. But it will give me a lot more to work with in the classroom than if I hadn't learned them. In much the same way, buying a scalpel doesn't make me a good surgeon. Even practicing on corpses doesn't compare to the real thing. Everyone seems to agree, though, that having a scalpel, and being taught how to use a scalpel, makes for a better surgeon. Of course, now and then you hear about some crazy emergency where someone with no training except for a lot of ER and Grey's Anatomy has to perform a tracheotomy with a pen or something and it actually works--but no one then confers an M.D. on that person and throws him into the operating room.
This is more or less what's happening with teachers today. We are addressing the emergency of our teacher shortage and failing education by grabbing people who were good at school as students and figuring that that gives them what they need to perform an emergency tracheotomy on a classroom somewhere that's in big trouble. Sometimes the intelligent, hard-working, dedicated, ballsy, but mostly untrained person pulls it off, and sometimes everyone involved crashes and burns. I know people coming out of those programs who are doing amazing things in the classroom because of a combination of the above attributes with a natural talent for teaching, and I think that's wonderful for our schools and wonderful for them (because this is a damned hard business). I also know people coming out of all the training money can buy and becoming abysmal failures in the classroom. I don't think training is a magic bullet or anything--but I do think that this is a profession with smart people in it, people who try new things and write them up so that other smart people can try them and improve on them and then write that up. If some of those teachers who are doing well with no training felt like they belonged to a professional community, and felt like part of the job was to keep up with that community, and innovate, and contribute to that community, how much more could they do? If everyone in America felt like teachers were doing what other professionals--doctors, lawyers, etc--do, if they knew that such a professional community even existed, wouldn't they respect teachers a little more? If they knew that a teacher's education isn't a two- or a four-year process but an ongoing one, and if they knew how seriously some teachers take their profession, would this teacher crisis start to fade away as successful liberal arts grads no longer felt that teaching was only suitable for them via one of these two-year, sink-or-swim programs? Would education grad school be respected like law school or med school or engineering school? And in turn, as demand rose for really good teacher ed programs, would the quality of the programs improve?
Sometimes I get lost in all the problems. I'll be teaching kids who may or may not have eaten a vegetable in the past week because processed stuff is cheaper. They have no energy because they eat crap and we make come to school and sit through first period while their brains are still releasing sleep hormones and maybe they had to work late to support their family or sit up at night with a younger sibling because their parents work all night to do the same. Oh, and of course, forget about adequate health care, so who knows how many of them need glasses or have rotten teeth or need counseling or have family members with severe illnesses that are left untreated. That's the stuff that I can maybe, just maybe find ways to work around if I get to know my students. That's the stuff I have the energy to try and fix and fight for. But then to have other teachers who try to undermine me because I'm trying to help my students and in the process making them look bad, a principal who thinks I need a script to teach English, a superintendent who hates my guts for belonging to a union that spends more time trying to hang onto power than to make deals that can help teachers AND students, and to have parents think I'm obviously deficient in some way because why else would I be a teacher...I usually try not to consider this magnitude of a worst case scenario. But reading that article the weekend before I start my first student teaching placement sent me into a big-picture spiral of anxiety. There are just so many problems.
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