by Kurt Watson

Having been a public school teacher in Fresno for over 30 years, I thought we had seen a low point under former President Bush when it came to educational policy in this country. No Child Left Behind, however well intentioned it may have been, had devastating effects on our public schools. Now, however, under a President who promised to “reform No Child Left Behind so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them,” things seem to be getting even worse.

Teachers like myself, with decades of classroom experience, are now being required to have their lesson plans approved by administrators, who are then telling us how to deliver those lessons. It’s like a straightjacket. In school, teachers-to-be are well educated in what are called “best practices.” Best practices represent years of research into what actually works best with kids in the classroom. Credential programs, both the one I attended years ago, and programs currently operating, still base their curriculum on best practices, and rightly so. However, when new teachers enter the classroom and begin teaching, they quickly see that best practices get thrown out the window. What’s important these days are the tests, and the test scores. Administrators, following Federal policies, are currently pushing a bare-bones (or one might say dead bones) approach to education, one that emphasizes a small piece at the expense of the whole. This narrow-minded approach does not have as its goal the development of young children’s minds, or their ability to think critically about the world around them.

One of the craziest aspects of this, in my view, is that the administration is telling us what to do and how to do it, and then, if the students aren’t learning, the blame is placed on the teachers. After giving us no leeway, no input as to how (or what) we’re teaching the kids, we’re to blame for bored students who aren’t learning? The idea that salary will be tied to testing results is beyond any rational person’s ability to comprehend, given the current setup. (Obama has been a big supporter of the idea of so-called ‘merit-pay’.) Another crazy aspect of this current system is that they’re not teaching kids how to actually use the things they’re learning. The focus is not on how to relate concepts to reality, or on how to apply these concepts in real life, but only on how to use them to do well on the test. It’s becoming less and less of a real education. Learning is turning into packets of information we’re attempting to forcibly download into students. Don’t get me wrong, there have always been elements of this rote-memorization approach in our schools—it’s just that now it’s becoming the only approach that’s acceptable.

Obama promised to reform/get rid of No Child Left Behind. He spoke of not wanting to force teachers to spend all their time showing students how to “fill in bubbles on standardized tests.” Not only has he not done changed NCLB, he’s taken it a step further. Basically, what we ended up with under Bush was a business model of education (handed down, I might add, from an individual who was an utter failure in business) and the Federal government becoming more involved in curriculum than it had ever been. Obama has taken the erosion of the public school system a step further..

Teachers hoped that under the new administration we’d see a return to a time when kids were encouraged to appreciate literature, enjoy music, produce art related to the curriculum, and when teachers would be able to explore areas in more depth. There was hope that the dictator-style reign had ended; that there would be major changes afoot in domestic & foreign policy. But it seems like more of the same…

In August, the NEA wrote a response to Obama’s educational proposal (called “Race To The Top,” or RTTT) and stated: “The details of the RTTT proposal do not seem to square with the Administration’s earlier philosophy. The Administration’s theory of success now seems to be tight on the goals and tight on the means, with prescriptions that are not well-grounded in knowledge from practice and are unlikely to meet the goals. We find this top-down approach disturbing; we have been down that road before with the failures of No Child Left Behind, and we cannot support yet another layer of federal mandates that have little or no research base of success and that usurp state and local government’s responsibilities for public education….Instead of focusing on strengthening enforcement of civil rights laws to promote access and opportunity for students, the Administration has chosen the path of a series of top-down directives that may discourage rather than encourage productive innovation in classrooms and schools across the country. Despite growing evidence to the contrary, it appears that the Administration has decided that charter schools are the only answer to what ails America’s public schools—urban, suburban, exurban, and rural—and all must comply with that silver bullet, despite the fact that charters have often produced lower achievement gains than district-run public schools.” [1] [2]

Teachers throughout the country (especially those in low-income areas) are no longer making decisions about what to teach & how to do it. Before, Fresno Unified School District prided itself on catering to diverse populations. Now everyone’s supposed to be on the same page; teaching the same thing, the same way. Before, kids had the opportunity to get multiple teacher’s versions/methods. Some kids won’t learn one way, but when teachers were actually allowed to make decisions about their curriculum, a student could get exposed to many different perspectives, and would be given multiple opportunities at flourishing/understanding. In addition to insulting the intelligence of those who devote their lives to teaching the youth, it’s having devastating consequences on a generation of young minds as well.

Stephen Krashen, the leading linguist specializing in language acquisition, says kids take 4-6 years to learn a language fluently. Kids who come in speaking another language are being tested right away in English, which is not only discouraging, but wrong. Currently, children who should not be tested due to lack of fluency in their second language are being counted as if they were their native-speaking counterparts. Federal policy has thrown out the leading linguistic research, leaving the English-language-learners with the challenge of jumping through the hoops just like everyone else. The education of this group of children has surely been compromised. ‘Drill and kill for specific skills’ is no replacement for a coherent, holistic approach to education, which could serve as a base for further learning.

Teachers do not come into the profession to test, but to do good in kids’ lives. But right now, for the most part, teachers are doing as they’re told, and everyone is suffering as a result. Because what they’re being told to do is to change the way they deliver the curriculum, and to change what they teach. This is happening on a massive scale, in a manner that is forceful and dictated from on high. At some point, there has to be a collective awakening, when teachers decide to trust what they’ve learned (both from best practices at the university level and their own teaching experience), and to stand up to the dictates of increasingly narrow-minded administrators & Federal mandates.

Obama & Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have already pushed through, along with a commitment of $100 billion dollars of stimulus to the nation’s schools, the requirement that, in order to qualify for those funds, the states must remove any caps or restrictions they have on charter schools. Part of the trend that is continuing under the Obama administration is really about a push to privatize our public education system. [3] As CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan “presided over the implementation and expansion of an agenda that militarized and corporatized the third largest school system in the nation, one that is about 90 percent poor and nonwhite.” [4] (Funny that under our “socialist” president, the trend to privatize and “let the market figure it out” seems to be just as strong a tendency as under Bush…) It’s time to wake up and realize what is being done to our nation’s schools and our nation’s kids; it’s time to organize against this madness.
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Kurt Watson is a bilingual elementary school teacher in Fresno and an artist whose work can be seen at Studio Itz. Check out myspace.com/studioitz.
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Notes:
[1] NEA’s comment on Obama’s educational policies/goals—August 21, 2009
[2] [See recent report on Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 initiative: Young, V.M., Humphrey, D.C., Wang, H., Bosetti, K.R., Cassidy, L., Wechsler, M.E., Rivera, E., Murray, S., & Schanzenbach, D.W. (2009). Renaissance Schools Fund-supported schools: Early Outcomes, challenges, and opportunities. Menlo Park, CA: Stanford Research International and Chicago: Consortium on Chicago School Research.]
[3] See Danny Weil’s “Neoliberalism, Charter Schools, and the Chicago Model: Obama and Duncan’s Education Policy: Like Bush’s, Only Worse” @ http://alturl.com/f6ya
[4] from “Obama’s Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling,” by Henry Giroux and Kenneth Saltman, @ www.truthout.org/121708R