One Very Slow Octopus

This image is a metaphor. The national conversation about education is squirmy. Lots of tentacles. Lots of tentacles distracting us from the big bulbous fact right in the middle of it all. Public education is understaffed. In the cities. In the suburbs. In the country. Reforms and reformers are a dime a dozen and always will be as long as public schools underperform, which they always will, because they are understaffed.

Rigorous national standardized tests in reading, writing, and mathematics would be an excellent way to measure school-wide performance, and more immediately to measure which schools are most in need. But testing every student in every subject every year in order to evaluate every teacher's performance is an absurdity.

Charter schools and the work of charismatic school leaders are excellent means for pedagogical experiments, but too often one model or another is offered up as a cure-all, the one obvious answer that is supposed to work for everybody.

Paying a teacher more, or working her longer hours, or more days, or under the constant threat of being fired by an administrator, will not make it easier to communicate effectively with 100 students at a time.

Computers are not going to do it either.

All the random matrices of the world of education-- rubrics, lesson plans, syllabi, scopes and sequences, book lists, textbooks, multiple choice tests, study review questions, graphic organizers-- do nothing unless they are infused with meaning by a relationship with an actual human being. That is the teacher's job.

Hold schools accountable for their results with standardized tests. Give schools monetary incentives for improving results. Give schools the freedom to figure out what works the best for them. But a school is just a team of teachers. And when each one of those teachers is lost in his or her individual workload, you get the system we have now. One very slow octopus.

Malcolm Gladwell contributes to the cause!

So to repeat the concluding words of my previous post... Everyone is trying the best they can. Teaching is hard. Everywhere. Why can't that be the new story?

And, lo! none other than Malcolm Gladwell contributes to the cause with a story in this week's New Yorker. He says straight up that teaching is like being an NFL quarterback. And what job is harder than that?

I am distorting his argument a little, though. His point is that it is impossible to predict who is going to be a good teacher, just like it is impossible to predict who is going to be a good NFL quarterback. Therefore requirements that teachers be "highly qualified" are beside the point and that "Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree-- and teachers should be judged after they have started, not before." He then suggests some sort of apprentice system.

This article mostly makes sense. And because it is Malcolm Gladwell and this is what he does, it is very persuasively written. Good writing about teaching! Because I am feeling peppy, I will state my reservations (and, oh, I do have some) later.

Maybe Students Would Learn More If Their Teachers Were Paid a Ton of Money and Always Worried They Were About to Be Fired...

Okay, this is another post about policy and not writing. Though I believe strongly that they go hand in hand. The larger narrative that we've been telling ourselves about the public schools is retarded. Literally. It has failed to grow or develop in the last twenty years. Posh, worry-free suburban schools. Urban schools in crisis staffed by union-protected burnouts. These are both idiotic tropes that need to be destroyed.

So I have my doubts about the current hot idea discussed in an article in today's New York Times about the D.C. superintendent's plan to offer teachers lots of pay in exchange for forgoing any tenure. Personally, I never think about either of those things-- my salary or my tenure-- when I think about how or what I am going to teach. I am always doing the best I can with my personal talents, the resources at hand, the students I have, and the culture I am in. I have rarely encountered any other kind of teacher.

Every fully conscious human being knows what real teaching and learning looks and feels like. Status quo conditions (class size, teacher load, rote expectations) in schools make real teaching and learning rare.

Everyone is trying the best they can. Teaching is hard. Everywhere. Why can't that be the new story?

Wordy

Reading this site by sixth grade teacher Bill Ferriter in North Carolina... and while he seems to have his head about him, his commenters highlight how wordy everybody gets when they start talking about schools. Why is this?

Trying to figure out Eduwonk

So back to thinking about the world of education policy... Policy blog Eduwonk is an encyclopedic resource, but reading a little about Andrew Rotherman helped sort out why it feels a little bit off to me. Specifically, it appears that Rotherman has never been a public school teacher. I will correct myself if I am wrong about this, but I feel this is the problem with almost everything I read about education. Teachers are always remote figures, never authoritative voices. And so it goes that conversations about school reform and school policy never become more than an annoying buzz in the teachers ear while they go about the everyday work of making their school year make sense to their students and themselves.

What about the movies?

It's probably true that most of the people who are reading about education are people who are paid (however little) to be interested in education-- teachers, administrators, policy types, and politicians. Parents are the obvious exception here. This may be a reason why reading about it seems so much like work. Where is the writing that does justice to the full human experience of a year in a high school classroom from a teachers perspective?

The movies seem to be a primary location where American culture processes how it feels about the work that teachers do. The dozens of examples are too obvious to list, but without exception a teacher in the movies never has more than one class of students. A practical necessity when it comes to telling efficient stories, but an obviously absurd lens for looking at the work teachers do when you consider that the typical high school teacher has not one class of hard-edged-but-lovable underacheivers, but five. Five. Five classes everyday for 180 days in a row.

So it seems like writing might be better at this than the movies, but I am willing to expand my search to include any work of art. Also, if somebody can tell me a movie where a teacher has more than one class, I'd like to know. The only possible exception I can think of is Matthew Broderick's character in Election (and what a depressing example that is...).

Good writing is more important than research or your experiences

My preliminary web surfing has turned up a couple more categories of school writing that I left out of my previous post-- molasses thick education policy blogs and teachers personal blogs. Now that I think of it, I encountered the book versions of these things in graduate school and they made my head hurt then too.

Also, it seems that everybody who writes about schools ends up sounding like a jerk, including myself.