What to do with Education

I was planning to write an entry titled, "What to do with a big pot of roasted buckwheat," because that's my current culinary dilemma, but Oregon's educational crisis (plus the mayhem in Wisconsin, Michigan, and elsewhere) has me thinking. About reform, to be precise, and from an educator's perspective.

Our governor, John Kitzhaber, is currently locking budgetary horns with the Oregon Teacher's Union, which is a fiscal powerhouse in the state and also legitimately upset about classroom size, layoffs, and school closures. The problem is that we don't have enough money in Oregon to cover our constituents' basic needs: food stamps and pantries, mental healthcare, low-income health coverage, housing services and public education. Services need to be cut, and since we've already stripped social services to the bone, the school budget has to be renegotiated.

I think the first problem is that people hear "we're cutting the school budget" and freak out: Classroom size will be out of control! Test scores will go down! Teachers will be overworked or laid off! The powerful teacher's union kicks into an emotionally fueled diatribe about how hard it is to be a teacher.

And it is hard. Non-educators equate teaching with instructional hours, but the fact is that most educational work is done at home or in our offices, when we're planning lessons, grading papers, and dealing with students and administrators; for adjunct college instructors like myself, this is unpaid labor. Public school teachers are compensated for some of this time, but because the work is invisible it is not given the recognition that it deserves. Or the financial consideration. A teacher who goes from having four classes with 25 students each to 4 classes with 45 students each is not given a parallel raise in pay.

(Worth noting: The average class size as of 2009 in Oregon was 19.4 students per teacher, giving us a national ranking of 49th in terms of poor student to teacher ratios. I think the number, low to the naked eye and high by national standards, is impacted by the high number of tiny, rural school districts in Oregon. I was in public school here from 1992-1998, in advanced classes, and never had fewer than 25 peers per class. )

Let's step into that teacher's shoes for a minute: with 180 students, it is safe to assume that the teacher is grading 180-360 pieces of homework per week, which will vary in length and detail depending on the course. That's roughly 25-50 papers to grade each night of the week (weekends included), in addition to planning lessons and having a life outside of work.

Do you think that teacher is carefully examining each piece of homework to determine each student's strengths and weaknesses, and then revising the lesson plan to cater to those needs? Is that essay being proofread and the grammatical and content errors rigorously addressed? Is it likely that the high-performing students are being lauded without being challenged, and the low-performers chucked, however unintentionally, to the side because there simply isn't time to sit down with the student who after several weeks of class still doesn't understand the quadratic formula or how to write a thesis statement?

No, he isn't.
No, it isn't.
Yes, it is.

I know this because I know public school teachers, but more importantly because I teach their students once they've arrived in college. And my students can't read or write at the college level. Sometimes, and I'm not being snide, my students' critical faculties (reading comprehension, understanding of symbolism and irony, ability to make connections between diverse materials, or apply philosophical or critical concepts to texts) pale in comparison to my eleven-year old brother's, who is fortunate enough to attend Montessori school.

And I think, "We are failing these kids." I think, "My God. I live in an America unaccustomed to thought."

There are people who argue that class size doesn't matter. And to them I reply, "You stand in front of a classroom of 25-45 children or adolescents four times a day and know each of their names, all of their pertinent skills and weaknesses, how to address their individual learning needs, and by the way, keep everyone focused." Smaller classes make these tasks easier. And a teacher who can't do the above with a class of 25 or less should not be a teacher.

Which brings me to the second problem: teacher evaluation.

Currently in Oregon teachers with seniority are protected against firing or lay offs. As a union member who has recently benefited from seniority protection (though not in the educational sector) I understand the security this imparts. But let's be honest--seniority doesn't always equal enthusiasm, innovation or skill; the only thing seniority ensures is experience, and depending on what you've done with that time, that experience could be of negligible use in the classroom. And the only way to gauge the value of that experience, and its application, is to evaluate teachers more frequently and in person.

The current and favored method, standardized test scores, is not a legitimate way to evaluate teaching.

First, a teacher "teaching to the test" is limiting the students' knowledge and abilities to those needed to pass an exam. Standardized tests rely on formulaic questions (multiple choice, chiefly) and brief passages of text, as well as short essays. So students learn how to narrow down an answer from four to two likely choices, and they learn how to read and write very brief documents. And they're not reading interesting texts, or responding to exciting essay prompts; they're being taught to scan a paragraph on any subject in order to pull out the main idea and chief metaphor. They're not being taught that symbols have wide interpretations. Or that reading is fun. Or that critical thinking is more than memorizing facts--that critical thinking, indeed, is being able to ask questions as well as answer them.

And the worst part of this system is that students who are not adept test-takers are labeled un-teachable or left back. And the teacher who has a high proportion of these students in his classroom, or who dislikes this model of education, is considered a bad teacher.

You know what a bad teacher is? Someone who doesn't like kids. Someone without patience. Someone who doesn't remember what it's like to struggle to learn something. Someone without the energy and imagination to continually try new methods of engaging and teaching students. Someone who won't take critique to heart and change her approaches to students and materials. Someone who can't communicate clearly to lower-performing students. Someone too burnt out to care. Someone who doesn't make learning as fun as possible.

There are experienced teachers and new teachers who are bad teachers. If all teachers were evaluated at least once a term by fellow educators, and then given the opportunity for discussion and growth, and then reassessed, and then let go if they couldn't do the job, that would be fair. And it wouldn't cost a dime to implement. And it would raise the stakes for teachers to do their best; and it would raise the stakes for administrations to support their teachers.

But now you're thinking, what about the budget? We still need to cut money.

We do.

And my answers are, in no particular order:

1) Get rid of seniority-based firing.
2) Stop using so much expensive and (studies continue to show) fairly useless education technology.
3) Reduce the administration and increase the teaching staff.
4) Do not hire administrators who are not also educators. Do not hire outside of the state. Set a time limit on job hunts for new administrators. Do not pay administrators more than teachers.
5) Instead of offering "gourmet" course options like anthropology, integrate those subjects into standard courses like English and Science and select teachers who can do that.
6) Look into alternative educational models like Montessori or Waldorf that manage to integrate intellectual autonomy and creativity into largish classrooms that also focus on hard science, math and english.
7) Ask the students where they want money to be spent.
8) Make all teachers contribute to their pension plans (just like every other employee on the planet, who pays into his 401K).
9) Reduce classroom size but have teachers double as academic advisers.
10) Reduce classroom size but have teachers lead extracurricular activities and clubs.
11) Put the school into the community, and the community into the school. Make the school the cultural center of the community by hosting events, renting the gymnasium, inviting in outside groups to host events and join in school celebrations.

At the end of the day, what a school really needs is a safe building, a blackboard, desks, paper and pencils. It needs computers for word processing, and a cafeteria that offers simple, healthy food. It needs students and teachers and a principal.

That's a lot, but it's not impossible and it doesn't need to be expensive.