It is exhausting to attempt to follow all of the various arguments about school improvement in the United States. In no small part, this is because it frequently feels like it all devolves into a game of finger pointing. There is one party responsible for the state of modern education in our country, and they are responsible due to a shocking negligence.
We should not be blaming politicians for the state of modern education in the US. Yes, they have forced it on us, but they didn't create it. That was done for them by moneyed interests, and nobody told them otherwise (which of course means, "nobody demonstrated to them that it would be politically unjustified to resist the moneyed interests").
We should not be blaming parents and families for the state of modern education in the US. Yes, they are an easy target and it is frustrating to have students show up to school without having had enough food, enough sleep, enough time for homework, good clothes, or preparation for kindergarten. However, parents are doing the best they can. None of them are perfect and many do intentional or inadvertent harm to their children, but that is something that our country is not ready to do much about through the law, so it's off the table in the education debate.
We should not be blaming administrators. They are, contrary to what many of them say, not in the business of educating children. They are in the business of running schools. One function of that is seeing that children are taught well, but they also are concerned about keeping the lights on and providing meals. They cannot be expected to digest, understand, and then advocate for or against education policies as they simply do not have the time.
We should not be blaming "bad teachers." Now, this one is a bit controversial. It is tempting to blame the spectre of bad teachers for every ill in the schools, but these are much like Reagan's specious welfare queens - there are abuses of various privileges to be found in virtually every school, but I have never yet encountered a teacher who truly didn't care at all about children, education, or seeing that children become well-acquainted with that teacher's subject matter. We should stop considering these people "bad" teachers and think of them as unmotivated. They are like water - they follow the path of least resistance, but can generate great quantities of work if well-guided.
We should not be blaming the students. They're children. They're all egocentric and most of them are lazy, and it's up to the adults in the room to work with and around that.
We should be blaming the good teachers.
The good teachers are the ones who come to school early every day and leave late almost every day. They teach well-organized lessons that align to well-considered curricula. They bring extra bagels in their lunches to slip to the kid who didn't have breakfast or offer a ride home to the kid who's walking in the rain. They sponsor two or three clubs without asking for a stipend because they can see that it benefits the children. They attend professional development and read up on the latest instructional theories and attempt to implement research-based methods in their classroom and excitedly meet with other teachers in their discipline or in other departments in order to find new strategies or places where they can collaborate. They know that it takes a personalized community effort to teach every child, so they call home frequently and send notes and meet with counselors and administrators and coaches and the librarian in order to get the fullest picture possible. They're doing everything right, but this is all their fault.
What they are not doing is anything beyond the school level. They do not show up at school board meetings. They do not testify before the state legislature. They do not contact their national representatives and they most certainly do not testify before Congress.
Good teachers knew what was wrong with every major educational initiative of the past twelve years before it was enacted (because they do their homework), but they never stood up to advocate against these flaws.
While rolling their eyes in department meetings and chuckling to themselves about the newest policy that surely wouldn't last five years, they counted on someone else to tell Congress that No Child Left Behind wouldn't work because it didn't have enough money and was expecting the impossible (seriously, every good teacher is an optimist, but not even the most starry-eyed of hippie dreamers would believe that in only thirteen years, every student in the country would be able to pass standardized state exit exams).
After realizing that NCLB really wasn't going away, teachers were elated to hear about Race To The Top, until they did what nobody else did and actually looked at what was being asked. When they realized that it meant increasing class sizes, reducing curriculum diversity, and aligning state standards with the Common Core, they got nervous. After all, the Common Core is a nice guide and all, but students in different places have different understanding of the world - there are two states for which the answer to "what country lies south of the United States?" may well be "Canada." Similarly, cultural understandings and social mores vary greatly from place to place, even within a state. Again, good teachers saw this problem coming and did nothing.
When charter schools became more and more popular as "school choice" options, good teachers began looking at the data and pointing out to each other (but not to parents, legislators, or newspaper editors) that even with selective admissions practices (meaning that most charter schools will not take special education students or those with language impairments), charter schools perform on average in a manner that is statistically indistinguishable from the average public school, if not worse. Of course, this is done with far less oversight than what is given to public schools.
When NCLB waivers began being offered and states clamored for them, good teachers again saw right through the biggest flaw and did nothing. While linking student performance on standardized tests to teacher pay and retention may sound like a great idea to someone accustomed to running a business, good teachers know that this makes as much sense as blaming Toyota for a car that ran into a tree after it's been piloted by a drunk driver with the lights off in an unfamiliar city. The multitude of factors impacting student achievement is too great to be distilled in one easy set of numbers that can all be attached to one person's work over ten months. These scores do not, cannot, and will not take into account any external factors and there is no way to have those external factors (pregnancy, rape, abuse, death of a parent, parental divorce, loss of the childhood home, etc.) attached to the score as a footnote. Again, the good teacher knows about those factors most of the time and is working with and around them in the classroom, but that never shows up when the scores are tied to the teacher's evaluation.
Good teachers know that merit pay is a sham. In only one study has merit pay been shown to do any good, and that was a study in which the teachers got the money up front and had to forfeit it if they did not perform to expectations. It's hard to give back that which has been spent. Good teachers, however, are not interested in bonuses. What they want is more time for professional development, more time for collaboration with other teachers and with students, better facilities in which to work, and, if there's time left over, a bit of respect. The unmotivated teachers also want all of those same things, and will generally teach better in situations where they spend more time in contact with colleagues who are doing all of the right things.
Unfortunately for the US and for the teaching profession, good teachers aren't sharing this knowledge. There are a few heroic advocates who are standing up to the corporate reformers and the Michelle Rhees of the world, but Diane Ravitch cannot do it alone. Teachers by nature tend to be a cautious lot. We self-censor all of the time because we do not wish to cause offense or to alienate students or parents with different beliefs. We carefully lock down our social media presences so that we do not cross any boundaries. We share our cell phone numbers with students for various reasons connected with work but are then uneasy about the public perception of a teacher with forty or fifty teenagers' numbers stored in a contacts list.
We need to get over our caution. We need to be our own advocates and take back our profession by doing what we do best. We need to teach the public the things that we know.
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