exaggerating the exaggerations, but the point is there

[acroyear]

that teacher salary and teacher "quality" actually have very little to do with student success. if there is no support for the child's education at home, the child won't get educated. period.

The Infamous Brad - The Central (Wrong) Assumption of "Education Reform":

A child who grows up in a home where there is (at most) one parent, where the TV is on all the time, where there are no books, who owns no books of his own, who has no quiet place or working surface he can use to do his homework, where there's no food in the house most of the time and what little food there is contains no actual nutrition, just salt, carbs, fat, and trace amounts of protein, who has never met anybody in their family or from their neighborhood who finished high school, and the only people that child knows who did finish high school work insanely long hours, taking two jobs that both work them more than 40 hours a week, just to end up getting evicted when they can't pay their bills, or worse permanently unemployed the first time they get a toothache, and who goes to a classroom where (thanks to all the jobs having left town, and taken the tax base with them) there are 30 kids trying to get one teacher's attention (or, more likely, finding it all too easy to escape that teacher's attention), surrounded by an entire community that tells him that nothing he learns in school is true and that none of it is important? If only that one teacher in front of those 30 kids were trying harder, and applying New Scientifically Proven Methods, that kid will graduate from MIT and cure cancer. The only reason he ends up as a painfully ignorant high-school dropout, if he does, is that he had one teacher who wasn't any good.

A child who grows up in an upper-middle class neighborhood in the white-flight exurbs, where all the jobs and the whole tax base fled to (and where every business owner and property owner has dedicated their entire adult life to keeping that first kid and his family out, so they can feel "safe" because they're "around people who share our values"), who grows up in a house with over 500 books in it, and where the TV is frequently off or turned down because one or more of the adults in the household reads books as their idea of entertainment, who grows up surrounded by food that is fresh, plentiful, and nutritious, who has his own room with his own desk, computer, stereo, and TV that he can turn on or off whenever he wants, both of whom's parents are degreed professionals who work as many or as few hours as they want and still make comfortable money, and who has other relatives or friends of family who are doctors, lawyers, or ranking government officials, who goes to a school where a 20-student classroom has both a full-time teacher and a full-time teacher's aide so he's always under observation and always gets personalized help, and who has never even met someone who couldn't go to the doctor within 3 days of getting sick with even as little as the sniffles? The only reason that kid goes to Harvard, gets a post-graduate degree, and becomes moderately wealthy is that all of his teachers were hard working and used the latest New Scientifically Proven Methods; if he has even one lazy or obsolete teacher, he'll end up dropping out and living in some poverty-stricken ghetto.

If everything I wrote in those last two paragraphs is obviously true to you? Fuck you.

So why is education "reform" always so focused on teacher quality (without ever actually addressing teacher *pay*, mind you)?  Because they can never solve the real problem, and they know it.  Because they invented it.

Comments

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

There's a real easy solution: more teachers. But so few people are willing to pay for it, that it'll never happen.

They focus on the teachers because they've got nothing else.

[arseaboutface.livejournal.com]

But...but...bootstraps!

[silvrwillow.livejournal.com]

Because I'm a teacher, and because I see this attitude All The Time - thank you.

[uncle-possum.livejournal.com]

Agree on the exaggeration for effect, but fundamentally it's true. There are exceptions, of course. Notably, the first kid may have parents who, for whatever reason, really do feel education is a "good thing", or will get the kid farther ahead, or something. And that kid may get a decent education, too.

Why pick on teachers: They are an easy target. They don't make much money, but probably more on average than that first kid's parents. They have summers off when many people have little vacation (the fact that the "summer off" also means they don't get paid for 3 1/2 months is rarely mentioned). They are one of the last groups of workers to mostly be unionized, so they can be more easily demonized. And, demonizing a group is so much easier (look, we are doing something, like inventing more standarized tests which don't really test much of anything, but provide numbers) than trying to ameliorate the underlying problems.

Oh, and few government officials, especially legislators, have a clue on how to teach, or what makes learning effective, or have been in a classroom much at all in years. (And when they do go, the whole thing is sanitized, and they get to spout off, or read The Itsy Bitsy Spider, and then think that's what goes on every day).

Last thought: consider "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader"--those kids get the answers more than the adults. Adults who are successful in their work and life (regardless of pay or job title) don't remember any of that stuff because much of what is taught (based on state and federal "guidelines" for curriculum, and the need to teach to the test) has nothing to do with adult success.

[silvrwillow.livejournal.com]

Oh I could go on for a dissertation length essay here on this topic... needless to say it's a sore spot for me. However, I won't hijack another person's journal to rant on my own soapbox. :) But you're right about the points you raised.

[moosecadet.livejournal.com]

I also am a teacher (and agree wholeheartedly with Silvrwillow). I've taught children described in both paragraphs. Thank you.

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

I think the problem which this kinda points out is that teachers often have to deal with a combination of the two students above (or the reality of the muddy middle ground which most kids fit in) and to try to be fair to both.

