Promoted by Steven D. The author is Murvin Auzenne, a teacher.
One of the ongoing debates in America is what to do about public education. It was Michelle Rhee who was the lightning rod for everyone who opposed, rightly in my opinion, the corporate/right-wing effort to gut and/or privatize public education.
Her teacher-bashing, confrontational style of reform eventually flamed out in DC. But now there is a new lightning rod, Campbell Brown. Both of them voice real and sometimes resonant critiques of the failings of public education. Both place the blame on teachers, tenure and unions. The response to them has often been ugly, personal and not very productive. In other words, it has played into the very narrative that teachers and their supporters rightly oppose.
Over at TPM, Sabrina Joy Stevens has written a sane response to this unproductive debate. Her basic point: don’t let the real weakness of the Rhee-Campbell reform approach get lost in the personal attacks.
To this I say, thank God.
I teach in a private Catholic school and I have much more freedom to run a Dewey-esque (Wiki link)classroom than my public school wife. I hear every night of the ridiculous counter-productive policies and standards she must overcome to do her job. I just feel overwhelmed when I even try to write about this. Where to start?
Here’s one example to illustrate my point. She is expected to have an engaging, student centered lesson that changes activity and focus every 15 minutes. Yet she has three classroom preparations, and it seems that any time she may have at school to work on preparations is filled up with mindless meetings and other duties. She, like I, work at least three hours every night at home on our preparation and grading.
The theories of education and school management that I find associated with the Rhee school of reform are typically rehashed corporate models which the business community has rejected and moved on from many years ago.
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Case in point: emphasis on writing, parsing, and fitting objectives into some cookie cutter template. This is the old “management by objective” theory which corporate America walked away from a long time ago. It is not a bad idea in itself, but simply and rigidly applied it does not work in education. A teacher needs to plan out his/her use of time, but when the production of these plans becomes the focus instead of what happens in the dynamic of a classroom the tail is waging the dog.
Case in point: holding teachers accountable for student outcomes, an imprecise goal at best, but taking away (in my wife’s case) a month of instructional time to test student achievement!
Case in point: my wife is expected to manage every type of student from the wheelchair bound special needs learner to the college bound one in the same classroom with no assistance ( no teacher’s aide, no additional prep time etc.). That means her test must come in not one form but as many as 3, with adjustments for the various special needs kids. It means that the lesson plans must be “differentiated” for the various learning styles and needs every class period, every day.
It means that her Principal can pop in and write her up because her “objectives are not written on the board,” or she didn’t vary her lessons enough that day, or her objectives were not sufficiently student centered.
What all this tells my wife is that she is constantly in the cross-hairs, no help is coming, and failure is always her fault.
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If you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you. Ben Franklin