Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
As the trees bud and June looms, teachers perform their annual spring exercise of tallying how many days of actual class remain for actual teaching.
The formula is simple. Count the number of weekdays. Then subtract all the anti-bullying puppet assemblies, anti-tobacco assemblies, spring concerts, concert rehearsals, field days, class trips, grant-funded traveling performers, and all the countless other organizations who just need an hour or so before June.
Next, take the sum of all those hours and multiply by a billion or so to account for the eons lost to standardized testing. This includes “pilot testing,” which is when assessment companies get to use your children as guinea pigs to road-test the new assessments they’ll be selling to your school next year at prices that ought to be embarrassingly high, but that don’t seem to embarrass either the assessment contractors or the officials who agree to pay them for tests that historically generate reams of expensive, useless numbers, except for pilot tests, which don’t yield any student data at all.
You may have noticed that your school and state keep switching to a new expensive standardized test every few years. That’s not because the old expensive tests were so good.
Speaking of standardized assessments, we can’t let the 2013-2014 school year draw to a close without publicly celebrating that all American students are now academically “proficient” in reading, writing and math. This miracle was wrought by No Child Left Behind, which back in 2001 “ensured” that within 12 school years “all students” in every ability, ethnic and income group would “meet or exceed” their state’s academic standards.
If you’re blinking in confusion, you can relax. You didn’t miss the headline or the miracle. It predictably didn’t happen. Of course, now that it’s 2014, and NCLB is safely out of fashion, every policymaker, official, and expert who sang its praises and swore by it in 2001 is now singing a different tune and innocently searching the horizon for the silly people, whoever they are, who could possibly have thought NCLB was a good idea in the first place.
One typical expert, writing in the journal ironically titled Education Leadership, explains how teachers must “earn their seat at the table” when it comes to expressing their views about education reform.
Most of the education world’s big thinkers now acknowledge that anyone with a brain should realize that “universal proficiency” in schools is an “unrealistic” goal. Since having some sort of brain isn’t a high threshold, I don’t feel immodest recalling that in 2001 I likened the federal government’s guarantee that all my students would succeed to Leah’s demand in Genesis that her husband Jacob make her pregnant. Jacob, who was already doing everything he could think of to make that happen, replied simply, “Am I in the place of God?”
I here repeat the offer I’ve made on several occasions. The day your congressman, or mine, is willing to guarantee the financial, marital, genetic and behavioral success of all his district’s constituents, I’ll make a similar promise for all my students.
Incidentally, before you get the wrong idea, don’t imagine for a minute that education’s leaders have somehow suddenly achieved a measure of sanity. Yes, most no longer chorus NCLB’s promise of academic proficiency for all students in every ability, ethnic and income group. Instead, they now trumpet the Common Core’s promise that all students in every ability, ethnic, and income group will graduate “college and career ready.”
The mandated, top-down Common Core, which claims to be a “grass roots” initiative even though most Americans don’t know what it is and had nothing whatever to do with designing or adopting it in their states and schools, is already crumbling and losing support before it’s even fully implemented. Now would be the time to reject it, before another generation of American students gets to serve as lab rats in yet another vain, ill-conceived education experiment.
Of course, you’re going to need to shout if you want the captains of education to hear you. They don’t hold regular people and teachers in high regard. One typical expert, writing in the journal ironically titled Education Leadership, explains how teachers must “earn their seat at the table” when it comes to expressing their views about education reform. This leader’s biography describes him as “a former high school social studies teacher,” which he was for two entire years back in 1990. He then attended graduate school and became an expert. Since then he’s been writing education reform books, sitting on education expert panels, and serving part time as an education professor.
And I need to earn my seat at the table?
Teachers aren’t the only targets of disdain. According to a Gallup/Education Week survey, “most of the nation’s superintendents” disapprove of the job that school boards are doing. Only two percent “strongly agree” that schools “are effectively governed” by citizen boards. Given the expertise displayed by many if not most superintendents, school boards should take their disapproval as high praise. Apparently, the surveyed superintendents complain that “no one is really reviewing boards.” Someone should explain to these education leaders how representative government works, and that since almost all school boards are elected by parents and other citizens, school board membership is already reviewed on a regular basis by the people whose schools they actually are.
At the top of the heap sits Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Mr. Duncan, a former sociology major, gained his education expertise watching his mother tutor inner city children, running a private education foundation, and playing Australian professional basketball. Based on that experience, he was drafted to superintend Chicago’s schools, following which he became the nation’s chief education officer.
In a stark display of self-obliviousness, the Secretary recently labeled his critics “armchair pundits.” Speaking from his armchair in his Washington office, he derides those critics for “living inside the Washington bubble” and for being “so supremely confident in their perspective that they have simply stopped listening to people with a different viewpoint.” He also denounces those who oppose him for engaging in “false debates,” “ignoring plain evidence, and deliberately distorting” other people’s positions.
This is the same education leader who recently described teachers and school administrators as a “school-to-prison pipeline” for suspending disruptive students. This is the non-distorter who blamed opposition to the increasingly beleaguered Common Core on “white, suburban moms” who “all of a sudden” discover “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
These leaders are the people sitting at the table.
It’s time to remind them whose table it is.