More teachers and smaller class sizes would help a lot with this, but teacher quality should be a part of any reform as well.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

My point (and the author's) is that all this focus on "teacher quality" utterly misses the real core underlying reasons for academic failure, which are circumstantial and often related to the situation at home.

no amount of improvement in "teacher quality", even if you could actually come up with an objective test for that, will solve the problems in schools in poor neighborhoods where drugs and guns have taken the father away, and working 2 jobs has the mother never home.

like immigration, they consistently focus on one thing they think they can change but miss the real underlying issue. Why is there so much illegal immigration from Mexico? because living near the Mexican border sucks. if we were to work better with Mexico to actually have them solve THAT problem, the amount of illegal immigration would go down tremendously. But Congress can't step up to the plate and help solve that problem within the 14 month lifespan they have between inauguration and the next campaign, so they won't try.

so too, this. they can pass a requirement to test every student in a day, but without making the touch decisions (like drug possession punishments being far too harsh on users without impacting the smuggling or sales problem at all, or moving to a more "year-round" school schedule so kids don't lose their minds (literally) every summer), they'll never really solve the larger issues that cost those children their (academic) childhood.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

If the quality of the teachers doesn't matter, why not just hire minimum wage temps to teach in our schools?


Yes, your examples do make sense, but very few kids are those pure ideal examples. Most fall somewhere inbetween.


Also, the school systems can't fix the kids home life. They aren't the home life learning environment police. All they have any control over is the kids schools and teachers. They are stuck teaching the kids they get, complete with the home lives those kids already have. I am thinking about the worst three teachers I had in HS, and I am pretty convinced that even your stereotype ideal student would have had a hard time learning in those classrooms. Two of those teachers were math teachers, and I took calc I 4 times when I got to college. Never did get a C in the subject. Did I fuck up along the way? Sure. But was it harder because my math background was patheticly weak? Yes.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

the issue isn't necessarily trying to improve teacher quality, its the fact that the measurements for that do not and can not control for variables outside the teachers' control. teachers are being fired (or quit in desperation) and schools shut down because of the lives of the children outside of the school simply make academic development impossible.

and yes, some kids will fall by the wayside because of the disruptions of their less interested peers.

My other point is that it shouldn't be seen as the school system's problem to fix the situation outside. that problem while always with us, has in its current form entirely been congress's fault.

but only after such external forces are isolated (and other options more seriously considered, like year-round schooling) can any proposed "teacher quality" test actually be addressed on its own merits.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I have to disagree. If we can't determine anything about teacher quality until we fix poverty, crug abuse, crime, and apathy, we are doomed. The current model for measuring teacher performance may not be valid, but there is some way to determine that a math teacher doesn't understand the math he is teaching, or the earth science teacher enjoys teaching because he can tell his class to do the lab and then he has 40 minutes out of each hour to read the newspaper (these are both teachers I had in HS). Comparing standardized scores nationwide isn't a valid measurment, for a wide variety of reasons, I agree, but that's not the only possible way to determine if a teacher is competent. I know it's mean to tell a teacher they aren't competent, but not everyone gets a trophy. Teaching isn't an easy job that anyone can do, and we should treat it as such.

I agree, it's not the school systems job to fix the situaton outside. It's the school systems job to fix the school system, and they can't wait until poverty is fixed to do so. Do you really think poverty is going to go away? Without educational improvement? That's putting the cart in front of the horse. You fix poverty with education, not the other way round.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

did I say we weren't doomed? I was just saying that the test that they need to come up with has to be one that controls for those variables, those external situations. the current model, looking at everything strictly by some arbitrary national standard (and relying on a "test", which both directs teachers to "teach to the test" and unfairly ranks children based on their ability to take a test and not their actual ability to learn - i was a "test-taker" who always aced tests but usually got C's 'cause I couldn't stand the redundant homework).

it really is more that teachers should be judged really by the subsequent teachers of the students, thus allowing for local situations. if a math teacher for a subsequent class (Algebra 2) is having to re-teach proofs because the previous geometry teacher sucked, but all the students seemed to still have a grasp of algebra 1 skills, the THAT, while somewhat more subjective, is still a more reliable indicator that something needs to be done.

we've really hit a catch-22 in this. you say, education fixes poverty. i say, poverty makes the education almost impossible to enact.

my point is that the teachers trying to teach through the poverty are unfairly judged by the current testing standards. the approach may work to weed out the crappy teachers you had (and we all had them at some point, yes), but doesn't solve the inner city problem that it was designed to solve in the first place. It is not solving the problem it was sold to us to solve, and THAT is my problem with it.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

[noting that teachers judging other teachers is also unlikely, given the politics and backbiting that would invite. thrown in the trend of the religious right in rural areas to put their victimization "pity us poor suppressed christians" spin into it and you've got an even worse hornet's nest...]

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

[crap, thought not finished in that first paragraph due to overthinking on the aside]

the current model, looking at everything strictly by some arbitrary national standard, is too biased against the inner city schools.