Actives in the
Trenches: What Happens If We Succumb to the Corporate Models?
I
apologize for the length of this post.
BUT IT IS IMPORTANT.
Some of my
best friends are teachers.
And some of
my smartest friends are teachers in classrooms now. Sadly, many are considering leaving the
profession for any number of reasons.
Not only has
recent “pension theft” in Illinois taken the likelihood of promised retirement
security away in exchange for lesser income, actives also face ever increasing
pressure to perform according to the newer public-relations, corporate models
of knowledge acquisition. Not really education;
instead, measureable knowledge acquisition.
Looking at
evaluations based upon student success in norm-referenced testing or Common
Core, there is no longer any exception for those who do not meet
expectations. RTI (or response to
intervention), according to one veteran teacher, “states that we are to
intervene at different levels when a student is struggling. Only after all of
those interventions have been used, can that child receive his low grade. We're
not required to record each intervention yet, at least not contractually, but
administratively they say it's in our best interests to do it to cover ourselves,
to show we’ve done everything we should.
“In fact, this
year has been the Year of Student Differentiation. It's another approach to
RTI. If the kids aren't getting it, it's because we're not differentiating
enough.
“And, to top
it all off, everything needs to be quantifiable so we can show exactly where
the deficiencies are and how to improve each student’s performance. Our
assignments need to be front-loaded. The rubrics need to show exactly how the
students can score in each box in the rubric. For example, if a student
received a "needs improvement" in the
"organization/structure" of the rubric, we better have demonstrated
showing them how to receive the higher score in that section, otherwise the
onus of the student’s is on the teacher. The student needs to know how to get
each score in each rubric box.
“The arts are
gone, my friend. There is little or no
aesthetics. Forget that one-on-one
appreciation for learning together with an appreciation for what made you so
unique, kid.”
What came
before is a response to what follows.
This is a heart rending and crucial response to a question asked by Washington
Post writer Valerie Strauss asking How Hard is Teaching?
It is
with a heavy, frustrated heart that I announce the end of my personal career in
education, disappointed and resigned because I believe in learning. I was
brought up to believe that education meant exploring new things, experimenting,
and broadening horizons. This involved a great deal of messing up. As part of
the experimentation that is growing up, I would try something, and I would
either succeed or fail. I didn’t always get a chance to fix my mistakes, to go
back in time and erase my failures, but instead I learned what not to do the
next time. Failing grades stood, lumpy pieces of pottery graced the mantle,
broken bones got casts. As a result of my education, I not only learned
information, I learned to think through my ideas, to try my best every single
time; I learned effort. I’d like to say that in some idealistic moment of
nostalgia and pride, I decided to become a teacher, but the truth is that I
never thought I would do anything else. I come from a long line of teachers and
I loved school from day one.
To
pursue this calling, I worked hard to earn the title of “classroom teacher,”
but I became quickly disillusioned when my title of teacher did not in any way
reflect my actual job. I realized that I am not permitted to really teach
students anything. When I was in middle school, I studied Shakespeare, Chaucer,
Poe, Twain, O. Henry, the founding fathers, if you will, of modern literary
culture. Now, I was called to drag them through shallow activities that
measured meaningless but “measurable” objectives.
Forced
to abandon my hopes of imparting the same wisdom I had gained through my
experiences and education, I resigned myself to the superficial curriculum that
encouraged mindless conformity. I decided that if I was going to teach this
nonsense, I was at least going to teach it well. I set my expectations high, I
kept my classroom structured, I tutored students, I provided extra practice,
and I tried to make class fun. At this point, I was feeling alright with
myself. I quickly rose through the ranks of “favorite teacher,” kept open
communication channels with parents, and had many students with solid A’s.
It was
about this time that I was called down to the principal’s office with a terse
e-mail that read only, “I need to speak with you.” Clueless, I took down my
grade sheets, communication logs, lesson plans, and sat down as an adult still
summoned down to the principal’s office. “I need to talk to you about these
students.” She handed me a list of about 10 students, all of whom had D’s or
F’s. At the time, I only had about 120 students, so I was relatively on par
with a standard bell curve. As she brought up each one, I walked her through my
grade sheets that showed not low scores but a failure to turn in work—a lack of
responsibility. I showed her my tutoring logs, my letters to parents, only to
be interrogated further. Eventually, the meeting came down to two quotes that I
will forever remember as the defining slogans for public education:
“They
are not allowed to fail.”
