Which works better, schools or the Legislature?
When the Legislature tries to reform education it is a lot like the guy across the street trying to do his own electrical work. Looks simple enough. Heck, read the instructions. Nothing to it….until you start to do it and then you can get shocked.
The whole mess is such wrongheaded badthink that newspaper columnists are supporting it. Anything simpleminded enough to be subscribed to by that tribe is bound to need rewiring at some point.
But let’s just look at a couple of the factors, primarily the idea of merit pay. It is a good one…on paper. To equitably be able to determine who should get it, you would need a parallel system that is the size of the school system itself. That won’t happen.
What will happen is some set of fairly arbitrary standards that purport to take into account what ought to be happening in the average classroom. That average classroom idea, by the way, is arrived at by Legislators who sent their kids to private schools where everybody speaks English and you rarely have to take knives away from 9-year-olds. This knowledge is backed up by scenes from Disney movies and research done by people who study the system for a living but who couldn’t last a week inside it.
Once these standards are in place, replacing the amazing set of standards already in place, it will be administered by pretty much the same wonks already administering. The upshot is that after tremendous trouble, expense and confusion, in three or four years we will end up with pretty much what we already have, except with new paperwork and a lot of old forms that will need to be recycled.
The goal here is to educate EVERY child, using what you already have. This is to be done regardless of that child’s resistance to education, lack of family support, total indifference to any sanctions that can be taken to encourage learning, gypsy lifestyles, noncompliance with everything, disruptive behavior, truancy, tardiness, malnutrition (often by choice…they buy ice cream and throw away the free vegetables)…and that doesn’t take into account the biggest and baddest obstacle of all.
What really makes it hard to educate those “kids on the back row” as some call them is that you have to spend some time and effort on “the kids on the front row.” The ones who show up everyday and try their best have something coming too. Don’t they?
The columnists and legislators have an easy answer to that. Do it all. Work harder. Work smarter. Use your resources more effectively.
Yeah, right — just like the Legislature and newspapers, do.
Remediation is the answer, according to those who are supposed to know. Small groups, individualized programs, personal attention and lots and lots of forms to fill out to prove that you are doing it. So, for example, if the cards happen to deal you nine children who need extra attention twice a day each day of the week, find the time for 18 individualized extra lessons with corresponding assessments, accommodated to needs. The other kids — the ones who have already learned how to read and add and subtract, can work in their workbooks, or do “literacy groups” which you can monitor by occasionally standing up at the back table and yelling loudly enough to wake them up. The ones who aren’t drawing.
In my experience, it would seem that we are beating this horse as hard as we can beat it, but the powers that be still don’t think it is running fast enough. So, they are going to give us an extra saddle.
What if we turned this sort of “get ‘r done with what you have” attitude around, and applied it to, say, the newspaper. Well, actually, that sort of is what is happening. Look how much that particular institution has improved and look up the circulation numbers to see how well that policy is working. But you could take it even further…suppose that columnist who doesn’t see any reason why teachers can’t snatch those kids off the back row and make mathematicians out of them were asked to modify his column-writing a bit? It will now have to be fully accessible to those who can’t read English, and will have to be modified to make it understandable to everyone who subscribes, and you will have to sit down and explain it to anyone who doesn’t get it and another version will have to be produced that is in simplified language, along with a version that is more complicated to enrich the advanced readers.
AND you will have to spend as much time filling out forms to show that you are reaching readers as you spend writing the column.
Better yet, apply the standard to the Legislature. You will need to keep the government spending just as much as it has ever spent on a regularly increasing scale, you will need to improve the effectiveness of everything you do at your end WITHOUT any new taxes or increased revenue of other sorts. AND you will need to prove to an independent agency regularly that you are making an effort to get this done using research-based methods that don’t seem to work in all cases and you will be called in occasionally for close examination by someone who doesn’t have a good handle on what ought to be done but who is obsessed with crossed t’s and dotted i’s.
Everybody wants the school system to work. But here is the kick in the pants. It seems that nobody believes teachers care whether or not it works. The root of all legislative or grassroots reform in the last 30 years has been the assumption that teachers are lazy and indifferent, that they are not giving this the sort of 100 percent effort that we are getting out of our hard-charging legislators.
I worked for a newspaper. I know how hard that is. If the writers, columnists and editors worked as hard as teachers, for the same pay, those businesses would be solvent instead of dying like fruit flies at the end of their day in the sun.
I’ve never been a legislator, but I have known some. They all seemed to have plenty of time to play golf back when I had plenty of time to play golf. I don’t anymore. They still do. You make the call on who works harder there.
Having time for golf was especially true of those with seniority. Seniority means everything in government, because it is assumed that if you have been doing something a long time, you understand it better, are in a position to help others and are more capable of getting the job done. In the military, seniority is rank. If you have been a captain longer than the next guy has been a captain, you are in charge. It works on the police force, at hospitals, the fire department, the post office and just about every aspect of life overseen by government officials who do their business in committees chaired by the senior member.
It is assumed that seniority makes these people better and therefore of more worth, which is reflected in tenure and compensation.
But in teaching, it is assumed that people who have been around longer have just gotten lazier and more indifferent. They want to take that away and base it all on “merit.” I have a suggestion for all those exalted ones….don’t just tell us how to do that, SHOW US. Can your system. Pay yourselves based on what you get done, judged by experts who don’t understand your job.
Oh well. This will all either blow over or will be instituted and teachers and administers will try to turn the ship around and go 10 knots beyond full speed in yet another direction, until another legislator decides this, too, is the wrong course.
I’m not ready to mutiny or to abandon ship and most of the teachers will hang in there, too. However, I do have a few legislative names in mind when it comes time for somebody to walk the plank, also known as election day.
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