A recent op-ed piece in the NYTimes by Jal Mehta, professor
of education at Harvard, asks if we can ever "
fix
the teaching profession". The answer, the author argues, is yes,
but not by following either pole of the current debate: neither the Michelle
Rhee model of laying blame squarely on the teachers, nor the Diane Ravitch
model of blaming corporate profiteers and social ills. Instead, what we
need is a mixture of accountability and recognition that social ills drive
inequity in schools. By properly training teachers, we can overcome
things like poverty and academic unpreparedness by getting teachers into the
classroom who know how to overcome such difficulties. A rigorous exam,
for example, would make sure only the best and brightest enter the profession:
A rigorous board exam for teachers could significantly
elevate the quality of candidates, raise and make more consistent teacher skill
level, improve student outcomes, and strengthen the public’s regard for
teachers and teaching.
Unfortunately, this is all bullshit. And it comes from
one of the greatest myths in education, the idea that student performance in
general has very much to do with the teacher.
While it is true that a teacher can make a big difference,
this is only marginally true, and when compared with similar demographics of
students. To understand this, you must first look at how education
actually happens in the classroom. In any school there is a great
variation in student preparedness, i.e. their emotional, cognitive and
behavioral readiness for learning. At the elementary level, you see this as a
spectrum within the classroom. But as children enter middle and high
school, you see it both within the classroom as well as across subjects, with
some same-age students taking low-level classes, and others taking high level
classes. At both ends of the spectrum, you have special education and
gifted programs taking the very top and bottom students.
What's interesting is that at almost every level, the
"preparedness" of the student is entirely dependent on the home from
which they come to school each day. Aside from genetic anomalies (special
ed or gifted), students are basically products of their environment and will
perform as such. Families with high levels of societal capital with
produce children with high levels of preparedness, and families with low levels
of societal capital will produce children with low levels of
preparedness. You see this across schools and districts, the measurements
of societal capital correlating directly with student performance.
At the macro level, generalities are easy to predict, as the
data sets are large. For example, income correlates in general with
societal capital, and so neighborhoods on hills have high test scores, while
neighborhoods near industrial zones have low test scores. Yet when the
data sets are smaller, generalities are harder to make, and evidence becomes
less clear, even if larger trends still hold when small data sets are included
in wider arrays. For example, at one school, there might only be 10-20
kids whose parents both have graduate degrees. It is therefore difficult
to make any generalizations about the highly educated school population at that
school. But if we combine what we know about students with highly
educated parents, we can make rather strong predictions about the preparedness
of such children.
This is not a new phenomenon; it is a basic reality of human
development. What is odd, however, is the idea in education that a
student's preparedness can somehow be markedly changed by a single, highly
trained teacher. This isn't, after all, how we actually approach the
problem in schools. We don't give kids Calculus when they haven't
mastered Algebra I. Education 101 tells us about the "zone of
proximal development", a basic psychological principal that one's
knowledge must necessarily grow by degrees, not giant leaps. New
knowledge must be applied to old knowledge for it to be meaningful.
And yet this is exactly what is being asked of teachers of
disadvantaged students, who by definition are lacking in academic
preparedness. Remember, of course, that there will be highly prepared
students in poor schools, but less of them. Their dilemma, of course, is
that they must suffer through an education in which so many of their peers are
so disadvantaged. In a way, it would be like forcing Michael Jordan to play
on a team where few know how to dribble the ball. Charter schools have
been able to gain great moral favor by promising to provide just these sorts of
students an "out", their poor parents no longer being constrained by
the relationship between their income and real estate values. (Of course,
going to a "good" public school is as easy as being able to afford an
apartment in a nicer part of town).
This larger theme of social inequality, disadvantage and the
reality of property markets is a tough sell. What is it, after all, that
one is selling? How do you solve a problem as complicated as all
that? Next thing you now we'll be talking about more redistribution and
that means more taxes and moral arguments. So much easier it is to simply
emphasize the technical aspects of the problem and go after the low-hanging
fruit, especially when examples of lazy teachers, intransigent unions, and
arbitrary seeming tenure-ships can score big political points.
