Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Poor Elijah’s September has two silver linings. First, everybody stops asking him when he’s going back to work. Second, he enjoys what he does for a living. Here are a few well-intentioned observations as we embark on the first semester.
1. Everybody isn’t starting the first semester. Some schools instead have subscribed to the latest in rearranging the deck chairs and decided to divide the school year into three trimesters instead of four quarters. As anyone with common sense can tell you, dividing a pie into bigger or smaller slices doesn’t change how it tastes. In the same way, despite the hoopla and press releases, many of the alleged innovations happening at and to your school are cosmetic and don’t change anything substantial.
2. Even fairly benign changes have consequences that promoters ignore, obscure or conceal. For example, shifting trimesters means that parents get fewer report cards. Boosters nonetheless commonly justify the change on the grounds that it improves communication and better informs parents about their children’s progress in school. If you don’t see how that’s possible, you’re not the only one. Keep that ironic contradiction in mind when officials announce their next “improvement.”
3. Everybody now knows that No Child Left Behind was a bad idea, especially the experts who’ve apparently forgotten that they used to think it was a good idea. Congress is currently working on NCLB’s replacement, the Every Child Achieves Act. Regardless of whether its final version improves NCLB, its title is just as much a lie. Despite supporters’ claims that ECAA will ensure the “success of every student,” some children still won’t work, some parents still won’t care, some homes will still convey staggering disadvantages, and some students will still lack the ability to meet high standards. Until we accept that reality, we’ll still be deluding ourselves and spinning our wheels.
4. Policymakers and bureaucrats promise that consolidating your school into a larger district will save money, ensure equity and improve education quality. These are empty promises, often cynically proffered. Officials know well that consolidation rarely if ever saves money and typically results in hiring more, not fewer, expensive upper level administrators. Equity, meaning access to education quality, is somewhat dependent on funding and mostly reliant on your child’s teacher and the other students in his class. It’s in no way served by usurping control from parents and local communities. These are your children. Fight for them.
5. Most education officials and teachers mean well. This unequivocally includes people I don’t agree with. However, officials far too readily enforce their opinions on others, even when those others, like classroom teachers, are in a better position, like a classroom, to know what works and what doesn’t. Still more outrageously, those same experts consistently and condescendingly presume to decide what’s best for other people’s children, even when those other people, meaning parents, clearly want something different for their children’s schools.
Standardized testing is out of control, appallingly expensive, and shamefully meaningless. The Common Core won’t make every student “college and career ready,” any more than NCLB left no child behind.
6. Don’t assume that your child’s teacher or even your school’s principal is a free agent. I’ve known superintendents who are both decent and competent, but many district officials aren’t at all shy about compelling obedience to the party line. Teachers and principals often operate in a climate of fear where their jobs rest on their remaining silent. That threat leaves your school’s staff mute as bad ideas are imposed on students, districts are mismanaged, and parents and community members are either left uninformed or deliberately misinformed.
7. Teachers need to bear in mind that we’re trustees accountable to our communities and our students’ parents. Parents, for their part, need to understand that public schools aren’t private tutors. As much as you are and ought to be sovereign in your child’s life, once you opt to participate in the public school system, you necessarily relinquish some of that sovereignty. You can’t expect your child’s school to operate by your particular rules, any more than your neighbor can expect it to follow his. You get to voice your opinion and vote for your school board, and you always reserve the right to withdraw your child, but you don’t get to call the shots in his classroom.
8. Parents and teachers have different jobs. Yes, I should be a decent human being, the same way you should help your child with his homework. But expecting me meet his social, medical, psychological, spiritual and physical needs grossly overestimates my skills, egregiously usurps your rights and privileges as his mother or father, and diverts time and resources from teaching him how to read and write, the one thing I’m supposed to be able to do better than you.
9. The right to attend public school isn’t unconditional. I enjoy the unalienable right to liberty unless my liberty robs other citizens of their rights. In the same way, no child has the right to obstruct the education rights of other children. Advocates claim that removing a disruptive, dangerous student from class exacts a long-term cost on society because his removal denies him an education. First, we need to remember that, owing to his behavior and likely lack of effort, that student already wasn’t benefiting from an education. Second, and more to the point, against the cost of his lost education, we need to weigh the greater cost of all the educations lost by all his suffering classmates.
10. Schools are drowning in reforms and new initiatives. Even those that might have merit, and that would be precious few, never last long enough to bear fruit before we’re on to the next big thing. The follies that get touted as educational “best practices” would take your breath away. It would be a comedy if so many children’s lives and the fate of a nation didn’t hang in the balance.
Chief among those current preoccupations are the Common Core and standardized testing. Standardized testing is out of control, appallingly expensive, and shamefully meaningless. The Common Core won’t make every student “college and career ready,” any more than NCLB left no child behind.
With so much to watch out for, our prospects could seem bleak. It helps to know that most teachers are conscientious, most parents are loving and responsible, and none of us is keeping the vigil alone.
In that knowledge, we begin.
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