Years ago, before I left the classroom, the county I taught for (the seventh largest school district in the nation) released a strangely-worded mission statement: “Our vision is to be the top producer of successful students in the nation.”
In one sentence, some overpaid marketing focus group with no classroom experience turned the art of teaching into a business.
My classroom was no longer a safe haven in which to learn and grow and read and write and talk and think, now it was a factory where previously assembled pieces were dropped into place before moving along to the History Factory and the Calculus Factory.
“The number one producer of successful students” doesn’t even begin to cover the needs of students that go beyond what a curriculum can contain. What about the kid whose parents are getting divorced who can’t concentrate from the anxiety of wondering who he’s going to live with? What about the kid who finds herself pregnant and kicked out of the house, who comes to school because that’s where she’ll be fed? What about the children who get beaten at home, who wrote poetry about wanting to die, who cry out for help and protection? There’s no curriculum or benchmark to cover those things, because we’re teaching human beings, not computer chips.
From that mission statement, things deteriorated quickly. With the abolishment of tenure, new teachers could no longer close their doors and teach what was in the best interests of their students. With the loss of tenure, with the loss of free will, with the fear of unemployment if they didn’t hit all their quotas, new teachers became automatons on the factory floor.
Slowly and carefully, the new education mindset wore away how teachers themselves were treated. We were no longer highly-trained, well-educated professionals entrusted with the highest possible of all callings, we were lazy, incompetent slobs who wanted to be paid year-round when we only worked ten months. “You’ve got weekends and summers off,” everyone scoffed, “what more could you possibly want?”
Then came Common Board Configuration and Marzano. “Classroom Walkthroughs” from administrators were efficient checklists for compliance instead of logic. Was my date in the requisite place? Had I spelled out the learning goals for the lesson using opaque enough jargon? Had I painstakingly spelled out the state benchmarks that I would be covering in today’s lesson? Check. Check. Check. Congratulations, you’re still not good enough!
“No one gets Innovating on Marzano. It simply can’t be done,” I was told once in a post-conference.
“Then why is it there on the scale?” I wondered. “Besides, did you see the kids’ faces? They’re reading and understanding and enjoying Tale of Two Cities, and they’re mostly level one and level two readers. Surely that counts for something.”
“To give people something to aim for, even if they never achieve it,” said the PE teacher-turned-dean-turned-assistant-principal, who’d spent the minimum two years in the classroom before putting his name into the admin pool, and who couldn’t have told me anything about my own English curriculum, if I’d been so foolish to ask. “Besides,” he chuckled, “that book won’t be on the End of Course tests. How could I have assessed that as Innovating?”
Teachers and schools catch a lot of flack about teaching to the test, but when testing is what determines if a school, if a teacher, if a class is successful, then of course, you’re going to have croploads of teachers trying to keep their jobs and doing test prep instead of what they really want, which is helping their students to learn to think and speak and write for themselves.
As long as education is driven by the Testing Industrial Complex, things won’t ever get better.Â
As long as education is seen as a business and not the art it actually is, things won’t ever get better.Â
As long as the decisions for schools get made by people who are products of the system without actually understanding and working within that system, things won’t ever get better.
So here’s what needs to happen (and it’ll take some time, but I think it’d work, especially if the good teachers of tumblr were involved): a small group of change-oriented teachers from every grade level from every county in every state needs to organize themselves into a group that will start running for public office, any public office, just to get their names and faces and opinions out there.Â
These teachers will go after school board seats, city council seats, start small and then work up from there to local representative to national representatives. These teachers will be taking their stories, their experiences, their actual-teaching knowledge to a larger stage. And all the while, they’d be a big enough team to rotate in and out of office and back into the classroom so they didn’t forget what really happens there. Because as soon as you forget, that’s when All the Awful starts creeping back in.
If that happened nationwide, that groundswell, that outpouring of competent, qualified candidates from the classroom, it would create an undeniable tidal wave of change in education.
No longer would we have to fear the leadership of a woman who thinks we need guns in school to protect ourselves from bears. No longer would we have to flood the phone lines of our representatives, desperately hoping against all futile hope that for once they would do what was in the best interest for children instead of themselves.Â
Because we’d be there, leading the charge, leading the change. And we’d know what needs to happen in schools, because we’d come from the classrooms where real learning happens with real people every day.Â
The battle lines are drawn, everyone. Let’s dismantle the factory and get back to the art of teaching.