The problem is that accountability doesn't seem to be
working. Sure, we're only ten years into NCLB, and we still haven't been
able to break the unions, end tenure, develop top-tier education bar exams, tie
employment to student performance, or fully roll out charter alternatives to
public schools. Maybe by 2022 we'll have done so.
But it isn't going to work, for the simple reason that
performance has little to do with the teacher. In the end, if you still
have classes of 25-30 unprepared kids and one teacher, you are not going to be
able to meet their needs. At the end of the day, the reason the
students are unprepared is that their home lives have been, are, or will be
shitty. The reasons are too many to list, but they are created from
inequality. Single-parenthood, incarceration, menial-wage work, mental
and physical health crises - all at various levels of severity and impact,
feeding on each other to lower societal capital - will forever be conspiring to
devour the child's preparedness. A system designed around a teacher
overcoming these problems, alone in the classroom is destined to fail.
And if our current course is any indication, it is will bring everything else
around down with it.
You might be able to find a few rare teachers who can do
some amazing things, but they will be the exception, and in the process of
finding them - if current reforms are any indication - you will have severely
damaged what could have been a much more humane, nurturing, creative
profession. Ending tenure will create a climate of fear and remove a promise of
job security that compensates so greatly in a profession that requires so much
sacrifice. Designing accountability around tests principally designed to
improve scores of the least prepared, ironically, will reduce education across
the board to a numbers game. It will promote a pedagogy that might
increase scores in the short term, but will create a fog of lifelessness in the
classroom that in the long term will drive the disadvantaged student to feel
even more trapped and cornered by a less and less flexible institution in which
he can only succeed by repressing his natural impulses. Those that can
buckle under to authority will do so and those who cannot or will not will be
sent down a punitive road leading to further discipline and eventual expulsion
or other exit.
So what would one propose as an alternative? We must
start by radically changing our course. We must throw out the idea of the
teacher as the solution and instead look at how we can go after the problem in
a structural way. Special education is a great place to start.
Landmark law in special education was rooted in the notion, often seen as
enshrined in the 14th amendment, that all - including those with special
needs - have the right to an equal education. Not only were they to
be offered the same education as everyone else, but their special needs were
explicitly required to be taken into account and remedied for. As
recently as the Americans with Disabilities Act, students with special needs
have been promised in the courts an education that takes into account their
special needs. Within reason, such students are given aids, support
materials, special teachers or special classes designed to supplement their
education so as to ensure that they can be accommodated for.
This is what disadvantaged students need; their disadvantage
must be accounted for. Currently, we do this in only the smallest of ways
through income-predicated funding that provides for extra meals at school, and
a small portion of special serves. In general, if you live in a poor
neighborhood, you get some extra food. But extra food doesn't begin
to make up for the level of under-preparedness that disadvantage creates.
For some, it is surely important, but would you give a kid with severe
disabilities a sandwich and expect him to be able to function fine in a regular
classroom. What if half of the other kids in the class were in
wheelchairs as well? What if some had autism, some had troubles with
speech, some had problems toileting and some had a mental impairment?
What kind of teacher would we expect to be able to provide a proper education
to them?
Disadvantage in is this regard invisible. It is hard
to see on the outside, but is no less real. When a child grows up without
a father and learns from his friends that school is for chumps, he doesn't walk
into a classroom with a sign declaring so around his neck. Instead, he
might simply choose not to listen to the teacher, do as little as possible to
get by, or - God forbid - only pretend to fill in the bubbles on his
standardized state test. What happens when half the kids in his class are
just like him?
