blame the (good) teachers!

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.

The era of the bandmaster is truly dead.

Why is there a single music classroom in this country not equipped with a dozen or more Macbooks with GarageBand loaded on them?

Anyone who knows me well at all will know that it's stating it lightly to say that I'm not a fan of Macs, but this software/hardware combination is revolutionizing the way that youth interact with music and it is devastating to see how many teachers and schools are missing out on taking advantage of this (me and mine included, at this point). I don't pretend to understand the potential of this program (I've never even used it), but I have clearly seen what it can do in the hands of willing students.

I'll come out and say it: there is no quicker road to music composition and arranging than putting a copy of GarageBand in a child's hands. For all that we talk about music classes (and art classes and creative writing classes and, and, and) being creative and helping students to embrace their right brains and learn to express themselves, there's not much creation or expression occurring in the average "creative" classroom. Students copy what they've been taught to copy or struggle their way through the basic theory and practice of making a mediocre product and eventually get to a point where they have a piece that can be performed or exhibited without everyone cringing. If a student can survive long enough without quitting the program, a really successful school may have a top-level course in AP Music Theory and Composition that is open to a limited number of students each year, forcing the teacher to beat off the hordes of students who obviously will flock to such an exciting and sexy course option.

On the other hand, what if students could produce a piece of music that sounded radio-worthy (or at least crappy-high-school-dance-worthy) within the first two weeks of joining their first music class? How many of those children would discover the joy of truly creating something new? How many of them would seriously consider careers in the creative arts? How many of them would begin to refine talents that would remain with them through high school and the rest of their lives? How many of them would see enough of a reward in music that they would embrace the work and discipline needed to create through more traditional means, even if that meant learning theory? Sound crazy? I see it every day with the students I work with who bring me their music on iPods and Macs, then sit at the drums or piano or guitar and try to figure out how to play what they just composed.

If these students, with no formal training, can create quality pieces of music in their free time, it's amazing to think what could be done with the assistance and guidance of a trained teacher. We don't need to be cultivating clarinets who we can later switch to oboe or bassoon or bass clarinet or saxophone in order to fill out the instrumentation of the band so that we can play some Gordon Jacob piece in a few years (cool as that would be). We need to be cultivating individual composers and creators who will feel the music so intrinsically that they will change the way we experience it in the future.

ending poverty

OK, I know that it is highly atypical for me to post twice in one day, let alone one right after the other, but my last post made me remember a shower thought* I had the other day.

For as long as I can remember, "world peace" and "ending poverty" were the classic Miss America desires for all politicians to work towards. Eradication of world hunger usually made the list, too. Whether or not any of the three is truly doable in a real world situation is a matter for debate other than the one that concerned me while lathering. Without further preface, here goes:

If we were to truly end poverty worldwide and bring all people in all nations to a standard of living that the average American/European would find to be basic, what other problems would result? For instance, if all child labor ended as a result of wages being brought up for adults and those children were able to engage in more leisurely activities (school, for one), what would that do to the world's markets? Would enough rice be produced? Would there be a global devaluing of education in a generation akin to what has happened in the United States in the past half century? If all people were given the ability to live in housing that met Western standards, what increases in energy consumption and refuse production would result?

Basically, my shower thought ran a line of reasoning that led me to an uncomfortable conclusion: the world as we currently know it needs poverty to exist, to horrific extents in many places, in order to support the entire population of the globe at current standards of living. To do otherwise invites the major problem with communism: if even a small group of people choose not to comply with the system, the system will collapse.

*I don't know about you, but much of my best thinking takes place during the short amount of time I spend each day depleting the local groundwater supply.

Who advocates for the young?

Ten years ago, I was getting ready to go to college. As many of my cohort did, I selected a school that matched my interests and would provide me with opportunities to learn and grow and to change my mind. While there, I received training that prepared me for my selected occupation and then went out into the wide, wide world. What I found was a shock.

You see, when I was in high school, counsellors and career experts told me (and most others my age) that there would be a remarkable hiring frenzy when we got out of college. The Baby Boom generation was reaching retirement age, and hundreds of thousands of teachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, and other public servants would be leaving the workforce. They would need replaced, and my generation would be the ones to do it! Unfortunately, in the early part of the 21st Century, the economy of the United States started to falter. As it did so, those Baby Boomers made a pragmatic decision: they didn't stop working. To be fair, some retired, but they then moved to other jobs or got rehired to the positions they were working before retirement. Though I don't question their right to still be drawing their retirement payments, this practice of double-dipping has hurt their children and grandchildren and the country as a whole.

When I graduated from college, I spent half a year looking for a job. At first, I sent carefully prepared resumes and cover letters to districts in Michigan and Ohio, as those were the states I knew best and I wanted to stay near family and friends. As time progressed, I stopped spending the time to prepare individual cover letters and began sending more applications online. My search broadened, and I eventually moved 1800 miles ten days after accepting a job offer, site and sight unseen. The pay for this job was relatively generous for a new teacher, but still far beneath what most people would consider a reasonable salary for someone with a college education. Though I considered myself somewhat unfortunate for waiting as long as I did and then going through such hoops to get a job, I was far better off than many who have graduated in the ensuing years.

My reason for relating this story is that it is but one example of the young being victimized by their elders in our society. Legally excluded from the legislative bodies that could make changes to the system, teenagers and young adults are unable to work on their own behalf. Powerful lobbying groups work for the elderly, but no such groups exist for the young. Insurance companies offer group rates that are charitable to those with high risk but devastating to those in good health. Social Security payments made by workers of all ages today to support those of retirement age will not exist when the youth of today are of an age to draw those benefits. Student loan debt is the only type that cannot be forgiven through bankruptcy, yet many people in their twenties are drawing more debt to stay in school when they cannot find jobs.

It seems that someone, somewhere must speak for the young. Someone must raise a voice and champion the cause of youth and protect the future of our society from the present. Who will it be?