Detours
What follows is a post that is not from this blog, but from an older blog I used to write that no longer exists. It’s heavy on some educational solutions I came up with at about 3 in the morning. It’s half essay, half angry manifesto. It’s also reallllly, realllly long. In rereading it 15 months later, I’m laughing at myself for being so mad at the world. Yet I still feel there are some legit points made, and clever thoughts organized into clearly developed talking points.
“Real Practice has orientation or direction, but it has no purpose or gaining idea, so it can include everything that comes” – Shunryu Suzuki
I’ve always liked the idea of standards as a starting point for “what should be taught” but felt threatened by the idea of “standards for the sake of portraying every kid as a peg to put in a hole, or a cog in a machine.” Thus, I’m no fan of NCLB, or it’s ridiculous ideas about education. This blog post presented that idea well. I didn’t change it much, except to edit some things that were too close to home, but probably wouldn’t phrase everything the same if I wrote on the same topic today.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 6, 2011
Why Our Education System is Failing our Kids -or- Why I Need to Stop Reading CNN Late at Night.
Like an idiot, I went and read the recent article about teachers, students, administrators and government officials cheating on Georgia’s standardized testing, and now I can’t stop my brain at 3 in the morning. This is typical for me. Except for the neatness part, I have a type-A brain that obsesses over stuff at weird hours. I get a lot out of it in terms of new ideas, but I pay for it sometimes when I can’t sleep at night.
It also doesn’t help that I really care about education. As a teacher in the US, I feel constantly under attack. Too many parents expect me to do the parenting for their kids — they’re either too inept or too busy — and when the results don’t work out the way they expected them to, they point the finger at me, and the rest of America’s teachers.
I have two philosophies about education. One is that we really educate ourselves. Complaining that you have a bad teacher is like getting mad at your dentist because you have too many cavities. As a teacher, it is my job to present the material in the best possible way I know how, to introduce students to new ideas and possibilities — but the responsibility of learning it falls on them. It doesn’t mean I don’t work at interacting with them, or providing them with high quality activities, I do all those things. But in order for them to get anything out of it, they have to make a conscious decision to learn it. That’s on the kids. I look at it this way: I will do my job so well, that if they flunk, they have only themselves to blame.
My second philosophy is that education should be something that can turn the world on it’s head. The lower classes of society should be able to use education as a tool for self-improvement, and that should have a dollar amount to it. Too many schools in the US promote the status quo — rich families produce kids who get good grades and get good jobs as adults and poor families produce kids who get bad grades and have low paying jobs (or no job) as an adult. Statistically, that scenario sees itself out in most of our communities.
NCLB is failing our kids. NCLB stands for No Child Left Behind. It is the dumbest law ever passed in the history of education in the United States. Highlights include the following:
Federal education money is tied to school performance through state-created standardized testing. Schools that habitually perform poorly on standardized tests can have funding pulled from them (that’s right, we take money AWAY from schools that don’t cut it, as opposed to giving them more resources to solve the problem)
The levels of students who have to pass certain tests in order to be considered kosher by the law gradually go up over time, until eventually, it is expected that 100% of kids will be able to pass the test. In the state of California, this means scoring Proficient or Advanced in all subjects (the equivalent, roughly, of being an “A” and “B” student)
The culture of the law has created multiple problems in education, which will eventually cause the public school system to fail our kids. That isn’t hyperbole, the problems created by NCLB have made it worse to go to school in this country than it was when I was a kid. That’s a downward trend that has to end somewhere.
From 5 years of teaching experience, all under NCLB, here are the problems this law has created:
Rampant Cheating: 100% of kids in a class are never going to pass a test that is meaningful, because if something is actually challenging, that means someone will fail (at least the first time). States will (and have) dumb down their tests (that counts as cheating). The CNN article highlights problems in Georgia where teachers and administrators actively changed answers on tests (that’s cheating), knew about cheating and ignored it (as bad as cheating), or should have known that cheating was happening, and didn’t (qualifies as cheating as far as I’m concerned — also, it’s a sign of stupidity). So, let’s see, we created a system where teachers are paid more or fired based solely on their test scores, where schools’ funding is directly tied to test scores, where the goals that are set concerning test scores are entirely unrealistic, and then are surprised when a small percentage, but a scary percentage, of teachers and administrators cheat — who’s stupid now?
