Return the Teaching Profession to the Teaching Professionals
Historically, the federal government has played two distinct roles in public education: supporting people to go to college or to work and supporting students who live in poverty by providing funding for additional services. Both are considered as positive and supportive.
What teachers have experienced from the federal government since NCLB was enacted has been the opposite of support. Since 2002 we have been told that we cannot use our professional judgment. We have been told that we must teach with fidelity to programs, that we are not allowed to modify these programs by using our professional knowledge and the methods and materials we have at our disposal. We have been mandated to ignore subjects that are not tested. We have been directed to take recess away from young children and electives from adolescents.
As teachers, we have suffered through the insane hypocrisy of mandates that direct us to differentiate our instruction while following the pacing guide to-the-letter. We have tolerated hours of sitting through collaboration time designed, not for us to learn and share but instead to get the next verbal memo about how we have to teach now or so we can compare our rigid adherence to programs we didn’t choose.
We have cried with our students as we watch them take tests in a language in which they are not yet proficient. We have violated students’ IEPs and our own professional integrity as we force them to take tests beyond their instructional level. We have been threatened with the revocation of our professional license to teach if we vary even slightly from the test protocols. We have seen young people cry, throw-up, and have anxiety attacks because of the pressure of taking the test.
We have sat with colleagues, mouths and eyes fixed open in disbelief in staff meeting after staff meeting, blown away by the parade of people who come into our schools telling us we’re still doing it wrong, we’re still failing, and our hard work is to be discounted, derailed, and undermined yet again.
We have gone home to scream and cry with our loved ones and friends about what our work has become, about what we are doing to our students and, about how we don’t think we can take it anymore. We think of giving up. Some of us have left.
We know that this emphasis on high stakes testing and micromanagement is not the appropriate role for a government to take—a government that consistently claims that our children are our future. We know this law is a hoax, a sham, and a road that is leading us in absolutely the wrong direction. We know our unions must save our profession and our schools because it is through our unions that our voices can be united and strong enough to move us past this dark time in the history of public education.
We believe if we are to save public education, and ultimately our democracy, it’s time to use our collective intelligence to advocate for well thought-out alternatives. We must conceive of an appropriate role for the federal government to play. There is no political will nor is there political agreement on the massive amount of work it will take to “fix” NCLB—we must replace it with a policy that moves us forward. The education policy we promote must support our teachers to work smarter not harder, to teach more deeply not more broadly, and one that helps to create the kind of schooling essential for students in the 21st Century.
This law has driven good instruction underground. It has silenced teachers from actively participating in their profession. It has solidified a more deeply autocratic and absolutely non-democratic way of schooling our children. There is, without any doubt, a better role for the federal government to play in public education.
I RECOMMEND the creation of standards for any public policy that affects public education. Including:
• All mandates, whether local, state or federal, must be fully funded.
• Policies will be written in a manner that preserves the professional autonomy of teachers.
• Policies will preserve flexibility for local applications.
• Standards will be created by educators.
With the creation of standards for policy, we will enable the citizenry to hold our policymakers accountable. We will have policy that promotes and protects not only public education as we know it now, but public education as it should be—a government institution that prepares the next generation of Americans to be thoughtfully engaged citizens of a democracy.
Curriculum and Standards
Teachers know that the word curriculum and the word standard mean two different things. Curriculum is what teachers creatively use to teach to the standards. We also know that textbooks and packaged programs are not supposed to be the entire curriculum. However, the mandate to use them with “fidelity” makes them so. Good teachers understand that the curriculum we craft has multiple goals. Values, dispositions, and attitudes are purposefully included along with skills and knowledge. While the words standard and curriculum may be confusing to the general public and to politicians, teachers know that we can teach to well-crafted standards using a teacher created curriculum from a variety of sources.
Unlike curriculum, standards are the broad and descriptive conceptual ideas. Good standards—whether they are state or national—are essential when written by education professionals as the conceptual “must haves.” They are not a narrow and prescriptive list of facts and skills. Good standards guide a teacher-designed curriculum that is based on inquiry and active involvement as well as facts and skills.
