Author’s Note
(December 12, 2019)
When I retired from teaching almost eleven years
ago, I was already deeply concerned with the damage a monomaniacal
focus on standardized testing was doing to students, first, but also
teachers, administrators and true education.
In May 2008, I told my principal I considered
teaching to the test to be “educational malpractice.”
At the time, however, it seemed I might be wrong.
Almost all the experts were insisting that if we tested enough—basically, if we
held educators accountable for test scores—student proficiency in math, science
and reading would soar. After a generation of testing, what successes have we
seen?
So, far, on almost all national and international
tests, gains have been minimal, or American students have regressed. SAT
scores, for example, declined year after year, until the test was simply
revised. National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in reading and math
at the fourth and eight grade levels rose slightly. But scores for seniors, the
end “product” of school reform, never budged.
When scores on the Programme for International
Student Assessment (PISA) were released recently, our students were actually
scoring lower in 2018 than on the first tests given nearly twenty years ago.
In 2018, the average U.S. student
scored 505 in reading. The average score in science was 502; and the average in
mathematics was 478.
In 2000, on the first PISA tests ever
administered, with students from 41 nations participating, our kids averaged
504 in reading, 499 in science, and 493 in math. It was those scores, meaning
that U.S. students finished sixteenth in reading, fifteenth in science, and
twentieth in math out of 41 countries, that caused school reformers to freak
out and politicians to clamor for change. No child, lawmakers promised, would
be left behind. The result was educational upheaval. Billions of dollars went
to testing programs. And here we are. Up a measly point in reading, up
three in science, and down fifteen in math.
I stand by my thinking from a decade ago. I
believed then and still believe that standardized testing is educational
malpractice.
*
Below you have Chapter 1, from Two Legs Suffice: Lessons Learned by Teaching, based on my 33
years in the classroom. (Two years in the Marine Corps also helped.)
Werre = war.
Woot = knows.
Grunts = in the Vietnam War, the foot soldiers; in education, those
who do all the fighting, students, parents and administrators.
*
I believe school reformers who talk about fixing schools know almost
nothing about the real war to save children.
I will soon put my entire book online, free, for anyone
interested.
 |
| What would be the most obvious way to improve outcomes in any classroom or school? |
1.
Talk
to the Grunts
“Ther is many a man that creith ‘Werre! werre!
that woot ful litel what werre amounteth.”
Geoffrey Chaucer
I
don’t drink much. Besides, it’s seven a.m. and I’m hardly awake. “Not
again,” I mutter, rubbing my eyes and adding a string of expletives.
I hold
in my hands another stinging editorial directed at teachers. This one, from The New
York Times, carries the headline:
TEACHERS:
WILL WE EVER LEARN?
The
author is assistant professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. So
you might assume he knows what he’s talking about.
(You’d be wrong.)
He
starts by outlining a “tidal wave” of school reforms since 1983. I taught for
decades. So I remember them all. The professor lists vouchers, charter schools,
state standardized tests, No Child
Left Behind and “Race to the Top.” With implementation of Common Core in the
offing a fresh round of reforms is about to commence.
He leaves out a laundry list of changes veteran
educators might include but sums up results. U. S. K-12 education
remains “stubbornly mediocre.”
I feel
myself wavering. Is it too early for bourbon?
***
What
is it we keep failing to learn? Apparently, the problem with education in this
country is teachers.
According
to the professor we have too many dumb ones manning the classrooms. Only 23%
come from the top third of their college classes. What about Finland, a country
whose schools are almost too good to be true? Finland has smart teachers.
America needs to find smart teachers, under some rocks or something, and
pronto.
As a
former teacher, suddenly I feel like such a dolt.
“Well,”
I wonder, “will we ever learn?”