Loss of a diversity of programs available in public schools: It’s common knowledge that sports programs, music programs, libraries, work training, art programs and other programs are disappearing from American schools. The problem hits really close to home. Junior Highs in my county do not have school-sponsored sports, one high school nearby shut down its library, and has threatened to close down sports — nearly every school in California has either shut down many of these programs, or cut them severely because of budget restraints. Testing is partly to blame. In California, the two subjects that matter most in terms of calculating the Academic Performance Index that is a measure of school wide aptitude on standardized tests are English and Math. Other programs are expendable. Several students every year transfer to my school from other schools WHO HAVE NEVER TAKEN A HISTORY CLASS, but had 3 hours of English at their old school. For schools struggling with pressure from tests AND lower budgets, survival mode is the only mode.
Students don’t know how to think: Instead of using standards as a guide to teaching, many teachers teach to the test. Because test scores are the only thing that matter, we’ve created a worksheet generation — kids who can memorize well, but can’t think on their feet, and are flummoxed when asked to create an intelligent opinion. Critical thinking should be the goal of education, as it’s the most important skill for citizens living in a democracy (if people have the power, they also need to have the cognitive capacity to lead). I was once blessed to have a group of Chinese exchange students in my classroom, and when I gave them a textbook; they were amazed at the level of detail. One student told me “we only get a list of names and dates to memorize when it comes to history” with no depth or breadth of subject, and absolutely no interaction between student and teacher. Is this our goal? If test scores are all that matters, it will be the result.
Students take classes they have no hope of passing, because it’s worth more in API if they take a higher level class: I believe all students can be successful, but success is a relative term. NCLB’s goals don’t take that into account, so you get weird situations like you have in California, where it is worth more to have a student fail the standardized Algebra test, than it is to have them pass a test that is more suitable for their level. Many schools ONLY teach certain subjects at certain grades (an example are schools that ONLY offer Algebra at the eighth grade level, no higher math, no lower math). Part of this is a funding issue — schools can’t afford to differentiate because they can’t afford to hire two teachers — but NCLB has encouraged pigeonholing kids based on age, as opposed to diversifying instruction based on ability.
Okay, so it’s all well and good to complain, but how do we fix it? Repealing NCLB is a good start, but you’d need to have something in its place. Here are 9 “fixes.”
Ditch the stupid test: The results aren’t telling teachers anything we don’t already know, and sometimes the results don’t match a student’s actual achievement level. The students who do well in my class typically do pretty decently on the test, but there are so many other factors that come into play, that it’s not always a correlation. Get this: I teach a kid history for THREE YEARS before they test on it. ALL elementary and junior high history is tested on in the eighth grade. Because they don’t use the information, a lot of it is forgotten — it’s like they want the kids to fail. NCLB and its high-stakes gamble on standardized testing was a stupid idea, and now it’s failed. It hasn’t produced the results it was supposed to, and where it has, sometimes those results are falsified. What it has done is put an obscene amount of pressure on schools to meet goals that are entirely unobtainable, which has had unsavory side effects.
Stop evaluating teachers based on testing: if you want to keep the test as a tool, fine. But stop using it to evaluate teachers. That encourages bad teaching (memorization, no remediation –how can you spend time going back to teach something your students didn’t understand the first time if you’re on a schedule, lack of diverse subjects in school) and cheating. Administrators are a completely imperfect way to evaluate talent, as it’s all really subjective, but there are no other viable alternatives. It’s not a fast food restaurant, you can’t use objective numbers when it comes to teaching human beings — they’re far too complex for that. Additionally, without the high-pressure testing environment, standards become guidelines for teaching, but teachers wind up having the freedom to remediate, or to insert Critical Thinking activities based on key topics, without having to worry about the schedule.
Keep the tenure system, and keep paying teachers on experience: If you’re going to use a subjective system to evaluate talent, you can’t base pay on it. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the only viable one.
Make better parents: Not sure how to do this exactly, but when you’ve seen parents who will argue that holding their kid to a high standard isn’t in their best interest, who get mad at you for flunking a kid when that kid is the only one in class who refuses to do any work, who come to parent teacher conferences drunk, who beat or otherwise abuse their children, you start to wonder if parents are the problem. It’s not all bad. I would estimate about a third of my parents are awesome, about a third are in the middle somewhere, but don’t get in my way, and only about a third are actively subverting the education of their children somehow. Even then, many of the children of that last third find ways to be successful. But when you’re looking at a system that expects a 100% pass rate, but where a third of the parents have no idea how to be a parent, you’re trying to drive a car where the wheels have fallen off, and blaming the engine because you’re not getting anywhere. Stupid.