Teachers must be freed from the false notion that the for-profit program and textbook industry knows best how to design a curriculum for students they will never know and for teachers who know more than they do. The curriculum designed by the teacher must begin with the teacher’s question: What’s the big idea for which I must design meaningful learning experiences? Teaching professionals know how to combine the district’s curriculum, the textbooks, and multiple other resources with their professional knowledge and expertise in order to teach toward agreed upon standards. Thus, focusing on the big idea brings teaching strategies and curriculum (means) into alignment with the standards or the educational goals (ends).
I RECOMMEND the creation of national standards for education that are judged by “standards for standards” that will ensure the demise of rote memorization of facts in the place of real learning. For example we must ask:
• Does this standard support our vision of a public education system that engages learners in critical thinking and problem solving?
• Does this standard enable teachers to teach toward higher-level thinking?
We further recommend that if standards are to be the constant, then time must be the variable, a notion that will inevitably lead to the design of more student-friendly and rigorous institutions of learning. The current structure would never meet our standard for standards because it punishes students, communities and schools for not meeting standards at specific points in time. Time cannot be a constant for something as variable as learning.
Teachers and Teaching Methods
Teachers are smart. We know the subjects we teach and have a plethora of teaching strategies we can use to ensure the students in our classes learn. We are committed to a public education system that supports us to prepare our students to become compassionate engaged citizens who, because of their public school education, are able to participate in our democracy and to develop the thinking skills and dispositions that will support their full human potential. We are accountable for the quality of our work.
We know the “basics” of tomorrow are skills considered to be of a higher level today. These skills include critical thinking, problem solving, finding information from various sources, synthesis and application as well as creativity. As teachers, we know how to teach our students with this end in mind.
If our society truly wants an educated citizenry then we must take the handcuffs off of our teachers and allow them to do the work they know how to do. And, we must create policies and schools systems that support this idea—not undermine it with useless rules and views of teachers as robots. Teachers need to be able to practice and model the habits of mind that we are expected to engender in our students.
There is no longer room in the 21st Century for simplified solutions to complex issues—especially anything as complex as the human endeavor of teaching the next generation. We must rely on teachers to be capable and accountable.
I RECOMMEND that once we have agreed-upon national education standards, then teachers should be free to become the policymakers of classroom practice. For example:
Teachers should use their professional knowledge to make the best decisions for their students in collaboration with their school communities. When we trust professional teachers, then the focus of school shifts from the acquisition and manipulation of knowledge for its own sake to making essential connections with previously-learned concepts, solving real-world problems.
As the pendulum swings away from testing and back to learning, let’s trust teachers to realize that philosophies and methodologies that are the most sound lie in the gray areas between the black and the white debate of whole language versus phonics or facts versus concepts. There is no need to dichotomize the teaching of skills versus the construction of understanding. Once teachers are the policymakers of practice, we will attract and retain the best and the brightest in the profession and the result will be better teaching and more learning.
The Structure of Schools and School Systems
The current structures are the antithesis of everything that we want, that we know we should do, and that would really create the kind of educational change that politicians pretend to demand. We are craving the opportunity to work in truly collaborative structures. However, we are told to teach with fidelity to a pacing guide written by textbook companies owned by testing companies that know nothing about teaching and the students we teach. In essence, we are asked to practice in a context that defines insanity—doing what we’ve always done (or been told to do), but expecting different results.
It’s time to value the amazing power of ideas that live in the minds and hearts of teachers. Teachers, working in collaboration, can create the kind of innovative school structures that rise to the occasion of educating all students. Teachers can design school structures that allow them to focus on critical thinking, problem solving and higher-order thinking, while still honoring each student’s developmental readiness for each task at hand. This is not an impossible balancing act—teachers have always done that. Once they are free to practice in a way that truly supports teaching and learning, they can get back to it.
