State of the Union? …Under attack!

President Obama recently delivered his State of the Union address in which he highlighted education as a necessity to move our country into the future.  Obama referenced two education reforms he wishes to implement: performance pay for teachers and the end of teacher tenure as we know it.  Obama stated, “We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.”  Both of these will directly affect teacher rights and the unions that represent them. 

Teacher unions protect the rights of those they represent, they in no way work to keep bad teachers employed.  It is the job of school administrators to weed out underperforming teachers before they gain tenure.   The shift is simple: tell a new hire that their first year is an extended interview and they will only be kept on if the fit is right for both parties.  As for that burnt-out veteran, my guess is that they are still valuable to the school and could be used in different roles under a good administrator.

Performance pay is acceptable to most teachers if a sufficient measure can be developed.  Until that multiple and complex measure is determined, any performance pay system will be violating the professionalism, equity, and rights of teachers.  We will really need unions once these performance measures are implemented!

The President’s address also highlighted the need for innovation.  If you read this blog, you know that this is something I deem as extremely important to our nation’s success - we must teach and foster creativity and innovation.  I wrote about it in “Why Test Scores are Failing Us”.

Unfortunately, reforms supported by the President, such as merit pay, will likely continue to be tied to high stakes testing which take all the creativity and innovation out of curriculum.  I guarantee that teachers today are more refined in their craft than those that spawned the generations of NASA scientists that got us to the moon.  But, we have to have room to operate.  A generation of teachers running scared will not take risks (see my blog about the importance of risks), and yet in promoting innovation that is what we are asking the next generation to do.

While Obama also mentioned the need for family and community support of students, any reform which is fundamentally built around punishing teachers will ultimately fail.  The state of the union and the teachers these unions represent is strong (is it ever anything else?) but definitely under attack. 

Give teachers a real voice – reclaim public education!

An un-Rhee-sonable approach...

Society today is filled with polarizing personalities.  From the ionizing ire of talk radio to the great divide that is the aisles of Congress, our nation seems to feel the need to take sides.  This, as any middle manager could tell you, is not the way to work through issues and solve problems.

These polarizing trends are not just reserved for politics, but are found in education as well.  Though education reform has become largely politicized, the pitting of one side against another for no apparent reasons of ideology has become all too commonplace.

Namely, the debate on education reform pits teachers against administrators against the kids.  The vast majority of school systems in the country are not this way.  Everyone is working together.  Only in places like Washington DC and New York City do you see such polarization, and usually it is due to a top-down, irreverent administrator who has minimal if any experience in the classroom.  Michelle Rhee was just such an administrator in the DC school system, and now that she has been fired and has started her own political action group called Students First in California, I don’t expect any change in her methods.

Rhee does not get my favorite moniker of pseudo-reformer, because she actually did make reforms as the DC supe, but she has a monopoly on the “malevolent makeover” style of reform.  She is polarizing and condescending, like a right-wing talk show host.  Rhee and those like her are just the reason why unions around the world are formed in the first place.  The name of her organization, Students First, says it all.  It is a sad statement that anyone need be reminded that education is for the kids.  Yet Rhee is as far from the students as is anyone in education reform, and as such, the name of her organization is a lousy front.

For the same reason Sarah Palin should stay in Alaska (in the words of Barbara Bush), Michelle Rhee should stay way over on the right coast in Washington DC.  Her brand of politicized, confrontational, black-and-white reform has no place in the Golden State or anywhere for that matter.  Until reformers can stop pointing fingers, they will never solve some of the most pressing issues facing our children. 

Stop being un-rhee-sonable!  Reclaim public education!

Why Test Scores are Failing Us

The question that the current crop of education pseudo-reformers fails to ask is, “Do we really want a country of really good test takers?” 

This is an important question to ask because the direction of education reform will not only dictate results on international tests such as the PISA, but will also dictate the very nature of our society.  Will we be a society of theoreticians who exist in an unreality of choice A, B, C, or D, where a skilled workforce is one that can plug and chug through computations and recite facts without ever thinking critically about what they mean and what implication they may have for society, or will we promote a culture of creativity and innovation?

I believe we are at heart a culture of creativity and innovation, and standardized tests are indeed failing us.  Not only do standardized tests fail to discover the talented, compassionate, wise, and creative members of society, but by connecting these tests to such things as teacher pay, school itself is losing its freedom to be innovative and creative as teachers continually feel the pressure to perform for the singular measure of standardized testing. 

Some people believe you can be creative while teaching the standards, but that is not the point.  The standards themselves do not dictate the current atmosphere in education.  It is all the other hubbub surrounding standards that gets in the way.  The truth of the matter is that schools just aren’t as creative as they were 10-15 years ago.

Education is a pendulum that reverses direction every 15 years or so.  Stick around long enough, and what you were doing when you started the profession will come back en vogue.  I believe the reason for this periodicity is the failure of society to address the root causes of the problems facing education, namely the health and welfare of our youth.  Thus, we keep digging into the same bag of so-called reforms. 

However, I think there are signs that the pendulum is swinging and that standardized testing is losing its stranglehold on American education.  Fantastically, this is coming from institutions of higher education.  Firstly, there is a long-standing list of hundreds of schools who do not use the SAT to gauge admissions.  But recently, some hold-outs (such as the University of California system) have been dropping the SAT II, or Subject Test, requirement.  Secondly, some universities, such as Tufts,  are using a new set of metrics to dig deeper for successful students.

In a great article titled “To get the real star students, college admissions should look beyond SATs”, Robert J. Sternberg  writes on Washingtonpost.com about how Tufts uses a set of essay questions to assess a student’s “creative, analytical and practical skills and general wisdom.”  Tufts found that measuring these qualities was a better predictor of student success than test scores and GPA.

Any teacher will tell you this is obvious, and why standardized tests are such a joke in the first place.  Many of the students who will go on to make productive, creative, and innovative contributions are not the students sitting tamely in class and getting all their work turned in.  These creative contributers have an extra spark that some of the top students in my classes lack, a spark that is not detectable on standardized tests.

Universities should push harder to do away with testing requirements where it makes sense to (Engineering programs may want to retain test scores, as they may be a fair predictor in those fields).  Perhaps state and federal governments would follow suit.  The future ability of our nation to survive in the environmentally and economically challenged world of the future will not reside with a bunch of students with an aptitude for test taking, but with the creativity and innovation that education can and should instill in our youth.

Put down the No2 pencils, reclaim your inner creativity, and reclaim public education!