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Policymakers need to put pressure on students, not teachers
(by David Linzee - March 17, 2010)
Two weeks ago it was announced that Missouri had fallen by the wayside in the Race to the Top — the Obama administration’s dramatically named education initiative. We won’t get a federal grant for our schools on this round. But we’ll try again. We really need the money. So desperate are all the states for funds that they’ll accept any policy directive the feds attach to them, according to education authority Diane Ravitch. “Too much incentive means states will do it whether or not it works,” she told The New Yorker.
So this seems like an appropriate time to take a look at the Obama administration’s policies. The first thing you notice is that education is one of the few areas where the Republicans aren’t fighting him tooth and nail. They’ve even said some nice things about his education secretary, Arne Duncan, who made his name with “turnarounds” — closing schools that were underperforming on standardized tests and re-opening them with all-new staff.
You also notice that when Obama talks about education, he sounds not unlike George W. Bush. The word he uses a lot is “accountability,” which means high-stakes testing, which means that what will be going on in the nation’s schools is a lot of teaching to the test.
I’m not an education expert, but I have been on the business end of a good deal of teaching to the test. Back at Priory in the ’60s, for instance, we spent the first of our five years of Latin memorizing declensions, conjugations and vocabulary. Our teachers didn’t even try to make this “interesting” or “relevant” to 12-year-olds. They just tested us every month. If you flunked, you had to stay late on Friday night, studying. Then you took the test again, on the same terms.
Guess what? My scores started out abysmal but rose rapidly. Even today, I can conjugate annus and mensa — though, alas, I am seldom asked to do so. Teaching to the test works, as long as you’re comfortable with what you’re doing, which is using the test as a threat.
We’re not comfortable — and we shouldn’t be — threatening underprivileged kids. Instead, we threaten their teachers. We carry out the threats with increasing zeal. Last month, the school board of a Rhode Island district fired the entire teaching staff of a school where students were scoring low on standardized tests.
This highly publicized stunt strikes me as a revival of a very old educational idea: the whipping boy. Its purpose is to vent frustration rather than improve education. Do these turnarounds and firings work? The experts are divided and the numbers hard to read. But some bad consequences seem inevitable to me. Students will sink deeper into passivity, convinced that education is something others should be doing for them. And teachers who want to keep their jobs will concentrate on gaming the test, their administrators on cooking the scores.
Is this what Americans want? Maybe so. I recall a remark by one of my professors at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville: “You’ll never understand American education policy, until you realize that Americans don’t like teachers.”
He had a point. The things we do begin to make sense, if you start with the assumption that the majority of Americans didn’t like school, didn’t do particularly well in it and are looking for payback: let’s make teachers sweat out the test for a change.
To make the revenge even sweeter, let’s humiliate the majority of teachers by making a few of them “teacher’s pets.” Or rather policymaker’s pets. Underlying Obama’s program is a new research finding that great teaching is the most important factor in education.
This may be a case of research finding out just what we want to hear; it downgrades those factors we don’t like to talk about, like class and race. All the same, I doubt that we’re going to follow up on this research finding, to the extent that we do in teaching what we do in other professions — investment banking, say, or brain surgery — when we believe that only the best are good enough: shower them with high salaries and prestige.
It seems more likely to me that we’ll continue to overwork and underpay teachers and treat them with scorn. If we go on firing teachers whose students don’t do well on standardized tests, odds are we won’t end up with the ones who nurture and inspire, but those who are assiduous pre-test coaches. And we should consider the possibility that if we make teaching unrewarding enough, we may run low on people who want to be teachers.
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