“If they
have D’s or F’s, there is something that you are not doing for them.”
What am
I not doing for them? I suppose I was not giving them the answers, I was not
physically picking up their hands to write for them, I was not following them
home each night to make sure they did their work on time, I was not excusing
their lack of discipline, I was not going back in time and raising them from
birth, but I could do none of these things. I was called down to the
principal’s office many more times before I was broken, before I ended up
assigning stupid assignments for large amounts of credit, ones I knew I could
get students to do. Even then, I still had students failing, purely through
their own refusal to put any sort of effort into anything, and I had lowered
the bar so much that it took hardly anything to pass.
According
to the rubrics set forth by the county, if they wrote a single word on their
paper, related or not to the assignment, I had to give them a 48 percent. Yet,
students chose to do nothing. Why? Because we are forced to pass them. “They
are not allowed to fail,” remember? Teachers are held to impossible standards,
and students are accountable for hardly any part of their own education and are
incapable of failing. I learned quickly that if I graded students accurately on
their poor performance, then I have failed, not them. The attention is turned
on me, the teacher, who is criticized, evaluated, and penalized for the
fleeting wills of adolescents.
Everyone
received at least a C that year—not earned, received—and I was commended for my
efforts. In the time to follow, I gave up. I taught the bare minimum and didn’t
feel like my students learned anything of value, but they all got good grades.
I got frequent praise for being such a “good teacher.” It made me physically
ill. These empty words were in no way reflective of my capabilities as a
genuine instructor nor the true capabilities of my students, but rather, they
were akin to the praise you give a beloved pet: you did what you were told,
“good teacher.”
Despite
this gilt of success, I was constantly prodded both inside the classroom and
out by condescending remarks like, “It must be nice to have all that time off.”
Time off? Did they mean the five or less hours of sleep I got each night
between bouts of grading and planning? Did they mean the hours I spent checking
my hundreds of e-mails, having to justify myself to parents, bosses, and random
members of the community at large? Did they mean the time I missed with my
family because I had to get all 150 of these essays graded and the data entered
into a meaningless table to be analyzed for further instruction and evidence of
my own worth? Did they mean the nine months of 80-hour work weeks, 40 of which
were unpaid overtime weekly, only to be forced into a two-month, unpaid
furlough during which I’m demeaned by the cashier at Staples for “all that time
off?”
I
continued to wrinkle through the sludge because I wanted to believe that it
would get better, and for a brief moment, it did. I got a new administrator who
preached high standards and accountability, and I decided to try to hold my
students to a standard once again. Combined with a brand-new curriculum that I
had to learn basically overnight, I took the chance to set the bar high,
especially when it came to the gifted and talented program. I was now teaching
these “highly able learners,” and all of the training I received told me to
challenge them, push them, take a step back in order to “tap the genius inside
our schools.” So, I did. I created an intense environment that required
students’ best work. I created opportunities for students to rise to the
challenge. I provided choice and tapped creativity. And I required that
students take ownership of their work and be proud of genuine effort. I felt
like a “good teacher” then.
However,
as the whipping boy for society’s ills, I could do none of these things. I was
lambasted by parents as being ineffective because their child had a B or a C.
“S/he has always been an A student,” they screamed at me during frequent
meetings. “How dare you give them a B?” Give them? Give them? In my silly
attempts to assign grades based on what students earned according to the
rubrics I was given and the high standards I set forth for student achievement,
I was told that “I will not accept a grade of 50% because my student did not
turn in an assignment on time.”
I wanted
to tell them to tell their child, then. Tell Johnny that you will not accept
his lack of responsibility, and quell any of his excuses. The reality however,
is that I had to apologize, hang my head, and give Johnny another chance to
earn additional credit, as if that will somehow benefit him in the real world.
Johnny planned poorly, and it somehow became my fault. I thought back to my new
administration’s stock phrase that had initially given me a glimmer of hope, “We’re
not in the business of changing grades.” Although I heard these words a lot,
each time parents complained enough, I ended up having to change grades. I was
confused. To me, this was akin to going to a hardware store and demanding that
they make me a cake. They would try to tell me that cake baking wasn’t their
business, but I would scream and be nasty over and over until I got that cake.