We must reconfigure school systems to support teaching, rather than self-perpetuate their bureaucratic structures. The structure and purpose of the typical central office must be changed. If schools are freed up to concentrate on good teaching and innovations rather than compliance, we will no longer need all those line supervisors. Central office personnel and most of the mid–level managers in a district (the ones with credentials to teach, but who never interact with students) should be in schools making it possible to provide innovative educational programs. Central offices should provide the centralized functions that schools don’t need to worry about and focus their role on supporting schools and ensuring that schools have the power and resources to make good decisions.
I RECOMMEND that we change school systems into a system of schools with centralized support for teaching and learning at the heart of a system of schools and innovation at the heart of each school.
I further recommend that, once we free ourselves from a factory model, teachers must be encouraged to rethink such unquestioned time-honored practices as: grouping kids in grades, grading as a way to communicate learning, moving kids around based on bell schedules, and separating subjects into discrete time blocks. We must all embrace the idea that schools can no longer be expected to change and still look the same.
Testing and Accountability
Teachers know how to assess learning. We assess each of our students every minute of every day. Every time our students talk, write, compute, interact, ask a question or answer one, we are assessing what they understand, how they use their understanding, and what we as teachers need to do to move them forward. Teachers who are not completely overwhelmed with the mandated testing that has replaced this kind of assessment use these moment-to-moment assessments to make judgments. I don’t mean the kind of judgments that the system is making when it judges students, teachers, schools, and whole communities as failing. I mean the kind of judgments a doctor makes when she is diagnosing a patient. These kinds of judgments rely on professional knowledge and experience, knowledge of the patients (students), their histories, and the evidence before them. The doctor then makes a judgment about what the next medical steps should be. In our case, we make judgments about the next educational steps. And, as in the medical profession, outside regulators with no knowledge of the patient should never make judgments about treatments.
We must insist that no individual or entity outside of our field of expertise has the professional knowledge that teachers do, and that, once teachers design our own assessment system, we would be happy to demonstrate to the public, to whom we are accountable, the results of our work. The assessment system teachers design will be more accurate, engaging, and provide more timely feedback. Once assessments make sense for teachers and students, then, and only then, should teachers teach to the test.
I RECOMMEND the creation of national task force charged with producing authentic assessments that are public, performance-based and required no more than three times in the career of a public school student. For example:
• Authentic assessments created to connect with our agreed upon national standards that support our vision of a public education system that engages learners in critical thinking and problem solving.
• These national assessments would be fully funded by the federal government.
• The assessments would be performance-based.
• These summative assessments would never be required of children under the age of eleven, the age at which children become concrete operational.
• Teachers will be responsible for creating formative classroom-based assessments that prepare students for the authentic tasks they will be asked to perform.
• Any student who does not do well on authentic formative assessments as they develop will receive added time and support.
• Assessment tasks will be public. All students will know what they are preparing for.
I further recommend that the national task force charged with creating authentic assessments will be made up of no less than fifty percent practicing teachers, who will work in tandem and with the guidance of psychometricians, other educational experts and policymakers.
Connecting Social Policy and Public Education
The significant effect that growing up in poverty has on a student’s education is about the only idea I know of that educators, politicians and social scientists agree upon. As well known and accepted as this is, there seems to be almost no purposeful link between social policy and public education. It’s not that people don’t think there should be—it’s just that politicians haven’t mustered the political will to make that link profound enough to really make a difference.
We must champion the theme that fair is not equal. We must insist that schools that are serving the kids with the least resources get the most resources, including, but not limited to: lower pupil teacher ratios, longer school days and year, more social services on site, increased staffing, the best physical plants, and the most intellectually rigorous and culturally relevant curriculum and teaching methodologies.
I recommend that the President of the United States, along with Congress, become accountable for creating social policies that support families who live in poverty and support families to get out of poverty. This includes, but is not limited to:
• Reform health and dental care for all children and fund school-based health clinics.
