Letter to Elected Representatives

Dear Elected Representative:

The entire nation is attacking public education, claiming our schools are failing and that teachers are to blame. Just because something is repeated often enough does not make it true. In fact, as Hitler pointed out, if the lie is big enough, and simple enough, people will believe it.

We do have a crisis in this country, but it is not a crisis of education. It is a crisis of poverty. As I am sure you are aware, our students do very well when compared with other nations when poverty is factored in to the equation. That is, our students who are not living in poverty do just as well, or better, on tests like PISA and TIMMS as do students in other developed countries. However, our students who live in poverty are certainly struggling. The last figures I saw said that nationally over 20% of our students live in poverty. In my own rural community that number is over 50%.

That is our crisis. How can a wealthy and powerful nation have 20% of its children living in poverty? What do we as a nation need to do about this? Do we need to spend millions, or even billions of dollars on more standardized tests? Or do we need to look at the policies that are hurting our children and keeping them in poverty?

No one denies that a good education is a way out of poverty. High paying jobs require an education. But the current unemployment rates cross all education levels. College graduates are unemployed as well as high school dropouts. That shows we have a deeper problem. The poverty problem in our nation is not an education problem, but an economic problem.

If our nation continues to vilify teachers the way it has been, then we really will have a crisis in education. We will no longer have anyone who wants to become a teacher. Why would someone want to enter a profession that is called lazy, lousy, and money grubbing? What evidence do we use to prove that teachers are horrible? The results of standardized tests, which is not a proven way to evaluate teachers. Even if this were a proven method, tests only measure a small slice of what is truly important in education.

Who really benefits from all this testing? Is it the students? After 25 years of teaching I have noticed a disconcerting trend. More and more of my students, both successful and unsuccessful, complain about how much they hate school. They are bored with a curriculum focused mainly on test preparation, and see no personal value to learning anymore.

If the students don't benefit, then someone must. According to Fair Test, “McGraw Hill, (one of the big four testing companies), reported profits of $49 million in 1993 before high stakes testing; in 2004 with contracts in 26 states, profits exceeded $340 million.” And in 2009, K-12 testing overall was estimated to be a $2.7 billion industry. We need to seriously look at a system that benefits corporations at the expense of students.

Please, stand up to the special interest groups that are vilifying education, and take a stand for our students. Stop believing the big lie. Public schools are not the problem, poverty is.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Yes, there are bad teachers in public schools.

Yes, there are mediocre teachers in public schools.

And, yes, there are amazing teachers in public schools.

Here is what no one seems to realize: they are the exact same people.

Every teacher has students who think they are wonderful, and students who think they’re horrible. I have colleagues whose teaching methods appall me, but who have students who love them. I have colleagues who I know are great teachers, but administrators do not like them. I hear parents complain about teachers who are too hard and about teachers who are too easy.

I have taught for 25 years, most of those years in the same small town. I often run into ex-students and their parents in the stores and offices around town. Usually they talk about how they loved my class, or they loved some aspect of my class. But I also have had them make it clear they did not think I was so great. I had one woman who was working in a day-old bread store attack me. She told me she was warning her daughter, who would be at the high school soon, to make sure she never had me for a teacher. I slunk out of that store trying to remember why she hated me so much. The only thing I actually remembered about her was the time she came to class so stoned that the whole class smelled of weed. I had the school resource officer come and escort her out of class. I guess that would indeed make me a horrible teacher.

Everyone talks about getting rid of the bad teachers, but no one can define what a good teacher is. If good teaching means having high test scores, then I know exactly how to go about being a good teacher:

1.     Only teach in middle class schools

2.     Only teach students who have parents who support education

3.     Only teach students who do not have learning disabilities

4.     Only teach students who have no personal problems

5.     Only teach material that will be on the test

If good teaching means reaching as many kids as possible, and helping them to become thinking citizens, then that is a much harder job to describe. We all have different ideas of what it means to reach a kid, or how to go about doing it. We also have different ideas about what thinking means.

What makes a good teacher is as hard to define as what makes a good book. I love books with strong believable characters while my friend prefers books with layers of symbolism. My husband likes science fiction and my neighbor despises that genre. I won't touch a romance novel, and a colleague owns every book written by Danielle Steele.

So give me a definition of a good teacher.  Go ahead, give it a try. Now get twenty other people to agree with that definition. See what I mean? Not so easy, huh?

We are NOT failing

One of the ideas I discuss with my students is that most people assume that others, in the same situation, would react and think in ways similar to themselves.  Thus I have thought for years that those seeking to “reform” education were actually doing it out of a desire to make education better. I no longer believe that. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that the current crop of educational reformers are actually seeking to destroy public education as we know it.

            When I began teaching in 1985, I passionately believed the power of an education rested in its ability to enlighten individuals, to turn them on to the power of ideas. History and literature, my two subjects, opened minds and doors, exposing my students to the entire world of ideas. In 1988 I began teaching journalism as a way to give my students a voice. The value in all of this was profoundly obvious to me. I assumed that was how every one else approached education.

            How wrong I was.

            Another idea I teach my students is that controlling education, and who could get an education, was historically a way to keep populations under control. You do not need to look any further than our own American history to see this in action. Slaves were denied the right to reading and writing because it was easier to keep them from rebelling if they were ignorant. American Indian children were sent to boarding schools to be educated in the white man’s way. Their own language, culture and religions were beaten out of them.

            This control is continuing today. The only difference is the rhetoric surrounding it. Now politicians and the multi-millionaires who control policy use phrases like “educational reform” and “work place readiness.” Education is no longer about opening minds to new ideas, or instilling independent thought.  It is all about providing job skills and preparing students to be productive employees.

            The creative and independent thinking we used to value as a country is no longer valued. Instead we want our children to be competitive with China. The same China whose Cultural Revolution killed millions of intellectuals simply because they were intellectual. Thinking people are dangerous. We can’t have that. Thinking leads to new ideas. Thinking leads to challenges of the status quo. To the people who control that status, thinking is subversive.

            Americans still give lip service to the value of education, which is why the people set on destroying it use the word “reform” and talk about our failing schools. People have heard this phrase so often, that it now becomes a given, reminding me of Adolph Hitler’s famous quote: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” Most schools were not failing; at least they weren’t until No Child Left Behind turned them into testing factories. Now we spend so much time testing (one tenth of the school year at my high school) that we no longer have time to teach real thinking. Which reminds me of another quote of Hitler’s, “How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.”