By Alan Bean
The current assault on America’s teachers has been brutal and bipartisan. The correlation between family income and student test scores has been clear for decades, but no one, even our progressive President, wants to acknowledge the obvious.
In the decades following the civil rights movement, everyone knew that if we sat back and did nothing for poor and struggling families and communities we would eventually be dealing with a great, sprawling undercaste. The crisis in education is a function of poverty. We had a choice: schools or prisons. We chose badly.
There are bad teachers just as there are bad mechanics and bad dentists–that has always been a given. But bad teachers are not the problem; poor and broken families are the problem. America chose to leave her most at-risk citizens to their own devices and our teachers live with the consequences every day of the school year, Monday through Friday. They take these consequences home with them. The consequences come unbidden in troubling dreams.
I am not dispassionate and neutral on this issue; my wife and all three of my children are teachers. I live with these brave people and my perspective has been shaped by their passion and their pain.
You may have seen Diane Ravitch on the Daily Show last week. This short essay, written for the New York Times, summarizes the thesis of Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”
It Started With ‘No Child Left Behind’
March 6, 2011
It’s a long-standing complaint, echoed throughout American history: teachers don’t get the respect they deserve. But it’s a long way from that age-old complaint to the current campaign of vilification directed at our nation’s more than three million teachers.
The roots of this campaign of vilification can be traced to the 2002 federal law called No Child Left Behind. That law mandates that all students must reach “proficient” on state tests by 2014, a goal never reached by any nation or state. Any school that cannot reach that utopian goal will eventually be declared “failing,” with dire consequences, including firing the staff and closing the school.
The assumption behind this punitive approach is that poor student performance is caused by incompetent teachers and principals, despite the fact that decades of social science show that family income is the most reliable predictor of test scores.
The Obama administration’s Race to the Top program took the attacks on teachers to a new level by encouraging states to evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores. This approach holds teachers alone accountable for student effort. Only teachers of reading and mathematics in grades four through eight, a minority of all teachers, may be judged in this way, since other subjects and grades are not regularly tested.
A year ago, President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan cheered when school officials in tiny Central Falls, R.I., announced their plan to fire the entire staff of its only high school. Eventually, a settlement was reached, but staff morale plummeted: 20 percent of the teachers quit, and another 15 to 20 percent are absent on any given day.
Last summer, the Los Angeles Times used student scores to rank the “effectiveness” of 6,000 teachers and posted the results online. Leading testing experts have warned that such rankings are likely to be inaccurate and unstable, Secretary Duncan applauded, teachers were outraged, and the newspaper stood by its decision. The New York Post wants to do the same in New York City, but must overcome a legal challenge by the United Federation of Teachers.
Now it’s open season on teachers and their profession. Many states are trying to end collective bargaining, due process rights, seniority, and other job protections to make it easier to fire teachers and to retain novices. A large contingent of National Board Certified teachers are planning a march on Washington in July to express their opposition to these attacks on their profession.
A historic strain of anti-intellectualism in American thought has merged with fiscal conservatism, producing the present campaign to dismantle the teaching profession. It echoes a deeply-ingrained American belief that anyone can teach, no training or experience necessary.
Although politicians and corporate leaders claim they want to reform education, it is impossible to see how the campaign against teachers will advance that goal. No high-performing nation in the world is reducing the status and rights of the teaching profession.
Friends of Justice 
I saw Dianne Ravitch on “The Daily Show,” and was duly impressed. Thanks for posting this essay. I want to propose an educational experiment with two schools in the Texas Panhandle. One of these schools is in a village in the midst of a German Catholic settlement with a strong Protestant work ethic. (How’s that for an oxymoron–German Catholics with a Protestant work ethic. It’s true, nevertheless, as the work ethic designation is popularly understood.) The students in the school in this village are children and grandchildren and great grandchildren of hard working, frugal, prosperous German Catholic farmers. These students excell academically, athletically, and just about every way. This school is in no danger of being stigmatized by “No Child Left Behind.” The students in the other school, no more than 100 miles away, are predominately children of Hispanic immigrants and are ESL students. The teachers in this school are in danger of being fired due to low test scores of the students. Since the presumptions/assumptions of “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” are that non-performing students are the result of poor teachers, I propose that the teachers from the German Catholic community be resettled en masse to the school a hundred miles away, and that the teachers at that school be relocated to the German Catholic community. If the aforementioned presumptions/assumptions are correct, the German Catholic school would then be a failing school, and the Hispanic children would overcome their linguistic, cultural, and economic barriers and excell academically. Given that outcome, firing teachers in failing schools would be the proven solution to problems in education. But do you think that’s what would happen?
