Who controls the table, wins

[HiPointDem]

...In the spirit of "What if?" let's consider a brief thought experiment. Let's imagine an other world where the Discovery Institute—a think tank that promotes...Intelligent Design —decides to evaluate how evolution is taught in colleges and universities... with the stated goal of reforming the...teaching of evolution by labeling and ranking the current departments of biology based on standards...designed by the Discovery Institute.

Let's also imagine that governors and the federal government decide to fund and support this process, and that the Discovery Institute has reached an agreement with a major magazine...to publish these reports...

Now, let's imagine what the response of those biologists and their departments would be. Would they clamor to fill the seats at this table set by the Discovery Institute...? My speculation is to say no they wouldn't because biologists trust and work at the table they set for their field, and as a central aspect of their professionalism, they would sit firmly at their table...

My thought experiment above is a thin mask for exactly what has occurred in education and education reform over the past three decades and intensified in the last decade.

And here is the essential problem and distinction between K-12 education and high education. K-12 education is hierarchical, bureaucratic, and blinded by a market ideology (customer service) that de-professionalizes teachers; college education is more apt to embrace academic freedom, professor expertise and autonomy, and field integrity (although these qualities are certainly under assault and eroding).

Calls to join the agendas that are de-professionalizing and marginalizing teachers are concessions to those without expertise and experience establishing the table, and in effect, their winning before the discussion ever starts. Hollow rings the refrains that cry out for joining the table because joining the table immediately silences any credible call for questioning the efficacy of the table.

Joining the CCSS table concedes that education somehow fails due to a lack of standards, that teachers somehow in 2012 need someone else to tell them what to teach.

Joining the CCSS table to make sure they are implemented "properly" admits teachers are not professionals, not experts as every biologist in U.S. colleges and universities demands for herself or himself.

Joining the teacher education reform movement, participating in NCTQ's assault on teacher education masked as reform, concedes that a think-tank knows something the entire field of teacher education has yet to determine.

Joining the test-prep mantra and the "no excuses" tables acknowledges and confirms a deficit view of children and transmissional view of knowledge/learning/teaching that dehumanize children and teachers while working against democracy, human agency, and human autonomy.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/15/1083543/-Who-Controls-the-Table-Wins

[mbperrin]

1. Last year, at the beginning of the year, I asked our curriculum coordinator at our weekly(!) meeting

What studies have been done to determine what, if any, impact on students' lifetime happiness does our teaching have?

I asked it at all 32 meetings, and was simply ignored, while the "need" for a "viable and guaranteed" curriculum was pounded over and over again. That means every student should receive the same instruction regardless of which teacher they had for a particular course, no difference in emphasis, enrichment, addition due to life experience, differentiation based on student composition, nothing. The only "good" education is the exact same instruction and comment to each and every child.

Except AP and IB, of course, who for some reason, don't need the guaranteed curriculum.

I'll ask again as we implement the CSCOPE curriculum, even though our department has been at or above state rankings since testing began in 1984.

[Igel]

2. I'm a fairly new teacher.

I'm actually heading in the other direction. I don't like it, but don't see, given the sucky context that I'm teaching in, how it can be anything else.

In favor of strict regimentation in my content area:
New TEKS
New curriculum and teaching materials
Course is now required: Can't teach it like it's an elective.
Fewer prerequisites, lower level of content
Required means "lots more students" = lots of teachers new to the subject--perhaps
they know the subject and are new to teaching, perhaps old teachers new to the subject.
New standardized test.
Students are constantly transferring between classes the first 7 weeks.
Changing demographics (even)

Like I said, I like more liberty in the classroom. Not gonna happen, at least not this year. Probably not next, either. I know a lot of teachers that they it used to be fun. They're looking forward to retirement. "One more year," some of them are saying.

AB and IB have their own tormenters. The guaranteed curriculum is the minimum the kiddos need. AB and IB have their own required curricula and trainings and are usually so far above that ... And if they flub up, you have to pity the poor students.

As for happiness, it's a metagoal. You set goals which, when reached, are likely to allow for or promote happiness. When I tell my own son, frustrated because he can't find anything, to "clean up your room" he's at a loss--it's not a valid goal, he's 8. He can't get there. If, over the course of a weekend, I tell him, "Put away your train tracks," "Pick up these books," "Put away the toy cars," "Pick up your clothes," etc., by Sunday afternoon he'll have found everything he wanted and will know where everything else is. Good character, responsibility, hardwork, resilience, sound habits of mind are all goals that we can set for older students and allow or promote happiness--but even then we have to break them down most of the time and teach them piecewise. Those things get tossed in for free, and if we do our jobs right then the kids pass our class and, when they remember back in 10 years don't usually so much remember the content but remember the other things we taught.

My evaluator has never, ever asked, not even once, while I was taking time on these non-TEKS goals. I never let a class become just about them, however.

[mbperrin]

3. Welcome to the profession. I have in 16 years, about to start #17.

I have taught every social studies course offered in Texas, plus English 1-4, both online and in the classroom.

I teach inclusion classes and remediation classes only.

I have 32 students per period.

My lifetime passing average on TAAS and TAKS is 98%.

I teach what's required to pass those extremely low TEKS in the first 6 weeks, along with anxiety reduction and testing strategies.

We've always had time for enrichment during the remaining course.

I have a BA in English and Economics and an MAEd in Distance and Adult Education.

Now I have to teach only the extremely long and boring stretched out version of what I used to do in 6 weeks.

No plays, no outside reading, no writing, no foldables, not even flash cards, because it's not in the "guaranteed and viable" curriculum. What's wrong with my 98% pass rate, which began with my first year of teaching English 2 and continued last year through US History?

The five year plans for the old Soviet Union didn't work out so well, as central planning for large groups never does.

It's killing the schools and creating a nightmare of student misbehavior, and I don't blame them one bit. I'm 60, and I often feel like misbehaving myself.