Nels Ackerson, Democratic candidate for Indiana’s 4th Congressional District has an opinion column in the Journal Review (out of Crawfordsville, I believe.) He criticizes the premise of No Child Left Behind. That policy does not promote education. It merely promotes the indicia of education. In other words, it doesn’t encourage teachers to teach kids to be smart. It encourages them only to produce students who can take a particular test. And, it does so at an expense. There are only so many hours in the day, and so every minute spent teaching to the test is a minute not spent teaching kids what they need to live. (Never mind other problematic aspects of NCLB — unequal and inadequate resources and disparate needs of student populations, for example).
To be sure, this isn’t the only time waster in a teacher’s life. My wife was formerly a teacher, and from her perspective, the non-education obligations imposed on teachers and schools were legion. The bureaucracy was formidable. Teachers are expected to be babysitters, police officers, and social workers as much as educators. Frequently, it seems, there is poor communication between school boards and teachers; leaving a school corporation in bad shape where, perhaps, the teachers and the board members are adequate, but school administration is not.
So, how DO we measure how well schools are doing? Drop outs? Average wage after age 25?
I have had to suffer through many BAD teachers that really don’t care. Thankfully, they are a minority, but they do need to be changed or elminated. How?
There must be some way to measure how well schools and teachers are doing other than subjective measurements (AKA grades) that are issued by the very people who are being measured. Self-monitoring can’t work.
Perhaps some sort of school board and parent assessment. But, I think it’s going to have to be a fuzzier evaluation — more like grading an essay than grading a multiple choice quiz.
You think school board members, elected officials with full-time day jobs who already devote tons of time to a really daunting, practically volunteer task, should be responsible for teacher evaluation? The typical school board has five members as compared to dozens or hundreds of teachers. That strikes me as highly realistic. Ideally, a school board should function as a board of directors and hire administrators that it trusts. The school board should be involved at the strategic level, at least routinely, rather than directly involved with the day-to-day operations of the school.
As for the layers of bureaucracy, I’m sure that there is more paperwork than teachers would like. That’s true of any profession, really. As for teachers acting as a police officer/social worker/babysitter, has that ever not been the case? Teachers generally are responsible for the first level of discipline in their classrooms (police/babsitter). Also, any good teacher will get to know her students, which makes the social worker part of the job inevitable. My dad is a school administrator, so having watched him work 60-80 hour weeks routinely for the last quarter century, I get a bit snippy at the implication that administrators are the fundamental problem with public education. There are good ones and bad ones, same as teachers and same as school board members. It’s nice to romanticize the “sainted teacher,” and there are a hell of a lot of them who are absolutely committed, who view their jobs as vocations and take on more headaches that their pay grade would retire. On the other hand, we all know that every school has its share of teachers who are counting the days to retirement, who hate their students, and who take the path of least resistance. Anyone who has gone to school knows that. I think the idea that schools would work best if each classroom were regarded as its own one-room schoolhouse is unrealistic.
Wow, but this is refreshing! A candidate for federal office who is intereted in addressing, perhaps reducing, the federal role in education? Excellent.
Teaching to a test is useless for life skills. Critical and analytical thinking, anyone?
Now I doubt Nels will go as far as to call for getting the federal government out of education, which in my opinion should be purely a local concern, but this is more than I’ve heard on the matter from any congressional candidate in recent memory.
Funding strikes me as the major issue with respect to making education purely a local concern. The kids in Carmel are probably always going to have a leg up on the kids in Fountain County, but I’m not sure you want to exacerbate it with an inordinate funding gap. Though, maybe money isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I never felt like I had an inferior education at Richmond High School, even if we didn’t have as much money as some other districts did. (And, to be sure, we had more money than some). I think I ended up getting lucky by winding up with a cluster of really outstanding teachers. (Don’t get me wrong, there were a few truly awful ones as well.)
Doug –
If money were the sole answer, the DC schools would be the envy of the world.
‘Teaching to the test’?
Well, that depends on the test.
If the test is a good one (that is, if test results are a good predictor of future success), then teaching to it is a reasonable approach. If not, not.
I’d like to see less federal involvement in education – my questions with regard to this are:
“If the Department of Education were shut down today, how many schools would be unable to open tomorrow?”
“How many schools would be worse off?”
As long as the funding is coming from the Federal Gov’t, the same Federal Gov’t is going to attach strings. How many elected congressional politicians could you name that would be pleased to create so much of the funding without exerting any control? I can’t think of any.
What’s the worst thing that happens if it becomes a local concern? People pay for the education they can afford? I dunno- sounds like a just outcome to me. Beyond that, a couple years ago I read with great interest the lamentations of the past graduates of Indy’s Crispus Attucks. They beamed with pride about how their poor, black community rallied around that school to make it something special. They lament today that it isn’t the same, that there isn’t a sense of community- and they tied to the move away from local support to broader regional support. It doesn’t feel like “their school” any more.
Things things all get into the debate about the levels of government, and I confess I’m torn. At once, it appeals to me to strip away the Township level of gov’t. And yet, I fear it as doing so would make gov’t less local and more remote/less accountable. I think this applies to schools as well.