Another state about to pass into law that teachers are indeed the problem. I wish some school district with a rich school and a poor school would enact, evern for a semester, the experiment I suggested above. My experiment above has to remain hypothetical because of distances. Within a city the same kinds of cultural discrepancies are abundant. The danger in the experiment is that it might just prove that poverty and culture are at the root of the problem, rather than poor teachers.
MIAMI — The Florida Legislature, convening its 60-day session on Tuesday, quickly set its sights on measures that would link the pay of new teachers to student performance and allow school boards to fire teachers more easily for mediocre results.
The final bill is expected to clear the Legislature next week. Unlike last year, when similar legislation was vetoed by the former governor, who considered it too extreme, this slightly softened version is expected to win Gov. Rick Scott’s approval easily.
The far-reaching bills in the House and Senate would shake up a system of pay and tenure in Florida that has existed for decades and would position Florida as a leader among those states taking on teachers’ unions. Supporters say it will make it easier to reward and promote the state’s best teachers, not by their longevity, but by their work in the classroom. This, they say, will ensure that the lowest-performing schools can lure more effective teachers.
Representative Erik Fresen, a Republican from Miami who is sponsoring the House bill, said the measure would do away with a system that did not benefit the best teachers or help struggling students and replace it with one that would actually assess how well a teacher performed.
“If you look across the board, one thing that is consistent is that teacher effectiveness is the most influential variable in a student’s learning,” Mr. Fresen said. “Teaching is disconnected from any other profession in the world. Every profession that I know has some effectiveness input in terms of a salary increase and whether you get promoted or get paid less or paid more.”
But teachers’ unions, who forcefully opposed the legislation last year, say the measure, which will mostly affect new teachers, is deeply flawed. It would serve, union officials say, only to demoralize a work force already battered by ever-shrinking resources and other demands.
“We are under siege by our own Legislature,” said Robert Dow, the president of the Palm Beach County Classroom Teachers Association. “People are extremely depressed. People are seeing this coming like a freight train, and no matter what you say, you can’t stop it.”
At rallies in Tallahassee and other Florida cities, state employees who say they fear for their jobs and benefits turned out to protest what they view as extreme measures on the part of Republicans in the House and Senate to make up a budget gap of $3.6 billion. Tea Party activists also streamed into the capital to support lawmakers in their plans to cut spending and create jobs.
“You are changing the country because people are listening to what you’re doing, whether it’s Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey or Texas,” Governor Scott, a Republican, told the Tea Party crowd, which helped elect him.
If passed, the education bills in the House and Senate would mean that starting in 2014 students’ performance on assessment tests would count for half of a new teacher’s evaluation. The other half would rest with the principal. Those evaluations would lead to yearly raises or dismissals, if poor ratings continued three to five years. Tenured teachers can opt into the merit pay system, if they choose, but they would face the possibility of dismissal because of unsatisfactory evaluations regardless.
New teachers would also be subject to one-year contracts beginning this July. Their ability to renew those contracts would rest squarely with their evaluations.
Mr. Fresen, the author of the House bill, said much of the bill’s framework in terms of pay had been laid out in the state’s applications for federal dollars in the Race to the Top program. The state was awarded $700 million in federal money to help develop measurable standards to evaluate teacher and student performance.
“The toxicity of the debate this year is much less than last year,” Mr. Fresen said. The overwhelming majority of school districts signed up for those federal dollars and the performance evaluations that were tied to them.
But the unions and most teachers oppose the Fresen bill, saying the move is premature. There are no reliable ways yet to evaluate teachers consistently, outside of testing, which does not necessarily capture a teacher’s worth. In addition, they say, the shift to yearly contracts will lead to hiring teachers on the cheap and will do little to attract the best candidates. They also argue that Florida’s schools have sharply improved in the past several years and are now ranked fifth in the nation, according to a yearly report by Education Week magazine. Teachers are doing something right, they say.
“The rubber hits the road here,” said Karen Aronowitz, the president of United Teachers of Dade, which represents teachers in the country’s fourth-largest school district. “Why would you retain experienced teachers if they simply cost too much? You don’t have to provide a reason not to renew the contracts. You can be teacher of the year and be let go because there is no due process.”