The Listening Room

The Listening Room, Rene Magritte

         Molly Ivins, that great political satirist, once said, “What you need is sustained outrage…there’s far too much unthinking respect given to authority.” What a lovely jolt to my brain after a friend gave me an article published in The New York Times on May 22, 2012.  She handed me the clipping and said, “Bill Gates is putting his focus on helping teachers improve. He finally gets it!” Well, that’s nice and tidy huh?  I found myself wanting to believe it, but the moment passed and sanity returned. How easy it is to read a piece, dust off our hands and decide the problem is solved.

     As if Bill Gates is the savior of public education. As if he really knows all about it. What he’s got is money and influence. He pays people to promote his agenda. Where is the outrage? Where is the understanding about the complexities of education reform?

     Outrage requires the ability to think, and, on the face of it, the article makes a few compelling points: (see Joe Nocera, Gates Puts the Focus on Teaching)

• Bill Gates objects to New York City’s decision to publish the performance rankings of its teachers. He believes this a “kind of public shaming” that won’t result in better teaching. Bravo on that one!
• The Gates Foundation has begun working with school districts to help design evaluation systems that would improve the overall quality of teaching. With data provided by Harvard University, the Gates Foundation has begun a pilot project in Hillsborough County, Fla. to create a personnel system that measures teacher effectiveness. The unions had to agree to participate. Okay, sounds fair.
• Gates remains a supporter of charter schools, but says that charter schools alone will not solve the crises in American education. Absolutely.
• Gates does not dismiss the need for test scores, but he views them as the least important in terms of helping teachers improve. Hmmm…the test score part, great, but helping teachers improve?

 Here’s where it gets a little tricky. Gates believes that true education reform requires engaging all of the country’s teachers, to work with them on the nuts and bolts of teaching. Education does not function like business evaluation systems, which are supposed to improve employee performance. Education has not been sensible because they have used either seniority or test scores as the basis for teachers keeping their jobs.                                

Oh brother. All of this reads like it makes perfect sense, but as a reader it’s important to be aware of the basic assumptions here: that teachers actually need help to improve and the problems in education remain squarely with them. All of them. Poor teaching is rampant, otherwise students would be achieving. Teachers are not sensible; they are not smart enough, and education needs a business model for reforms to work.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t bad teachers, but lots of non-performing folks in corporate jobs stay around for years. A friend of mine who works in human resources for a large company assures me that companies expect and accept that some employees won’t be productive.

     So then I read an interesting article by David Macaray, Blaming Teachers for Our Low Test Scores Is Like Blaming Doctors for Our National Obesity Epidemic, (see the Huffington Post, June 25, 2012). Now here’s some outrage: 

• People like to believe that if incompetent teachers did not belong to a powerful labor union, if they did not have cadres of union lawyers standing by ready to defend them, the administrators would be free to do the right thing – to drain the swamp and rid our schools of those union-created monsters who are holding our students hostage and depriving them of a decent education. That may be a compelling narrative, but it’s total fiction. Macaray goes on to quote statistics on teacher firing in California (heavily unionized) and North Carolina (non-unionized). California fires a greater percentage of its teachers. I wonder how that looks in other states?
• Why don’t these non-union schools fire more teachers? The answer is obvious. It’s because teachers – everywhere and anywhere, union and non-union – don’t deserve to be fired. And why would they? Why on earth would we expect our schoolteachers to be fired for general incompetence? Are our colleges, universities, and credentialing programs turning out such lousy, substandard candidates, we have no recourse but to get rid of them? That doesn’t even make sense. It’s like the guy in a friend’s office who shows up late, won’t learn new software, takes an hour and a half for lunch, and leaves early. He’s been doing this for fourteen years. He’s been coached and counseled and everyone knows the deal. He still has a job. He is one person out of a department that otherwise functions very well.
• We need to understand something. This move we’re witnessing against public schools and teachers’ unions is being orchestrated not by educational reformers interested in improving our schools, but by greedy entrepreneurs looking to privatize toe whole shebang. Having millions of kids leave the public schools and enroll in privates or for-profit charters represents a potential bonanza. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: follow the money.

     Why aren’t we hearing more about these different points of view? Why isn’t this article next to the Bill Gates interview in The New York Times? If education is in crises, why aren’t these articles on the front page? Because it’s overwhelming. Because it takes time to read it all – and there’s lots to read (I counted 59 articles on the education page of the Huffington Post alone). Because it’s easier to read about what Kim Kardashian wore on the red carpet last night. It’s easier to read about crime and sports and the best places to retire and the latest food being fried at state fairs. Who has time to read and consider the issues in education when we are bombarded constantly with information? Lots of people don’t have the time. They are just trying to pay the bills.

     The education community has many websites like Edutopia that have tons of information about best teaching practices. On Edutopia, they don’t want to hear about anything negative, which seems dismissive of reality, but maybe they have a point: Teachers are creating amazing things, thoughtful and smart: project-based learning and experiential learning and engaging lesson ideas.

     But who wants to read about that? It’s the negative that sells and sways public opinion, not people finding real solutions. I can’t wait to see how Obama and Romney address education reform in this election. My guess: not with much that we haven’t already heard. Really listening means thinking about what we’re told. Too much information dulls the senses and prevents the kind of outrage we need.

      Which brings me back to Molly Ivins: “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.” Amen.