It took me a long time to admit this because the job lasts longer than you do and I loved it most of the time I did it, but--I'm glad I'm not teaching any longer.
I've had enough of a chance to view the job from afar. As a member of the NEA Executive Committee during the last decade, I had an opportunity to visit many places in this country and see many schools. I also had the chance to listen to many members tell me about how teaching was changing. They didn't like it a bit.
"It's no fun anymore, Mark," said more than one of them. I had taken leave from my position in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, in August 2003. I would never return, though that was not my doing. Politics and paranoia spelled my teaching doom.
By the time that decision had been made, in 2007, though very disappointing, it wasn't all that surprising. The polititization of the profession, which has never been far from the surface, raged during Bush 43's dismal two terms.
That was because No Child Left Behind had been passed, which turned the determination of school competence strongly in the direct of the results of standardized testing. The NEA had not stood in the way of it, largely because it had been promised that funding for public education would be increasing. A rather stunning speech delivered at the NEA building sealed that fate.
Sen. Ted Kennedy, to whom the NEA's Friend of Education Award had been presented the year before, came to the NEA Board of Directors meeting in a surprise visit in February, 2002. He brought his two large, black poodles with him, as if he'd just been out for a walk and decided to drop by without an invitation, something that Senators never did (Perhaps he was: He wasn't wearing a suit.). He took the podium and, with one of the poodles constantly yelping, told the Board (of which I was then a member) to back away from opposing the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which NCLB was going to become a vital part. With President Bob Chase's tacit approval, we did, and that was that.
But bait-and-switch was underway in the White House. The moneys supplied that first year, 2002, would be by far the most of Bush's term. Looking back, it was the way it was always meant to be. That's because, in a twisting of logic that still makes no sense, schools that did not meet the adequacy standards of NCLB would have money taken away from it, not added on, thus by definition lowering the total funding necessary (as if to say: See? Told you you couldn't do it--something that teachers would never, ever say to students). Those standards demanded that 100% of the students would need to be competent in Math, Reading and Science--an impossible goal in any and every school--or eventually, the federal government would take over the inadequate schools, fire the administrators and the teachers, and virtually turn each of them into charters. Tough love turned into tough beans.
Back then, the specter of charter schools didn't quite have the onus now attached to them, but anyone familiar with education politics knew very well what that would mean: union power would be all but removed. As it was, the albatross of school failure had, until that point, been the stuff of campaign rhetoric. During 43's time, though, the Department of Education unabashedly began bashing the unions regularly, as often as it greeted the day. If nothing else, a wide propaganda campaign against teachers' unions came out into the open. The Republican mantra had always been that the unions were the chief cause of educational failure in America; now, policy had been carved out from it.
No Child Left Behind was eventually exposed for what it was: An underhanded attack on public schools to provide a bar that was always raised just a bit too far. Bush had buffaloed Kennedy and Rep. George Miller of California, who had shepherded the original NCLB through Congress. Infuriated, they hammered the 43 Administration during its second term for its deconstruction of the meaning of public education. With federal monies drying up, states and localities scrambled for dollars and cut programs that were once deemed important, especially in the arts and special education.
It didn't take teachers long to figure out the situation: They needed to 'teach to the test,' meaning someone else's test instead of their own. The demeaning of teaching has hung over the profession ever since, now more than a decade and a half. Bush and his education minions kept hammering away at a phrase we detested: The soft bigotry of low expectations. It was as if teachers no longer bothered to demand good work from students; merely adequate work. Left to ourselves, we would have done what was apparently asked of us; I sincerely doubt that many of my colleagues would have had a problem with it. We would have pushed them harder if we knew we had the support for it.
Instead, teachers had to figure out what would be asked on standardized tests and make sure the kids knew about it. The older they got, the more they caught on, too: a teacher they didn't like might have their job on the line, or at least a lack of a raise, based on the aggregate results of test scores. Passive resistance might take that teacher down. It gave the kids the classroom power--something that you never, ever want to do.
It also made teaching so repetitious that neither kids nor teachers felt good about it. Teachers feared that they'd run out of time if they decided to enrich the curriculum with class activities or simulations, for want of "covering the material." It's not as if teachers never cared about that; they nearly always did. But the daily grind could never let up, and that's never a way to deal with a semester or whole school year of coursework. There's nothing special about any teacher that has to just cover the book, either. Nobody could feel challenged, except to make students do something they didn't have to do, with no real consequences for them.
In my NEA years (2003-09), I gave speeches and commentary on this strange and damaging situation endlessly, raving against it the same way all leaders did. Everybody would nod in agreement: internally, it was low-hanging fruit to go after it. But 43 was re-elected, to our absolute disbelief and chagrin, due most likely to 9-11 hangover. We were stuck for another four years.
We had hope that the Obama Administration would relieve us of this iron collar. But by then, the recession had brought the country down low. Public education needed a surge in funding to survive, and that it got from a president who had our support in his campaign. But our bargaining position wasn't very strong then, either.
Barack Obama was a centrist: He wanted to find a place where all could settle, however uneasily. It would be an admirable but difficult position, since the Republicans were already determined to hold back absolutely everything he tried. Besides, education wasn't Obama's gold pin on his lapel: Health care was. The NEA backed him to the hilt, but it became compromised again on its own core issues.
We knew from the start that we wouldn't be getting the kind of support we were looking for. We pushed Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, long a union friend and an expert in teacher quality issues, for Secretary of Education. Obama had a different goal in mind, though: Straighten out the standardized testing, which had itself been compromised by a number of districts, such as Atlanta, in which cheating had been detected (to which I had commented more than once, though nobody else wanted to say it: What did you expect, with so many dollars on the line?). Arne Duncan had sniffed it out in Chicago, Obama's home. He got the nod.
With Obama's blessing (and an ability to turn a phrase so he never answered any question concerning it in a sufficiently direct way), Duncan's program was called Race to the Top. It created a set of benchmarks by which states could compete for funding, some of which were more favorable to teachers, some of which weren't. The problem was that the major benchmark was the fulfillment of standards that state governments were allowed to make for themselves. Most of them included reliance on the results of standardized testing, so not only did Race to the Top not get rid of such reliance, but allowed it to be doubled down and imbedded inside state educational cultures. States like Tennessee, for instance, allowed exactly half of its evaluations of schools and teachers to be based on test scores. That was, and is, absurd.
If states were to be allowed their own control over such evaluations as a compromise for Obama to get the funding placed, though, the ones controlled by Republicans will make sure to limit the effects of unions. Reliance on test scores is one good way to do it, especially if nobody trusts either teachers to do their jobs or administrators to observe and evaluate them.
But Obama and Duncan had committed the first mistake in problem-solving: They hadn't gotten to the problem itself. The true issue wasn't trying to clean up a system that had caved into test scores as its measurement: the issue was the overemphasis on test-taking itself. Obama did a lot of good things, and avoided a lot of bad things, as President, but not here.
By the time I spent a year in Washington, DC, looking for a job that never surfaced (2013-14), the test score culture had established itself inside the educational conversations in amazingly hard-baked ways. The whole system, it seemed, had simply turned and drilled into the entire aspect of test scores without challenging their validity or reliability any longer. I recall going to a conference which featured a discussion between researchers, two of whom had previously worked inside public schools. They were getting excited--excited--about giving tests to kindergarteners: Five-year-olds. I got up and asked whether they had figured in the simple fact that, during the testing, a number of them might have to go to the restroom. They got rather indignant.
The notion doubled down. I went to another conference at which three educational experts debated the benefits of controlled recess. You know, as long as they were controlling every aspect of curricula, why not control every aspect of schooling? I got to the mike again, supporting the single person who debunked it. Recess is the place kids work things out, I said (and so did she), kind of like any adult coming to the moment of aha! while walking, biking, or jogging; the physicality kickstarts endorphins, and you begin to put things together. Based on hearing that, I got solicited by people who wanted me to speak to prospective teachers. I did. They couldn't pay me, though. So it was during that recession.
In any event, governance via test scores continues. Tests prove only the ability of students to take a particular test--not the skills necessary to survive and flourish in the outside world. It doesn't broaden the students' worlds at all. In fact, it narrows them.
We do not need that today. We need wider perspectives and an awareness of all that the world encompasses. We get that by stressing the processing of information that is increasing geometrically, not arithmetically. Instead, we focus on content, the sheer volume of which is continually spinning out of our grasp. Measurement of school competence by test scores works in the opposite direction. Our system has been compromised by control freaks. We are the lesser for it.
It is due to a sad assumption: that education is the be-all and end-all of what people should absorb in their lives. Thus is the overreach of those seeking to get all of everything in. Formal education should be seen as the start, not the end, of a lifelong process and desire to learn as much as possible--to seek fulfillment that can never be completed, but can always be enriched. It is much the great gift of life itself that one can do that. But the battles over what is to be included within the box of twelve grades, at the bare minimum, too greatly stresses that portion of a learner's life--and, surrounded by requirements, too often turns them off. When they get to the end of it, then, they stop. We are feeding, not defeating, that trend.
My patience would wear very thin in such circumstances. My inclination to speak out would leave me in a position of non-support. I wouldn't be labeled a 'team player', and probably subjected to scrutiny beyond the norm. They might kick me out before I would step down myself, now unprotected by contractual arrangements. Either way, I'd walk away satisfied that I'd scratched that itch and it was time to move onto something else that made more sense.
Too bad. They took something great and covered it with ugly residue. Diane Ravitch was right: The main problem with American education is that no one can agree on why we educate children. But this sure isn't the way to do it.
Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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