I set
the editorial aside and gather my wits. I don’t think I’m deluding myself when
I say I was a good teacher. I don’t think I’m hallucinating when I say I worked
with a number of excellent educators and all kinds of good ones during my
career. Call me stupid, I guess, but I would argue that teachers come in the
same varieties, excellent, good, fair, and poor, as lumberjacks, car mechanics, congresspersons and Harvard professors.
I tell
myself: “You can do your bit to answer the professor’s question if you do it
right.”
The
dilemma is how? How write a book about education that might offer useful
insights? How capture the interest of some fraction of the general reading
public? And is there some way to poke all the self-styled “education experts”
where it hurts most?
I
mean—in the ego.
Perhaps
some sleazy sex and the right title might help: Fifty Shades of Grade Book? Nope. No way that’s going to sell.
All I
did was spend my career in a large rectangular room in close company with
teens. All I offer is a memoir about life in the classroom, a love story about
working with thousands of kids.
Still,
I’m compelled to try.
First,
I mean this book as a defense of good educators—an explanation of what they
do—and a look at the daunting problems they confront. There are plenty of bad books
to choose from if you want to read about what teachers do wrong.
I also
believe my book has value because of what it’s not. I won’t be offering the latest plan to fix the schools. I’m
not an authority in the fixing field. I’m not Steven Brill or Arne Duncan or
Michelle Rhee. U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan and former Washington D.C.
School Chancellor Rhee we shall meet again. Brill is the prototypical critic
and school fixer—a lawyer—who wrote a book about education, lambasting
teachers: Class Warfare: Inside the Fight
to Fix America’s Schools. Brill never bothered to teach. He studied “war”
at a safe remove and didn’t have to worry about getting killed or maimed.
What
do I know? Part of what I know I know because I sat in class as if in a coma
during my own misspent youth. Another chunk I know because I dropped out of
college in 1968 and joined the Marines. I know what I know, in part, because
I’ve pedaled a bike across the United States.
Most
of what I know I learned by teaching: American and Ancient World History, for
thirty-three years, at the seventh and eighth grade levels, for Loveland City
Schools, near Cincinnati, Ohio. That’s not an especially long tenure in the
classroom. Nevertheless, it represents more time spent working with kids than
Rhee and Brill and all nine U. S. Secretaries of Education combined. That fact
alone ought to tell us something.
***
Naturally,
training in history informs my thinking. More than two thousand years ago, when
ancient Greeks named their Seven Wise Men, they placed Thales, scientist and
philosopher, at the top of their list. Thales was once asked, “What is
hard?”
“To
know thyself,” he replied.
“What
is easy?”
“To
give advice.”
America’s
teachers know what Thales meant. Since passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
in 2002, the focus of school reform has been almost entirely on those at the
front of the classroom. Will we ever
learn, the Harvard professor wonders? I’m not sure. But I suspect you might
have asked any of four million U.S. educators and they could have told you the
utopian law was flawed from the start.
But
the promises of politicians and pronouncements of policy makers were
unequivocal. By 2014 every child was going to be proficient in reading and
math. Not 88%. Not 96%. Every single one.
In the
thirteen years since NCLB was enacted into law, countless editorials and TV
reports have bolstered one theme. Google: “education crisis in America” and
300,000,000 results pile up. Don’t have time to do all that reading? Here’s the
capsule version: America’s schools are failing. Teachers are at fault.
Ms.
Rhee became a brand name in school reform, turning up on television during one
stretch as frequently as Law and Order
reruns. In 2008 she graced the cover of Time,
broom in hand, promising to clean out all the lousy teachers in Washington D.C. and fix the biggest problem in education. Sweep! Just like that! Even Oprah
gave Rhee, who taught for only three years, some televised love.
Meanwhile,
“Fox News and Friends” did an interview with John Legend, the singer, and asked
him to comment on school-related issues. The segment, titled “America’s
Education Crisis,” was accompanied by tags like: “The Trouble with Schools,” “A
Broken System” and “Teachers Behaving Badly,” lest viewers miss the point.
