The Florida Legislature has handed Gov. Charlie Crist a new education bill to replace the one he vetoed last week. That one would have essentially linked teachers' jobs to the performance of their students on standardized tests. This one would require end-of-course exams for high school students in math and science classes, and add algebra II, geometry, biology, chemistry and physics to the list of courses required for graduation.
Predictably, the comments that accompanied the story in the Naples Daily News included at least one call for "greater accountability" for teachers. Elnuestros feels strongly enough about this issue to repeat his position here. One never knows when a story or a comment will disappear into the ether.
Wrote one commenter to the story:
"I saw this on the news, it makes sense but the teachers need to have some kind of accountability."
Responded elnuestros:
I don't think you'd find many teachers arguing against being held accountable.
What you will find are teachers reluctant to be the scapegoats for a failing system.
The rules on what and how to teach roll down from the federal Department of Education, from state education departments, from local school boards and from the education experts working for the superintendents.
The teacher is allowed freedom and movement within the tangled network of standards, practices, regulations, dictates and procedures that results.
But everybody wants to blame the teacher because the product is faulty?
That's like blaming the cook at KFC because the latest whiz-bang creation cooked up in the corporate kitchen is a bomb.
Education, to be carelessly blunt, has been over-professionalized to the point that it no longer works. Teachers with intuition, with the gift of connecting with students and of trying different approaches until they can find the right one, are handicapped in an industrial model that dictates specific tactics and strategies and refuses to acknowledge individual student distinctions unless accompanied by months of painstaking and time-wasting monitoring. That monitoring, by the way, doesn't help the teacher. He or she already knows the problem. It's just to give the supervisors a paper trail and set the stage for the appropriate intervention.
Teaching is a calling, like training race horses, being a minister, or (traditionally) being a physician or nurse. We're turning it into a service position, and telling the best we have to do their paperwork like good technicians and leave the thinking to their "betters" upstairs.
Then we want to blame them when the students don't perform.
Commented another reader:
Thank you for your astute and insightful post. It's comforting to know that sanity prevails.
To which elnuestros was forced to write:
I wish it prevailed. I don't see evidence of it. I know far too many teachers who think the Tea Party offers a solution, that Glenn Beck is right, that Sarah Palin would be better in the White House than that black guy.
It deflates one to see people with advanced degrees, people charged with teaching children, cutting and pasting whatever "credible" lie about Obama they come across: Did you know he lets Muslims pray on Capitol Hill but revoked the National Day of Prayer?
My fear is that by the time the teachers understand that standardized testing has nothing to do with students and everything to do with them, it will be too late.
Once the McDonaldization of education occurs, once the unions are weakened or dissolved, once the kind of "outside contractors" who have done such a wonderful job for the Pentagon complete their infestation of the schools, I envision a world where teachers will report in uniforms, year-round, for the purpose of handing out the materials they are told to, administering the tests they are required to, and uttering not a word that doesn't appear in the accompanying "teacher's" handbook.
When that day arrives, look for an end to extra pay for advanced degrees and for the time off that many experienced teachers know helps "recharge" the batteries for the next season's challenges. Maybe they'll make an advanced degree a job requirement, but I'm betting they won't be paying extra because of its presence.
And folks will line up for those jobs, doing their part not to "teach" our young, but to mold them and train them to color between the lines, sit up straight, stop questioning authority, not be "bullies" as the definition of that term continues to expand to cover more aspects of human nature, and be model little future service workers in the corporate-run world we will have left for them.
Got a problem with that? Look for the same defense of dissenting opinions one now finds among the Tea Party. Those who won't embrace the "majority" groupthink opinion will be ostracized, expelled, made unemployable and otherwise taught to toe the line.
Where will the professionals come from? Private schools. The trend is already under way. Watch for the division between the two to become permanent and beyond repair when the "libertarians" succeed in establishing vouchers, charter arrangements, and other devices intended to dismantle the funding mechanism that supports public education.
What will be left? Special ed. Lots of it. And behavior issues. Lots of them. And even unhealthier food in the lunchrooms, more soda machines in the hallways, and God knows what clever corporate programs designed to hook young consumers before their powers of discretion and critical thinking can be developed.
Ever listen to the garbage they blast on school bus radios these days? That's the sound of the future.
We'll be returning to this thread, I'm sure, since the debate over public education is unlikely to go away. In the current hardscrabble climate, anyone who belongs to a union seems to be fair game for those drowning in the effluvium of Trickle Down Economics. Those who belong to unions, get summers off, and find their creativity and sense of accomplishment plowed under by supervisors who either never taught, or couldn't hack it, are understandably thin-skinned about the public whipping they're getting from the anti-government crowd.
It's an explosive combination, fraught with danger on both sides. Add politicians, those mouth-breathing, publicity-seeking, kneejerk goofballs who, having made a mess of everything but trading political favors for contributions from the connected and the powerful, now feel obliged to "rescue" public education, and you have the kind of pile-up you sometimes see when a heavy fog descends on a California freeway. We'll keep trying to sort it out.
We'll also try to use shorter sentences. No promises, though. You're in the deep end. You have to concentrate.
It's an explosive combination, fraught with danger on both sides. Add politicians, those mouth-breathing, publicity-seeking, kneejerk goofballs who, having made a mess of everything but trading political favors for contributions from the connected and the powerful, now feel obliged to "rescue" public education, and you have the kind of pile-up you sometimes see when a heavy fog descends on a California freeway. We'll keep trying to sort it out.
We'll also try to use shorter sentences. No promises, though. You're in the deep end. You have to concentrate.
No comments:
Post a Comment