Why Demonizing Teachers Is Not the Answer
I did it. I completed my two years as a Teach for China fellow, and now count among its ever-expanding alum base. Even as I celebrate my own personal achievement and perseverance, and the achievements of my co-alums, I know that in the grand scheme of things, I have accomplished far too little. That you cannot start measuring a teacher’s true effectiveness until the third year. That I have the luxury of leaving Lijiao and returning to a privileged life in America, while my students and local teachers remain mired in a flawed system of education inequity designed to demoralize them, stifling their natural creativity and curiosity while offering the slimmest chances for success.
As I logged onto Facebook today, I saw TFC fellows discussing and sharing links on Campbell Brown’s recent interview on The Colbert Report. As I read the rebuttals written by teachers against the attacks on teacher unions and the tenure system, I could not help but connect these political movements to demonize teachers in the U.S. with what I observed at Lijiao Middle.
Lijiao Middle consistently ranks at the bottom (second-to-last this past year) in test scores among all Binchuan middle schools. English and math scores particularly suffer. The overwhelming majority of Lijiao students come from family and elementary school backgrounds where they have not had the opportunities nor the environment to build a solid foundation of academic and life skills. Behavior problems are rampant, and there are plenty of gangs and drugs around the village to lure students into a self-destructive lifestyle.
Every year, when the disappointing test results come out, how do the upper-level, central school education officials respond? In the two years I have been at the school, they have responded by vehemently scolding our teachers, calling them lazy, and implementing increasingly draconian measures, including literally locking the school gates to prevent teachers from leaving school grounds. These measures naturally end up demoralizing teachers, contributing to an already-toxic working environment.
Are there lazy, ineffective teachers at Lijiao, teachers who deserve to be fired? Yes. But the majority of local teachers I have interacted with are intelligent, hard-working individuals (and certainly better and more experienced teachers than me). They care about their students. They are also beaten-down individuals who have worked for years and years in a system that sees them and all their efforts only in terms of test scores, that chooses to blame them for anything that goes wrong, rather than exploring the larger systemic reasons for why Lijiao students continue to fall behind their urban counterparts. Our school’s average test scores are measured directly against the urban Binchuan schools’. It matters not whether a teacher may have taken students who came into the classroom with a 10% math score and increased that score to 40% in a semester. If your class average scores still rank last in the county, you are still considered a failure. It matters not whether a teacher has plans to start extracurricular clubs at the school. With teachers’ low salaries and demanding work schedule, not to mention the pressures of test preparation, what incentives are there to put all that extra effort into leading anything outside of the classroom?
We cannot be satisfied with a system that encourages teachers to lose their creativity and desire to try new, innovative education methods. Why do these older teachers lose that desire? It is not just a problem of aging or laziness. There is a lack of adequate incentives, and far too many channels of demoralization, until they become repeatedly frustrated with being labeled incompetents and failures, treated like little kids to be lectured at rather than equal partners working together to come up with solutions for students.
More than anything, my time at TFC impressed on me the need for under-resourced schools and their students to attract and keep experienced, qualified teachers who will stay for the long-term and be willing to take creative risks in their approaches to help students. Whether in the U.S. or China, oversimplifying the problem by giving teachers an unequal share of the blame, without asking the harder questions, is not a solution to solve our education woes.
Relevant links: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/08/03/fact-checking-campbell-brown-what-she-said-what-research-really-shows/
http://baileyshawley.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/an-open-letter-to-campbell-brown-from-a-teacher-on-leave/