If this scenario were to really happen, would that hardware store bake me a
cake? Probably not. They would most likely call the police and ban me from the
premises. So if we accept that modern education is a business (a modern
tragedy) and that our business is not changing grades, why am I expected to
cave to the insane ravings of confused and misguided consumers?
I thought
back to my own education, incredulous. Had I dropped the ball, my parents would
have been wildly disappointed in me and apologized to the teacher, and I would
have learned what not to do next time. However, education has abandoned us.
Some may want to believe that my incredulity stems from defensiveness, a sort
of “this wouldn’t have worked for me, so it’s only fair that it doesn’t work
for you” because this is an easier truth for deluded people to accept. The real
truth is that I wouldn’t have changed my failures for the world because I
learned something, really learned something, and I always believed that part of
my job was to help students learn things. We cannot concern ourselves so much
with “fair.” As the old adage goes, “life isn’t fair,” and education should
prepare students for life. Life may not be fair, but it is predictable in a
statistically significant way; success generally follows hard work, doing
something is typically more effective than doing nothing, and asking questions
leads to answers. But remember, just because I am a teacher does not mean that
my job is to help students learn things of value.
My job
is to be debased by an inescapable environment of distrust which insists that
teachers cannot be permitted to create and administer their own tests and
quizzes, now called “assessments,” or grade their own students’ work
appropriately. The development of plans, choice of content, and the texts to be
used are increasingly expected to be shared by all teachers in a given subject.
In a world where I am constantly instructed to “differentiate” my methods, I am
condemned for using different resources than those provided because if I do, we
are unable to share “data” with the county and the nation at large.
This
counter-intuitive methodology smothers creativity, it restricts students’
critical thinking, and assumes a one-size-fits-all attitude that contradicts
the message teachers receive. Teacher planning time has been so swallowed by
the constant demand to prove our worth to the domination of oppressive teacher
evaluation methods that there is little time for us to carefully analyze
student work, conduct our own research, genuinely better ourselves through
independent study instead of the generic mandated developments, or talk
informally with our co-workers about intellectual pursuits. For a field that
touts individuality and differentiation, we are forced to lump students
together as we prepare all of these individuals for identical, common
assessments. As a profession, we have become increasingly driven by meaningless
data points and constant evaluation as opposed to discovery and knowledge.
Originality,
experimentation, academic liberty, teacher autonomy, and origination are being
strangled in ill-advised efforts to “fix” things that were never broken. If I
must prove my worth and my students’ learning through the provision of a
measurable set of objectives, then I have taught them nothing because things of
value cannot be measured. Inventiveness, inquisitiveness, attitude, work ethic,
passion, these things cannot be quantified to a meager data point in an endless
table of scrutiny.
I am
paid to give out gold stars to everyone so that no one feels left out, to give
everyone an A because they feel sad if they don’t have one. I take the perpetual,
insane harassment from parents who insist that their child’s failings are
solely my fault because I do not coddle them to the point of being unable to
accept any sort of critique; if each student is not perfect and prepared for
college and life by age twelve, then I must be wrong about the quality of their
work. I lower my own standards so much that I have been thinking my grades were
generous. After years of being harangued, I gave Bs to D-quality work, but that
is never good enough. All I can do is field the various phone calls, meetings,
and e-mails, to let myself be abused, slandered, spit at because that is my
career, taking the fall for our country’s mistakes and skewed priorities. So if
you want your child to get an education, then I’m afraid that as a teacher, I
can’t help you, but feel free to stop by if you want a sticker and a C.
I sample
educator Kris Nielson when I say that: I would love to teach, but I refuse to
be led by a top-down hierarchy that is completely detached from the classrooms for
which it is supposed to be responsible. I cannot integrate any more information
about how important it is to differentiate our instruction as we prepare our
kids for tests that are anything but differentiated. In addition, I totally
object and refuse to have my performance as an educator rely on “Domain 5.” It
is unfair, subjective, and does not reflect anything about the teaching
practices of proven educators, rather it is one more vain piece of
administrative busywork that I do not have time for.
I would
love to teach, but I will not spend another day under the expectations that I
prepare every student for the increasing numbers of meaningless tests that take
advantage of children for the sake of profit. I refuse to subject students to
every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is
important. I refuse to have my higher-level and deep thinking lessons disrupted
by meaningless assessments (like the Global Scholars test) that do little more
than increase stress among children and teachers, waste instructional time and
resources, and attempt to guide young adolescents into narrow choices. It is
counter-productive to watch my students slouch under the weight of a system
that expects them to perform well on tests that do not measure their true
abilities, only memorization and application, and therefore do not measure
their readiness for the next grade level—much less life, career, or college.