On CNN
Campbell Brown hosted a series called “America’s Schools in Crisis,” leading
off with talk about “broken” and “failing” schools. When Geoffrey Canada, who
runs a charter school in Harlem, insisted that “the people who produce the
children are the teachers,” Brown let that stand without batting either of her
lovely green eyes. I remember scratching my head, trying to figure out how my
teachers produced me or how they produced my four kids.
Well,
good job, teachers! All my children turned out fine.
And so it came to pass.
And so it came to pass.
The
“heroes” of school reform sounded the charge, stood back, and let educators
storm enemy lines. Tens of billions were spent to implement NCLB. Hundreds of
millions of hours were devoted by teachers to preparing for, and by students to
taking, standardized tests.
Standards
didn’t rise.
They
fell.
President
Obama rode into office in 2009, promising to fix flaws in how NCLB was
implemented. A “race to the bottom,” he said, had been touched off when states
lowered standards to avoid punishment under complex provisions of the law.
Mr.
Obama would task Arne Duncan, ninth Secretary of Education, with leading a
“Race to the Top.” Fresh billions would be offered to states if they created
more charter schools and linked teacher pay to scores on standardized tests.
“It’s
all about the talent,” Duncan assured any who would listen. It’s all about
teachers.
In
2010 Davis Guggenheim set out to discover what was wrong with U. S. public
education. (His view may have been impaired because he sent his children to
elite private institutions.) In a critically-acclaimed documentary, Waiting for Superman, Guggenheim put a
finger on what he saw as the issue. Rhee featured prominently, sneering at the
efforts of D.C. teachers. While
viewers watched in disbelief the film seemed to strip away the last fig leaf of
doubt, “revealing” teachers in all their sloth and shame. The message of the
movie, focusing narrowly on five children trying to escape “awful” public
schools and get into charters, boiled down to this: If families could pick
their schools problems in education would fade away.
I
remember watching with disgust as Guggenheim painted a simplistic picture.
Yet,
Brent Staples, critiquing the film for The
New York Times, could come away from
a viewing stunned and impressed. Readers who planned to see the movie, he
warned, should take along handkerchiefs. Staples left no doubt who filled the
villain’s role: “Public schools generally do a horrendous job of screening and
evaluating teachers, which means that they typically end up hiring and granting
tenure to any warm body that comes along.”
(Hmm…maybe I should title my
book: 98.6°. Or: I Was a Teacher! I Had a Pulse!)
If assessments in the Times were
harsh, educators had to take two steps back to avoid fire and brimstone from
the right. Ann Coulter, in Godless, slammed teachers’ unions, labeled public
schools “the Left’s madrassas,” and compared the U.S. education system to
Soviet era factories, staying open even though products were hopelessly
defective.
At best public schools were:
…nothing but expensive
babysitting arrangements, helpfully keeping hoodlums off the streets during
daylight hours. At worst, they are criminal training labs, where teachers
sexually abuse the children between drinking binges and acts of grand larceny.
Neil
Boortz, in Somebody’s Gotta Say It,
argued that the danger went deeper. Teachers weren’t just incompetent. They
were a threat to the Republic.
“Our
government schools are killing the spirit of our children and, in the process,
our country,” he groaned. “Our wonderful government educational system produces
graduating classes of young Neanderthals with no sense of individuality, no
sense of self-worth, and no understanding of what it means to live in a truly
free society.”
Somebody
had to say it—even if what Boortz had to say was incredibly stupid. So he
spewed. “Teachers’ unions pose a graver long-term threat to freedom, prosperity
and the future of this country than do Islamic terrorists.”
(If
he was right it would indicate a need to scan teachers’ baggage more carefully
at airports.)
 |
| The author closes in on retirement: Spring 2008. (He still loves teaching, though.) |
IF ANYONE WANTS A DIGITAL COPY OF THE BOOK, SEND ME AN EMAIL,
AND I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU FOR FREE:
