Letter: Teachers aren’t the problem

It’s good that we are having this discussion about education.

Sometime in the 1980s, it became aucourrant for school boards to micromanage the classroom. This has worked about as well as a hospital administrator micromanaging heart surgeons. In any system, you have to allow the administrators to do what they do best (push paper, keep the funding flowing and smile for the cameras) and allow the rank-and-file workers to do what they do best (get the job done).

At the end of each school year, a school should turn out students who are prepared for the next step in their lives. That step may be the next grade in sequence, something bigger like college, or, if the student is old enough, a job. Somewhere along the line, we have lost track of this simple goal. Now, our teachers “teach to the test” so that school districts’ LEAP scores will look good in the newspaper.

My grade-school years were from 1961 to 1966. This was a time when the U.S. led the entire world in education. We were No. 1 in every category. What has changed?

In 1960, teachers were allowed to teach. Paperwork was done by the guidance office or by administrators. Today, a large portion of a teacher’s day is devoted to paperwork.

Although technology constantly advances, our society has consistently “dumbed down” over time. Kids watch TV or play video games instead of reading. Parents have the responsibility to see that this does not happen. Mine did.

Our drive to not leave anyone behind has blinded us to the fact that education is, by its very nature, elitist. We need to get back to the day when the star student was feted as much as the star athlete.

We need to ensure that top achievers are placed in programs that push them to their limits. Our magnet schools do a fair job of this, but the entry requirements are pathetic.

My parents and grandparents had high expectations of me and were not inclined to listen to excuses. No teacher of mine ever put together a folder for me to keep track of my work, called my parents to give them a weekly report on my progress, or engaged in any activities that took time away from teaching.

Our way of educating children in the United States is a system with many working parts. We have apparently decided to single out one — the classroom teacher — as the person responsible for all of the systemic ills. The teachers that I know wouldn’t mind that kind of responsibility if the bureaucrats would get out of the way and let them do their jobs.

Michael Hale

IT consultant

Baton Rouge

Comments

1) Comment by bourbon-soda - 27/02/2013

@Noel - is what you are saying consistent with my hypothesis - a lot of sound, fury, and fraud signifying very little regarding any change in educational outcome over long periods of time (decades?)? If the thesis is true, it could mean that the education bandwagon has driven itself over a cliff of public expectations of its own creation.

2) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 26/02/2013

@tradewinns: I think you will agree that given the 54 years history of the local desegregation lawsuit, that making the jump from integrated (there is no "r" in the word) to race integration is a natural result of social cognition, and not really a bias. Now, as to the special needs students in a regular classroom, there is some pretty good data that in most cases, with the proper training and the support needed, that ALL children do better in these mainstream classes. Unfortunately, especially given the ALEC and Univeristy of Chicago School of Economics - inspired "reforms," there is less and less money for the actual implementation of good "mainstreaming" practices. And good teachers are doing some a little different from "teaching to the lowest denominator." They are actually trying to reach each and every child where she or he is, and take them as far as possible in the time she has available to her. In the parlance of education, it is known as keeping each child in the ZPD, meaning the Zone of Proximal Development. That space between what a child can understand and engage with under the assistance of others, and that which is too far advanced. One of the toughest tasks of a teachers is to attempt them will an oversize class, with few resources, and while being bashed on a regular basis by the media, the business community, and their own State Superintendent. My thanks and sincere appreciation goes out to all the teachers out there who are trying, against incredible odds, to reach every child. And @Nimby, I taught to people at the universities and businesses everyday, and while some have an anecdote about a graduate lacking skills, most of the anecdotes are from someone else. There has never been a time in the history of our country when, on average, communities and businesses were happy with the quality of their newest high school grades. Books have been written about this! :)

3) Comment by tradewinns - 26/02/2013

i got the impression some took the phrase intergrated to mean mixing of the races. that's why i "quoted" it, it means classes now have all levels of strudents abilities in a classroom not just the mixing of races. so if you thought i meant races, you may want to check your biases. and scrooge, my education was in northern florida, jacksonville to be exact. i worked with a guy who took the state to court over the intergration of his mentally & physically handicapped child into a regular classroom. he won and the "county" in florida had to make special accommodations for his boy. he felt his son would be better off than in a school for those like him. true or not doesn't matter to the teacher and other students in the class. he made that class a bad experience with little learning accomplished by everyone else. i disagreed with him because of the other students, not because it helped his kid or not. as no child is left behind, teachers teach to the lowest common denominator not to the brightest student. so that student suffers.

4) Comment by nimby? - 26/02/2013

Noel , in the past older children may have quit school to help support the family , but that is no longer possible and highly unlikely . ask a child/young adult why they chose to quit school , do you get a reason or an excuse ? and I'm in total agreement over standardized testing . it does nothing to help a child learn to think for them self . they can pass a test , whoopee ! the local school districts overall numbers may look better but that child can still barely read , write , do basic math , is not prepared for any kind of future .

5) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 26/02/2013

@nimby: I am curious. Exactly what do you mean? We have been hearing the "no excuses" claim for a long time, but it doesn't really mean anything, I remember one of my favorite uses of the phrase was by a long-time supporter of "reforms" who aimed it directly at another reformer after I pointed out in data in the New York Times that his precious school in Denver was anything BUT a miracle. The President highlighted the school, said it had turned around completely and was now bragging about the school, as were most "reformers." Guess what happened? I showed that the school had actually not changed at all, basically... it was still in the bottom 5% of ALL schools in Colorado, and in fact, their ACT scores was several points lower than the average score for Hispanics in the country. This was a school that was largely Hispanic and had high poverty (thought not close to as high as our schools here in Baton Rouge.) and suddenly Diane Ravitch adn I were being attacked by some of the reformer zealots. Their claim? Sure, it is not fair to compare a high-poverty, high minority school to other schools in middle class neighborhoods. BUT, when they claimed this schools was. "one of the lowest performing schools in Colorado" they didn't have any "caveats" about the demographics of the school. Again, I am patient. Every standardized test in the nation (and the ones in the world that I know about) have one, undeniable pattern. As incomes rise, scores rise. not an excuse, a fact. BAEO likes to claim that I "pontificate about poverty." Maybe I am trying to get them to take off their very profitable blinders and actually look at the data!

6) Comment by nimby? - 26/02/2013

this isn't the 1960's it is 2013 . to quote my father in law , "there are no excuses " ...

7) Comment by JohnStJ - 26/02/2013

What Hammatt said: "The golden age of education, if ever there was one, is the one we are living in... BUT, we are killing it with the self-serving, profit- taking reformers who don't give a royal you know what about anything but their profits and ideology. " This is the core of the intellectual problem with today's reformers; they've hooked into the very natural (and very wrong) idea that our "youth" or maybe or parent's "youth" was the golden age. Public Education is NOT broken; it is simply not yet complete. (Like, you know, Democracy or Justice.) It is demonstrably better than ever before and is offered to more people than every before. The historical data is unequivocal. But it is so much easier to criticize than contribute. What we really need is real reformers that will assert what is true of education (and Democracy & Justice) that we are doing a good job today but can easily imagine doing a better one.

8) Comment by davelli0331 - 26/02/2013

I don't think anyone denies that the entire education system is busted, not just the teachers. The reason teachers are singled out is because they are the most vocal about wanting more money and benefits to continue doing the mediocre job that has contributed to the overall problem, while wanting less and less accountability for their results.

9) Comment by spqr - 26/02/2013

Hey Scrooge, begin your sentence with a capital letter, end it with a period, and lose the s in "educations" before criticizing others.

10) Comment by billynurse - 26/02/2013

Agreed , Mr. Hale. Still waiting for Superman . Going to Baton Rouge Public schools from the late 60's - 70's , I've watched the insidious, politically correct "dumbing down"....When the Dept of Education was established in 1978 , the U.S. undeniably had one of the best , if not the best overall educational systems...Now , we are , 38th ?...Nice.

11) Comment by bourbon-soda - 26/02/2013

From << http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/112806diversity.pdf >> or search "us commission civil rights benefits of racial and ethnic diversity," the oddly titled, given the contents, "The Benefits of Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Elementary and Secondary Education": "• There is little evidence that racial and ethnic diversity in elementary and secondary schools results insignificant improvements in academic performance; • Studies on the effect of school racial composition on academic achievement often suggest modest and inconsistent benefits; • Studies of whether racial and ethnic diversity result in significant social and non-educational benefits report varied results; • Much of the early research indicating educational benefits resulting from racial and ethnic diversity in elementary and secondary schools suffered from serious methodological weaknesses; • A preliminary review of data on the overall relationship between school racial composition and student achievement as measured by the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores does not indicate a consistent strong relationship between the two after controlling for socioeconomic status; • Based on the testimony of the expert panel, the Commission is aware of few if any discrete empirical studies that, once controlling for socioeconomic status, demonstrate scholastic improvement in disciplines such as calculus or, anthropology resulting from racial and ethnic diversity in the classroom; • While there are many research studies indicating that desegregated schooling is associated with higher educational and occupational aspirations , and to a modest degree, attainment for African-American students, methodological weaknesses in these studies make it difficult to isolate school racial composition as the cause of these aspirations and attainments; • While recent studies examining the relationship between desegregation and future wages found a small positive relationship after controlling for self-selection bias, research evidence on the relationship of school racial composition and actual wages is less definitive; • More recent surveys have indicated generally positive reactions to school desegregation, such as cross-racial friendships and greater understanding of racial and cultural differences, but some of these surveys do not definitively identify a causal relationship between the two; • There is little evidence on the effect of school racial composition on other social outcomes such as the likelihood of students attending a military academy."

12) Comment by bourbon-soda - 26/02/2013

@Noel Hammett - First, I appreciate your efforts and find everything you say and ask here imminently reasonable. An assertion that the American educational system did as well or better than anyone in a similar socioeconomic context would be difficult to refute, IMO. An assertion that American standardized test results were ever superior to the rest all other nations', would be impossible to sustain. This takes care of your questions about anything I posted. @SuzanneMS - All it takes to disprove "no one much cared" is a single counterexample such as << http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html >> or search "education minority children sowell," and that does not take into account religious schools like St. Augustine, about which plenty of people cared a lot. I don't think high black or free lunch schools are any longer funded at lower levels than are predominantly white or pay for lunch schools; if anything, the former are more highly funded now.

13) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 26/02/2013

SuzannaMS, as anyone who has watched me over the years might tell you, even if I agree with the overall letter, or the position of someone speaking before the board, I am still likely to correct inaccurate information. I don't want to win an argument, I'd rather search for truth, and let the chips fall where they might. The golden age of education, if ever there was one, is the one we are living in... BUT, we are killing it with the self-serving, profit-taking reformers who don't give a royal you know what about anything but their profits and ideology. Part of the evidence (since they love to hide the data) is simply that they cannot let the truth get out! We here lies about how voucher schools get approved. We here lies about the miracle of the RSD while it languishes at the absolutel bottom on the state in terms of their own measures of achievement. They hide entire schools worth of data to keep telling their lies. The claim the state pays for vouchers. They claim successes last year when scores rose for almost every high school, when every bit of data tells us they lied to the media when they said their were no changes in how scores were determined. (There were major changes.) They claim to want "parental choice" and then go to court to stop St. Helena from offering students in the ONLY Middle school from attending classes from St. Helena. Am I the only one who noticed that BAEO was not there at the Courthouse fighting for the parents who wanted choice? The puppet-masters must have pulled their strings and held them back from THAT effort to provide parents choice. It is all context, people. Follow the money!

14) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 26/02/2013

@rgeraldwallace & @ bourbon-soda: In what meaningful ways can it be said that the US education system "led the world" in education? I just don't get these claims, since there is no data that supports them. As for the claim that African-Americans did better in segregated schools? I don't dispute that some schools, some students, and some teachers did an incredible job, but what data can you point to that shows, as a group, that African- Americans "did much better" followed by your classic "reformer" claims about public education as a cash cow. SAT scores, ACT scores and NAEP scores for African Americans have been riding all along, sorta putting a damper on the notion that things are getting worse. Now, I am not one to put a loct of stock in test scores as a matter of principle, but it is, in fact, the reformers who keep using them to show how bad public schools are, so I am justified in pointing out that BY THEIR OWN STANDARDS, their claims are lame.

15) Comment by SuzanneMS - 26/02/2013

Yes, I'm surprised at Noel Hammatt's response, as well. He surely must agree that micromanagement by administration is a major problem. No, black students did not do better under segregation. They were in the lowest funded schools with no resources -- a situation that still exists in much of the South today -- and were essentially invisible, which some might define as "did better." I explained what "teaching to the test" means a few days ago, but here goes again -- in the current educational scenario, the teacher does not decide what will be tested; therefore the teacher does not decide what will be taught. That is determined by some testing company that creates the standardized test -- LEAP in Louisiana. The teacher is responsible for making certain that students pass the test, not for teaching a subject. They are essentially testing tutors who teach test taking strategies. We have this situation because the tests are being used inappropriately to evaluate teachers and schools, rather than students.

16) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 26/02/2013

@tradewinns: Your source for claiming the "average" student [score?] is behind what it used to be when we were in school? There has always been a sense that "things" were better "back in the day." Yet scores on almost every test have gone up over the years, for every subgroup. And overall as well. I remember when U.S. Senator Chester Trent Lott spoke at a national conference, and talked about how good teachers used to be when he was growing up. His mother was a teacher. Back then, he said "teacher taught and students learned." He went on to say, and this is an exact quote, "at my high school, everyone I graduated with, they all graduated." Now, it is hard to question that, since obviously anyone who graduated is in the class of student who "graduated." BUT, I asked him in a rather pointed question if he had any idea what percentage of students in Mississippi graduated the year he graduated. He of course didn't know, and I followed up by asking what percentage of African Americans graduated, and what percent of students with special needs. Oh, the answer? Fewer than 50% of all students were then graduating in the great state of Mississippi, back in the "good ole days." @bourbon-soda: I'm with you in the sense that all of this comparative garbage about rankings is much ado about nothing. It is used (usually) by reformers who want to claim a golden age for education (usually about the time they graduated) and then claim that things have gone to he-- in a handbasket since then. The rankings are dubious at best, but most use the measure of standardized test scores on some test, sometimes PIRLS or PISA, but the fact is, such comparisons are very, very subject to lots of problems. I agree with the author of this letter in this sense, teachers are NOT the problem. They ARE a scapegoat, and an easy target for those wanting to make lots of money... so, the leaders of Teach for America, heads of charter school groups, private companies starting schools, and of course, BAEO and the posse of kindred "non-profits" making lots of profits for themselves and their friends. Follow the money.

17) Comment by bigfatman - 26/02/2013

Whether you like it or not, there should be three types of high school degrees/curriculums. 1. College prep curriculum 2. Job force ready 3. Never will contribute to society (attended school for 12 or more yrs. Its time to qiut trying to shove #2and#3 into the #1 catagory. At its current rate this country is headed towards socialism, so why not get a jump start on the way socialist countries educate. Pick the best to lead and send the rest to the labor force.

18) Comment by [e-mail] - 26/02/2013

A good letter, and judging by the comments here, Mr. Hale managed to cause people to voice opinions that run the gamut, one person managed to get in a shot about segregation, which it must be said, is true but the comment glossed over a pertinent fact, i.e. that though indeed the schools were wrongly segregated, all students performed much better than they do now. Black students especially did much better because schools were not yet being used as a politically correct cash cow and teachers taught, parents parented, and students studied or were invited to go elsewhere.

19) Comment by bourbon-soda - 26/02/2013

1) Does anyone but me find it amusing that a letter essentially backing the teachers using their rationale, that the teacher is being blamed for factors outside the school, gets lambasted in this way? 2) The letter's assertion that the US led the world in education in the 1960s, is at least defensible, depending on the criteria for deciding leadership. 3) When they are looking for a raise, teachers are the solution; when things go bad, they are not responsible - is getting to be a regular tap dance.

20) Comment by bourbon-soda - 26/02/2013

My question should have been, how is world leadership in education defined, and how would it be decided, once defined?

21) Comment by Scrooge - 26/02/2013

tradewinns was obviously the recipient of a Louisiana educations

22) Comment by bourbon-soda - 26/02/2013

How is world education in leadership defined, and how would it be decided, once defined?

23) Comment by tradewinns - 26/02/2013

we have "intergrated" everyone into our standard classrooms and then made the teachers teach to the lwoest common denominator. then we wonder why the "average" student is behind what it use to be when we were in school. there are instances where a severly handicapped, mentally and physically, student is part of a regular classroom of say algebra. forget all the physical requirenments the handicapped student has to have, you can also forget about the disruptions they create by their physical needs, but just how is the teacher suppose to teach them along with the other students and accomplish the teachers daily goal? the parents of the handicapped child wants what is best for their child, well so do the other students' parents and the former is preventing the latter. as far as teaching to the test, someone will have to explain the difference in what they are saying by that statement and what the teacher did when i was in school. they taught the subject, stressing what they felt was necessary for the student to master to utilize the subject and then they tested those same elements to see how the students understood what they were taught. unless current teachers teach the exact test showing questions and answers so the student will pass the test, the process is still the same.

24) Comment by SuzanneMS - 26/02/2013

Also, in 1960, schools were segregated, and no one much cared how or what the African-American children were learning. However, there is a lot of truth in his letter. The changes made to meet the challenges of integrated schools, special needs children, etc., focused on standardized testing, rather than on providing the additional necessary resources that would enable teachers to teach more effectively.

25) Comment by Bighug - 26/02/2013

Mr. Hammatt is right. Many of those who wrap themselves in the flag and claim the US is tops in everything have never been outside its borders.

26) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 25/02/2013

"My grade-school years were from 1961 to 1966. This was a time when the U.S. led the entire world in education. We were No. 1 in every category. What has changed?" Unfortunately, the US has never been number 1 in international competition in math or science. Fact. Google "Brown Center Report on American Education 2010. Might be eye-opening. So many people have this sense that there was a wonderful time when we led the world in education. It just happens to not be true. And let's look at a couple of other things. In 1960 there were almost no special education programs, and many children with special needs, and the children of migrant workers or children who did not speak English, were denied access to most schools. Memory is a funny thing, isn't it? We somehow remember what we want to remember. A good reason to read the work of historians, who at least try to account for a more nuanced and accurate view of our past.