I usually beware when a lifelong teacher warns that good teachers are leaving the profession.
Back in the 1990s, I was appointed to a Commission that studied when teachers left and why they did. We found problems, and they weren’t problems that money solved. I wasn’t the most popular person with the local teachers union when we discovered that data.
So, when Mr. Rafe Esquith wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, I was ready to listen.
Not money, says he. Low salaries for teachers aren’t new.
The problem, he says, is teachers aren’t in charge of teaching.
All good teachers believe students have to be assessed, but the obsession with standardized testing has replaced real learning with the mistaken belief that a regurgitation of facts reflects scholarship and thinking. Teachers with enormous experience and much to offer are being forced to shelve valuable lessons because they interfere with a testing schedule designed by someone who could not teach a class of students on his best day. Drop into a break room and you’ll hear good teachers muttering bitterly, “Those who can, teach, and those who can’t, make rules for teachers.” (WSJ)
I don’t know what job these great teachers plan on fleeing to where they are going to escape some boss demanding measurable results from their work.
My clients expect to win their elections. I expect students to learn. When I hire someone to do my taxes, I expect it to be correct. If stockholders don’t like a company’s performance, they sell the stock.
But Mr. Esquith has a point worth exploring, doesn’t he?
He did until he invoked Joseph Stalin.
“I will not let the latest Stalinesque five-year plan destroy 30 years of Shakespeare productions with my wonderful fifth graders”
Joseph Stalin was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. Stalin’s atrocities included torture, the Gulags of forced labor camps, purges, famines and massacres.
A bit much comparing that to fifth-graders doing a play.
This is why teachers aren’t left to their own devices and accountability is demanded by us who pay for education.
If teachers think fifth-graders not getting to do Shakespeare is equal to the Gulag, they are demonstrating they need the level of oversight they are rebelling against.
