Nor is there evidence that student achievement will improve if teachers are evaluated by their students’ test scores. Some economists say that when students have four or five “great” teachers in a row, the achievement gap between racial groups disappears. The difficulty with this theory is that we do not have adequate measures of teacher excellence.
Of course, it would be wonderful if all teachers were excellent, but many factors affect student scores other than their teacher, including students’ motivation, the schools’ curriculum, family support, poverty and distractions on testing day, such as the weather or even
a dog barking in the school’s parking lot.
The Obama education reform plan is an aggressive version of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind, under which many schools have narrowed their curriculum to the tested subjects of reading and math.
This poor substitute for a well-rounded education, which includes subjects such as the arts, history, geography, civics, science and foreign language, hits low-income children the hardest, since they are the most likely to attend the kind of “failing school” that drills kids relentlessly on the basics. Emphasis on test scores already compels teachers to focus on test preparation.
Holding teachers personally and exclusively accountable for test scores — a key feature of Race to the Top — will make this situation even worse. Test scores will determine salary, tenure, bonuses and sanctions, as teachers and schools compete with each other, survival-of-the-fittest style.
Frustrated by a chronic lack of progress, business leaders and politicians expect that a stern dose of this sort of competition and incentives will improve education, but they are wrong.
No other nation is taking such harsh lessons from the corporate sector and applying them to their schools. No nation with successful schools ignores everything but basic skills and testing.
Schools work best when teachers collaborate to help their students and strive together for common goals, not when they compete for higher scores and bonuses.
Having embraced the Republican agenda of choice, competition and accountability, the Obama administration is promoting the privatization of large segments of American education and undermining the profession of teaching.
This toxic combination is the latest Big Idea in education reform. Like so many of its predecessors, it is not likely to improve education.
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A version of this article appeared in the Mar 17 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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I kept waiting for the part where the education historian introduced a better plan.
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Thank you for bolstering my decision to homeschool my son.
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I keep waiting for the person to advertise their local teacher's union.
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"Schools work best when teachers collaborate to help their students and strive together for common goals, not when they compete for higher scores and bonuses."
Agreed, but what do you do with the schools that don't do that? There has to be some measure found to hold these teachers who don't care more accountable. If teaching is too grueling a career to keep up for 45 years, perhaps we consider retiring teachers to non-student-facing jobs earlier. Perhaps we train them better, and make them understand that no one works a 6.25 hour day and they're setting a bad example for their students but insisting on it (not to mention shortchanging them).
The charters that DO succeed, have longer school days, motivated parents and students (because it is true the teacher cannot do it alone), and teachers who are teaching not because they don't know what else to do, but because teaching is what they WANT to do.
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Sorry, but you are dead wrong. You have many, many, many teachers within public schools who are there because they want to be. Just as the author stated, much of the success of students come from what is taught at home. Students who don't want to learn, will never learn, no matter how great the teacher or the curriculum is. I totally agree with Bill Cosby when is says that the success of students has a simple solution, yet the conditions upon which you meet that success requires hard work which is called "studying!"
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I'm a public school teacher. I'm not sure why you think teachers work 6.25 hours per day. Do you think the teachers follow the school buses into the parking lot in the morning and then leave right after the buses pull out at the end of school day? The students at my school are in class from 8 to 3 (that's 7 hours by my count) and then I'm required to be in school a half hour before class and a half hour after...at a minimum...so that makes 8 hours - just like almost every other working person in this country. That's doesn't count the numerous meetings and conferences that are held after school, not to mention the lesson prep and grading that needs to be done every single day. I'm not complaining. I love my job - but I don't appreciate it when people take their mistaken impressions from their youth and apply them to the job I put my sweat and my heart into every day.
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In California, twenty percent of the 2011 Distinguished School are charters, even though charter schools make up only around 10% of the state's public schools.
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Maybe if the title of the article was correct, it might have more credibility. Charter schools are public schools, not private.
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