67%
of black kids grow up in single-parent families. What if they have
other issues at home, such as physical, emotional or substance abuse, or if
their parents simply don't know how to prepare them for school because they
were never shown how themselves? Again, the list of issues associated
with poverty and disadvantage is almost endless. But suffice it to say
that in poor neighborhoods, classrooms are filled with them. Issues then
become ever more concentrated as children age, until high school were the
entire is usually spent with under-prepared, under-achieving peers who are
frequently delinquent because they've simply lost all respect for the
institution of education.
But what if we found a way to identify, track, and provide
targeted support to these kids and their families? In special education,
there is a specific model called Child Finder, which actively seeks out
children whose special needs are affecting their school performance. A
process is created in which a panel is formed to evaluate the needs of the
child on a regular, ongoing basis. It is not simply left up to the
teacher to do his or her best in the classroom, making phone calls home when
possible. Specialists are called in, paperwork is initiated, goals are
established and necessary accommodations are made. The child is not given
everything under the sun. But what is offered is substantive and supposed
to be reasonable.
To a degree, this has begun to go on, but in highly
inappropriate and misguided ways. Owing to special education's history
clinical history as targeting children with obvious physical disabilities, when
a child presents negative behaviors that are severe enough, they are being
classified as needing special education. But the model is limited.
Merely being disadvantaged certainly doesn't qualify, and a special
classification comes with a highly negative stigma.
What would need to happen is the creation of a new system of
identification and classification that is as least restrictive as possible, but
that still allows for appropriate interventions. Because the issues in
disadvantage are much less clear than low-order physiological issues in special
education, the program must be flexible and allow for students to move fluidly
in and out. For instance, a student might be going through a rough period,
and require only very temporary intervention. Others might face more
severe problems and require multiple years of intervention. The
intervention model would also need to be broad enough to incorporate a wide
variety of emotional, cognitive and behavioral deficits.
What would the program look like? At the most basic
level it would be a dramatic reduction in class size. This would
primarily serve to facilitate a more differentiated, nurturing
environment. Academically prepared students can handle much larger class
sizes. Their developmental capacity allows them to be more independent,
more able to follow directions, and be more self-directed in their
learning. But under-prepared students need more help. In education,
this would be called "scaffolding"; the process of supporting
students as needed, with the ultimate goal of removing scaffolding as they
reach new levels of proximal development. The differentiation would be
effected both in delivery of curriculum, but also in provision of specialized
services. The child's family would be brought in to his or her education
in w much more forthright manner. Not only would there be time to do so,
but there would be trained staff on hand to do the proper outreach and support
required to meet the needs of the family.
As in special education, this support would range anywhere
from the child being placed in a mainstream classroom, with ongoing special
support by outside specialists, to small day classes. It would be
entirely goal based, with mainstream teachers setting the pace for their
academic subject standards, and the individual child's placement and level of
services be rendered accordingly. For example, if a student is regularly
scoring poorly in an area, or is becoming a discipline problem, special support
services would be alerted, and the child would be targeted for interventions.
All of this would cost money, much more than we are spending
now. But the difference is that we would be holding ourselves morally
accountable for the reality of our society. Special education also costs
money, but we don't call it "throwing money at a problem".
Instead, we consider it our responsibility to fellow citizens.
Tragically, while there will always be students born with special needs, there
will also be children born to families that for whatever reason haven't been
able to prepare them adequately for school. As a society, we have agreed
to maintain an economic system that keeps large sectors of society
impoverished. We have tacitly agreed upon a system of property that
forces people to live in communities segregated by income and societal
capital.
If we are truly honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge
that human development doesn't happen in a vacuum, and that families matter in
the preparation of a child throughout his school years. Just as we
decided decades ago not to ignore students with disabilities, today we must
decide to stop pretending that teachers are the solution to social inequity,
and to stop ignoring the problem of academic preparedness.
Students who come to school prepared don't need
"good" teachers. Neither should students who come to school
unprepared because of their disadvantage. What they need are special
services that take their development seriously.
