How to survive ed reform without losing your job, your ideals, or your mind

A modern day Paul Revere could ride through the halls of your school calling “The common core is coming, the common core is coming” causing the collective adrenaline of all teachers, but particularly veterans, to spike.  Though we have all lived through various waves of ‘reform,’ we’ve shaken them all off, possibly saving a useful morsel of this one or a bite of that one but, in general, ignoring them.  But this latest onslaught is a lot more ominous.  We start hearing that teachers are finally going to be held ‘accountable’ for their sins and when we hear it enough we begin to wonder if it is true that we are a bunch of lazy sloths whiling away the hours until our big fat pensions become ripe.  I want to help teachers, particularly veterans (particularly myself!) that we will survive this latest epidemic.  Remember the bird flu?  Remember Y2K?

I’ve studied these latest ed reforms from every angle and, yes, they do have the potential to do a lot of harm.  In some cities they have already done a lot of harm.  But I truly believe that we will emerge from this still standing, and maybe even a little stronger for the struggle.

The common core are the new standards sweeping the nation.  They have cost taxpayers millions of dollars and by the time it is all done, hundreds of millions.  Much of that money was spent on little silver stickers that say ‘aligned with the common core’ for textbook publishers to slap onto copies of their old textbooks in the warehouse.  The fact is that the common core isn’t all that different from what we have already been doing.  We are told that the old standards were ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’ implying that we were all racing through every topic without savoring any of them.  While it is true that there were some topics that I would cover only superficially, for a lack of time, there were others that I would go into extreme depth.  It was a matter of prioritizing a nearly unlimited set of topics to fit into a limited amount of time.  The common core, as far as I can tell, has not alleviated us from daily making a choice of how much time to spend on this lesson or that.  There are still too many topics.

We have also heard there are going to be big changes in teacher evaluations.  We hear that ‘everyone’ agrees that the old system was horribly ‘broken.’  So it will be replaced with a new system that, in theory, factors in student ‘achievement.’  Except it doesn’t.  Unless by ‘achievement’ you mean how well your classes do compared to what a computer thinks your class would do if they had an ‘average’ teacher.  This ‘value-added’ component which, in some states, can be as much as 50% of the evaluation, are incredibly fickle.  In New York City there are middle school teachers who teach two different grade levels so they get two different value-added ratings.  While one would expect a teacher to add about as much value to her 3rd period 7th graders as to her 4th period 8th graders, we find that she is ranked as a ‘highly effective’ teacher for 7th grade, yet ‘highly ineffective’ for 8th grade.  Value-added is practically a random number.  The good news is that it is very unlikely for a teacher to be rated ‘highly ineffective’ multiple years in a row.  It would be like rolling double 6s on a pair of dice three times in a row.  My predication is that as the flaws in these new systems are revealed in various ways — known ‘effective’ teachers getting low scores, known ‘ineffective’ teachers getting big value-added merit pay bonuses — the public will demand that these systems are dismantled before they do any more damage.

The gravest threat posed by all these reforms is that they encourage teachers to forego ‘real’ teaching for test prep.  This will, ultimately, hurt the students they teach.  As teachers we cannot fall into this trap.  When I am tempted to compromise what I know is good instruction, I will think back to the letters I’ve received from students over the years.  Though I certainly can’t claim to have ‘inspired’ every student I’ve ever taught, I know from these ‘thank you’ notes I’ve received over the years that I have, at least, inspired some.  When a student writes to me that she used to hate math and now she likes it, well, that’s all the merit pay I need.  We must be aware of what our true value is — inspiring kids to enjoy learning — whether or not a computer can detect it.  So stock up on batteries and duct tape if you must, but remember if you allow the quality of your teaching to suffer the ‘reformers’ have already won.