Fully fund education: Stop making excuses and pay the hell up. Education costs money. In California, we pay about 1000 bucks per student per year to educate our kids. In New Jersey, they pay 7000. Why is New Jersey better than us? I’ll say this, there’s not that big of a gap between the two states in achievement (although that analysis is based on inherently-flawed standardized tests, and therefore flawed). The answer has to be somewhere in the middle. 7000 may be too much, but 1000 isn’t enough. Sports programs cost money. Good teachers cost money. Art, music, etc., it all costs money. If your kids matter to you, you’ll pay the bill. If they don’t, then you won’t. We send the message to kids in California that they don’t matter, because we refuse to fully fund our schools. And even at an elementary level, kids can see the crumbling classrooms they’re forced to try and learn in, and they understand the message the adults in this cheap state are sending them.
Diversify: If you can get the money, spend it on the right stuff. A school where kids are offered multiple electives, afterschool programs, and math and other subjects presented at their developmental level is a school where kids will get the most out of their education. Schools have to be able to afford these things, if there’s a constant budget panic, they go into survival mode, and “non-essential” programs get cut. The problem is that most students are drawn to a school because of those “non-essential” programs — they are athletes, artists, musicians, etc. You cut that program, you cut a kid’s reason to be there. You invest in a kid, most of the time, it will pay off.
Stop making yearly budgets at the state level: Schools lose continuity in their programs because they are subject to cuts every year. Stop that. States need to be run like a business in some ways in terms of financial planning, which means 3, 5, 7 and sometimes 10 year revenue projections, and 3, 5, 7 and 10 year plans in place for different scenarios. Give schools the ability to plan several years in advance so that if they have to cut a program, it’s not a surprise, and they can base any program growth on realistic and consistent information from the state. And while we’re at it, could we please stop micromanaging school funding? Don’t give me $100,000, and then tell me I can only spend it on technology, when what I really need are two more teachers. Let’s figure out how to use our money at the local level only. California needs to write me a check and get the hell out of the way.
Pay teachers more: It sounds self-serving, but it isn’t. Starting pay for a teacher is in the 30,000’s, which puts most first year teachers in a lower-class tax bracket. Why do we value construction workers more than teachers? There’s nothing wrong with construction workers, but there’s an overwhelming statistic of young teachers quitting after less than five years on the job to go to work in the private sector. They’re not paid what they’re worth, even after taking into account fictional “summers off” (all teachers are required to continually go to classes and conferences to keep their credentials up to date, summer’s the only time to do this, not to mention that it’s the only opportunity to plan a year’s worth of activities) and vacation time. If you can hang on to more of these young professionals, and give them a chance to make a decent living, you can get more fresh ideas into education, and therefore education as a whole will improve. That means you have to pay me as much as I can make in the private sector.
Fail some kids some of the time: Sometimes, kids decide not to learn. They’re like little people that way. Those kids need to get F’s. Those kids may need to not graduate. Some kids need to fail to learn how to succeed. Instead of dumbing down education, or giving feel-good B’s and C’s, we need to put the responsibility of education onto the kids. Everybody needs to come into the classroom feeling that if a kid fails, it’s their fault, and that includes the kids themselves. It’s the only way they learn the self-discipline necessary to succeed in the real world. I tell my kids that anyone can pass if they are willing to work hard enough. In five years, I’ve never had a kid flunk because they were too dumb to pass my class, but I’ve given a lot of F’s to kids who didn’t care enough about their education to do simple tasks like homework. Sometimes those kids have completely unsupportive parents, who make the problem worse. Sometimes a kid earns an “F.” Teachers need to be able to have the freedom to flunk a kid, which means you cannot tie their pay or their job to student achievement. That has balance, by the way. If 30 out of 32 kids are failing a class, then something is definitely wrong there, but assuming there’s a qualified individual in the classroom vetted by administration, give that person the freedom to fail a kid or two every once in a while who’ve earned it.
POSTED AT 2:58 AM
Zen and the Art of Teaching Junior High 