• Provide universal pre-school.
• Fund additional social workers, counselors and nurses in all schools serving poor communities.
• Support increases in the minimum wage.
• Ensure affordable housing for families.
I further recommend the start of ongoing public works projects focused on creating and maintaining the state-of-the-art green school buildings essential for appropriate teaching and learning environments. Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions, and current research strongly indicates that working conditions make a difference in teacher retention, and that teacher working conditions are important predictors of student achievement.
The Role of Unions
The driving force behind a truly democratic public education system must be questioning—questioning everything. We must question what others mean when they use the word “reform”. We must question power structures and motives. We must ask our members to look deeply at their practice and reflect on the questions—is this the best way to teach and if not, what might I do differently? Most importantly, if unionists are to be seriously considered during the inevitable next phase of education reform, we must be willing to ask the same probing questions of ourselves that we do others the current educational system. We must be more than willing; we must be proactively anxious and excited by the possibilities of self-initiated organizational transformation.
If unions are to be effective in creating teacher-led reforms, they must change in tandem with the changes they seek in public education.
If we are successful in creating policies that support teachers to create innovative structures, then their unions must develop supportive structures for them. Union members could, and should, be the readers and producers of research that provoke new ideas and the subsequent development of schools. If we are successful in creating policies that support teachers to create innovative structures, then their unions must develop supportive structures for them. Union members could, and should, be the readers and producers of research that provoke new ideas and the subsequent development of schools.
If schools are no longer standardized then neither can be our negotiated agreement. What kind of union structures would we need to develop so that school-based teacher teams can create contract language unique to their school? What is not negotiable when it comes to teacher union change: due process? democratic dynamics? self-determination? due process? Should teacher unions:
• Run districts?
• Run schools?
• Model communal practices?
• Be a community resource?
• Be organizations that learn?
• Be producers of knowledge about teaching and learning?
Responsive, responsible unionism is essential. Without those qualities, we run the risk of becoming the bureaucratic system that defines the school districts we organized against in the first place. Responsive and responsible unions change in tandem with the changing needs of our members and our students.
The question remains: how will unions committed to the idea that they must reform themselves in tandem with schools, transform their organization to better support the kinds of change they promote for public education? How will union leaders create organizations that preserve and integrate the best of professionalism and unionism?
Hope and Change
“I love to teach—but I hate my job”. I hear this all the time. Teachers feel this way because of the lack of respect and trust in the teaching profession. This attitude is infused in the No Child Left Behind Act and the policies and practices that have resulted. This systematic and systemic disrespect for teachers serves only to undermine trust in public education and to dishearten those practitioners who would transform education given the chance. It’s time to stop.
Our new President and many of the members of Congress ran on a campaign of hope and change. It’s time, they say, to change the failed policies of the current administration. For all of us in public education and those who care about its ability to thrive, NCLB is without a doubt one of those failed policies. It’s time for change. It time to return policy to the people. I say it’s time we do something really radical in education. It’s time to put education in the hands of educators.
Ellen Bernstein, President, Albuquerque Teacher’s Federation
This post was submitted by Ellen Bernstein.
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Comments
Hi Ellen,
I really appreciate a lot of what you have to say. Particularly your point about time as the variable. Learning is not something we expect to take place in a predetermined amount of time, such as a grade level based on a school year. Instead, I’d like to see promotion based on particular milestones that students would have to achieve. What do you think about this idea?
Roben Bellomo
This is just the sentiments I hear from teachers every day. When I did my student teaching in the 1980’s teachers were excited about all the new ways of using Math Manipulatives, Writing Process and Whole Language. They saw happy children eager to learn with breaks when they could run outside to play.
What I see now are children that are pushed to learn things beyond their developmental level. Children who are tired from too much homework and no recess. Teachers who are giving up because they can no longer be a part of a system that is so demoralizing to students as well as teachers.
Oh that Mr. Obama will read and hear your message. It’s time for a change.