I would
love to teach, but I will not spend another day wishing I had some time to plan
my fantastic lessons because the county comes up with new and inventive ways to
steal that time, under the guise of PLC meetings or whatever. I’ve seen
successful PLC development. It doesn’t look like this. I’m far enough behind in
my own work that I will not spend another day wondering what menial,
administrative task I will hear that I forgot to do next.
I would
love to teach, but I will not spend another day in a district where my
coworkers are both on autopilot and in survival mode. I am tired of hearing about
the miracles my peers are expected to perform, and watching the districts do
next to nothing to support or develop them. I haven’t seen real professional
development since I got here. The development sessions I have seen are sloppy,
shallow, and have no real means of evaluation or accountability. I cannot stand
to watch my coworkers being treated like untrustworthy slackers through the
overbearing policies of this state, although they are the hardest working and
most overloaded people I know. It is gut-wrenching to watch my district’s
leadership tell us about the bad news and horrific changes coming towards us,
then watch them shrug incompetently, and then tell us to work harder.
I would
love to teach, but I’m tired of my increasing and troublesome physical symptoms
that come from all this frustration, stress, and sadness.
Finally,
I would love to teach, but I’m truly angry that parents put so much stress,
fear, and anticipation into their kids’ heads to achieve a meaningless numeric
grade that is inconsequential to their future needs, especially since their
children’s teachers are being cowed into meeting expectations and standards
that are not conducive to their children’s futures.
I quit
because I’m tired of being part of the problem, and as only one soul in the
river Styx, it is impossible for me to be part of the solution.
Could I
be part of the solution? Of course. But no one ever asks the teachers, those
who are up to their necks in the trenches each day, or if they do, it is in a
patronizing way and our suggestions are readily discarded. Decisions about
classrooms should be made in classrooms. Teachers are the most qualified
individuals to determine what is needed for their own students. Each classroom
is different. It has a different chemistry, different dynamic, different
demographic, and the teacher is the one who keeps the balance. He or she knows
each student, knows what they need, and they should be the ones making the
decisions about how to best reach them. Sure, using different resources and
strategies among schools may make data sharing more difficult, but haven’t we
gone far enough with data? Each child is not a number or a data point. They can
only be compared to the developmental capabilities set forth by medicine, not
education, and to their own previous progress.
In
addition, teachers cannot and should not be evaluated on the grades of their
students. Who then would try to teach the boy who will never progress past
third grade due to a brain injury? Who then will teach the girl that refuses to
complete any work? Who then would teach any special education classes? What
stops me from skewing my grades to keep the world off my back? Education cannot
be objectively measured. It never could, and our problems began when we came to
that realization and instead of embracing it, decided to force it into a
quantifiable box that is much too small and too much the wrong shape.
Teachers
are called to teach because they, like me, believe in potential. We are
gardeners. We can plant the seeds, water, fertilize, but then we wait. Students
don’t always grow under our watch; it may not be until years later that
something we said or did takes root. As a result, it is impossible to hold
teachers accountable for what amounts to students’ physical development. I
cannot make them grow any faster; I can only provide the foundation for them to
grow upon. I can provide opportunities for students to stretch and reach for
the sun, I can provide them a scaffold upon which to rest on their way up, but
it is up to them to try and it is up to our leaders to support us and our
decisions. Like the growth we expect from our students, policy needs to be
driven from the ground up, starting with teachers in order to provide the
supports we need. How can we be told what we need from those who are not in our
position? It is counterintuitive. Let teachers assess the needs of students so
that these results can tell us what we need. It is not the place of outsiders
to make one-size-fits-all mandates to a world of different shapes and
proportions. In doing so, they create an atmosphere where pebbles are polished
and diamonds dimmed.
Though I
referenced Robert Greene Ingersoll formerly, Clifford Stroll has already
addressed our country’s educational misgivings in a single sentence: “Data is
not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding,
and understanding is not wisdom.” It is time that we fall on our sword. In our
rabid pursuit of data and blame, we have sacrificed wisdom and abandoned its
fruits. We cannot broaden our students’ horizons by placing them and their
teachers into narrow boxes, unless we then plan to bury them.
