Where bad education really comes from

[Hannah Bell]

Even liberals and Democratic presidents are placing an inordinate amount of blame on teachers for the state of public education, adopting the classic right wing practice of attributing the faults of a system to its weakest elements, in this case teachers and students. This distracts from such issues as who is responsible for running schools, who designs the curriculum, who chooses and trains the teachers, the size of classes, budgeting, how much we pay teacher, the economy's need for graduates and so forth. Besides, those making such claims never offer proof that the percentage of bad teachers has really changed all that much over time...

One of the reasons I don't like test score obsession is because I went through fourth grade at a DC public school that never would have passed the standards of today's self-proclaimed reformers. We had 160 kids with four teachers, two of them maiden sisters known by everyone as the thin Miss Waddy and the fat Miss Waddy. The school lacked special programs and we undoubtedly took up too many square feet to be truly educationally efficient. Nonetheless, out of this failure came a dean of Catholic University, a foreign correspondent for a major newspaper, an urban planning professor and an irrepressible independent journalist, just to name a few from my period - proving once again that in education, objective standards often don't cut it. What's happening in that square footage of whatever size, and who's doing it, is what really matters

For another example, one of the schools targeted for closing by DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee was in a heavily black neighborhood. The school, John Burroughs, put up a web site to help in its fight against closure. On it you could learn that this school the city wanted to shut down is:

- One of five Middle States accredited elementary schools in DC
- Meets federal requirements in reading and math
- Placed first in the city's black history contest
- Has a scout program, cheerleaders and a ski club
- Ranks 15th citywide in reading and 12th in math

There is no standardized test in the world that will tell you how good the two Miss Waddys were or that John Burroughs school has a ski team and that both these facts really matter.


http://prorev.com/2009/03/where-bad-education-really-comes-from.html

[Chulanowa]

1. Thanks for this

The problems in education really do start at the top, and extend out to the periphery; unelected textbook councils and the publishers of those textbooks have vastly more say over what is taught in the classroom than the teacher does! Administrators of course refuse any blame and hand it all to the teachers, the students, and the students' parents. And of course let's not forget that idiotic "funded by property taxes" thing that guarantees schools in poorer communities will provide poorer-quality facilities and resources!

[knitter4democracy]

2. It hit me in my third year of teaching that we can't really know how well we do.

At least, we can't for at least ten years, probably more. The only way to know how a school is doing is to look at the alumni, and that really only says how a school did. Test scores are essentially meaningless (just look at how much the ACT is manipulated--my score from high school would be four points higher today after all of the changes made to the scoring system and test itself). GPA is essentially meaningless, as different teachers grade differently and different schools have different standards. What really counts is internal motivation--and there's really no good way to test that or to know just which skills and information a student really is assimilating.

I still teach because I love to see that light dawn in a student's eyes, love to motivate my students to dream big and go to college, and love to participate in yet another fascinating class debate/discussion and see the kids finally get it. All the testing in the world isn't going to fix our broken system, and all the think tanks have wasted tens of millions of dollars we could have used in the classroom to have enough books, enough desks, and enough supplies.

[Starry Messenger]

3. People who view different parts of society in isolation are the problem

The whole thing is like a body, and when one area is failing then it affects several other areas. If a body has a failing organ you don't blame the other organs for not "succeeding". You support and heal the organ to help the entire body. In the case of school reform, the psychos have decided that they need to rip out the organ to "save" it and the other areas will heal. They think schools are cancer.

Schools are not just little boxes on a hillside that produce the student product. They have a culture and a history. Everyone involved has equity in them. The destruction of this sense of belonging and of social equity became wildly popular with the rampant corporatism of the last few decades. The CEOs who "care" so much about education have displaced and demoralized thousands of their own people in the quest for greater profits, no matter how much of a stake those employees had in making the company successful. Their goal is to apply this same thinking to schools. "Real" culture is only for the wealthy. Everyone else will get shallow team-building exercises to build loyalty to the company. They would hate and despise the Miss Waddys. They aren't "winners".