I Like Batman Better Anyway

School reform talk gets me all hot and bothered (and not in a good way). I have zero patience for people who have little to no experience in education telling me how to do my job or worse depicting me and my colleagues as lazy, pension worshiping, union lackeys more concerned about our summer vacation than making sure kids learn. This is not to say that I don't think that reform is necessary or possible. In fact, I totally buy into the standards movement and think that while NCLB is fundamentally flawed that it did force us to focus more of our attention on historically underserved populations of students. But the rhetoric that surrounds such reform is so vitriolic and so disconnected from reality that I can't read a quote from Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee without my blood pressure spiking.

That's why I was so happy while watching Stan Karp's speech "Not Waiting for Superman: Who's Bashing Teachers and Public Schools, and What We Can Do About." I felt like I'd found my educational soulmate (I think my husband is jealous). Here is a guy with thirty years of teaching experience in one of the poorest school districts in New Jersey giving his take on ed reform. Now to be honest, it was kind of thrilling in a You-Get-Um-Stan kind of way, to hear someone validating my own ideas about ed reform but I don't need to see eye to eye with someone to respect what they have to say. I just require that they know what they are talking about. I would never think to tell a doctor how to suture a laceration so why should a billionaire techy or Oprah for that matter tell me how to run my classroom?

If you ask competent educators about how they would improve education, much of the conversation is focused on a few fundamental issues--professional development, child poverty, and parental involvement. I'll spare you my feelings about all of these issues and focus on just one:

Professional Development
In his speech, Karp discusses how NCLB labeled thousands of public schools as "failures" but provided no resources to help those districts deal with the issues at the root of the problems they faced. To illuminate the problem, let's say that the latest AYP report shows that your Massachusetts school is under-serving low-income students. Now what? The state and/or federal government, offers little guidance in how to deal with the problems identified by testing data. If your school fails to figure out ways to best reach the identified under performing populations than the state threatens to intervene by taking over your school, firing your principals, putting your school under the supervision of a consulting firm (at town's expense, of course), and in extreme cases, firing you, the educator. At no point is there an attempt by the state to help your school train teachers to better serve their students. The solution is to punish, not help teachers develop as educators.

Even if a school does try to offer professional development, it has been my experience that school administrators like to spend thousands of dollars hiring outside consulting firms to help show teachers the light. The problem with consulting firms is that they come, without any real understanding of your school or its unique set of strengths and weaknesses, present their information once or twice, and then leave. We, as teachers, give their methods a go for a bit and then a new administration comes in and decides it wants to change directions. So long John Collins Writing System, see you later Links, it was nice working with you.

The best professional development that I've experienced as a teacher has been developed by teachers within our system. Yet, as the pressure mounts to keep those test scores moving up, I find administrators are less and less willing to place their confidence in their own teachers' abilities/ingenuity and more willing to impose intensely structured programs, like Pearson's Reading Street, to ensure child progress. The problem isn't with supplemental software or teaching materials meant to help improve student achievement. The problem is when we attempt to lessen or eliminate altogether a teacher's ability to assess her own students and address their needs accordingly by removing any control she has over her curriculum and instruction and replacing those choices with a scripted program. Such decisions reveal a lack of faith in one's teachers' abilities and experience. Instead of helping make teachers more effective through PD, constructive collaboration and evaluation, the trend seems to be to replace teachers all together.

However you look at it, there is little denying that the educational system in America does need in fact need to be rehauled. But I argue that many of the changes that need to occur can happen internally. With proper leadership, open communication between parents, teachers, and administration, and real professional development based on actual evaluation (rather than some gotcha! charade meant to punish teachers not help them grow as educators), we can make serious changes in our educational system.