Pay to Play ( or drink or eat or .....) ?

For a while, I did not believe that there really was strong anti-teacher/public education sentiment.  Yeah I thought that since everyone was forced to go to school and everyone complained as we do whenever we are mandated to do something (even if it is for our own good),  that people’s feelings about teachers and public education were like their feelings about going to the dentist – unpleasant but worthwhile.

What started me as a true believer in a sentiment to tear down public education and relegate the teaching profession to the same status as waitressing was reading the news stories and comments in various local and national papers.  I was surprised not only by the misinformation about the life of the teacher (overpaid, underworked and just in it for summers off), but also the system in general ( the US Constitution provides for fire departments, but not schools), and the services it provides (I taught my kids to read before they entered school so why are highly educated teachers needed)

What has sent me completely over the edge is the news story in my local paper, The Altoona Mirror about a local district, Tyrone, who is considering the following in its proposed school budget:

If passed, employees would have to pay $50 annually to have a refrigerator in their classroom or office, $20 for a coffee pot and $15 for a microwave.

What is up with this?  Why would a school district do this?   Well, the missing information is that the teachers refused a pay freeze, citing the fiscally sound state of the school district’s finances. 

This “appliance use fee” sounds like petty retaliation to me!

So let’s run the numbers.  It costs about $6 in electricity (assuming $0.12 /kW hr) to run a 500W microwave for 30 minutes for each school day. And no one runs a microwave for 30 minutes so the cost is even lower. A dorm fridge is about $25 for the school year. A coffee maker? Maybe $7/school year.

So what does the school district hope to gain?  Financially, NOTHING!!!  They just want to wield power, to put teachers in their supposed place.  I wonder if they serve coffee at school board meetings?  Do the school board members pay per cup or does the school district collect a monthly fee?

What is next? Pay Toilets?  Oh that won’t work because teachers never have time to go to the bathroom anyway.

Still an Engineer

 I opended the results of my kids Iowa test scores and have found myself excited to see a 95 th percentile on the sheet.  Why am I happy?  I do not even know the content that was assessed.  Reading Todd Farley’s book about his lucrative career in standardized testing which began by grading exams in the basement of an abandoned mall, I am sure that I will never have that feeling again, especially when the test includes open-ended items. 

Why do we trust tests given by people we don’t know and who have never met our children and yet we do not trust meaningful evaluations given by people who see our children for over 180 days each year? 

          Perhaps it is the low status given to the teacher profession.  We all know the anecdotes about how easy it is to get into an education program.  After all, those who can’t , teach.  And of course, we get summers off!!! 

Well ,as a former engineer, I find teaching incredibly challenging and yet familiar, not unlike solving a measurement problem in the lab.  It requires adapting known concepts about what is good instructional practice like frequent formative assessment, using student ideas, construction of knowledge through language, and applying them to a specific situation like:

          “It is a Tuesday in November and we are in the second day of projectile motion with a class of  28 12^th graders, some of whom have trouble solving 2t² -7 = 12.  It is 9a.m. as opposed to the 11:30 class (right before lunch) with 12 people who all can do algebra well, except for one for whom 2x = 4 is a challenge .  We have already sorted 15 situations into various student devised groupings so the students have seen the breadth of situations and have made a first attempt at teasing out important difference.  Are they now ready to start pulling numbers out of the problems and assigning them to variables?  Or maybe we should practice drawing the trajectories of the objects because if we jump into numbers too soon then the students just want to plug numbers into a formula.  We also need to do the lab in which the students organize themselves to see how flight time varies with launch speed, height and angle.  Oh and Thanksgiving break is in a week so we need to be at a solid stopping point by then.  What to do first?

          I am sure this rambling would come as a surprise to not only most of the non-teaching public, but also to education majors and even beginning teachers.  Most people think that you just “cover” the material from the book and the curriculum tells you what to do.  WRONG!! 

Teachers are professionals who rely on their education and judgment constantly, just like engineers.  I needed to design a way to measure the leaching of an alpha emitter from samples of glass to mimic the erosion of vitrified nuclear waste.  This required lots of math and creativity, but not the split second decision making skill of being a teacher.  My alpha particles behaved according to physics so they acted the same way every day and I could analytically test my different ideas one at a time.  Each year my physics classes have their own personalities.  Even in the same year, the personality changes depending on the season, day of the week, who is absent…!  I need multiple solutions to multiple problems twenty times a day. 

          So I propose a new name for teaching: Instructional Engineering which will be defined as a branch of engineering that designs learning experiences for young people involving the disciplines of psychology, statistics, ergonomics, human resources, business administration, family studies, along with the content of the learning goals ( physics, math, US history, etc.). 

          I guarantee that Todd Farley, the out of work would –be writer,  would not have gotten a job grading in the basement of a mall if the title of the tests were the Standardized Instructional Engineering Exams.  Actually, those exams would never even exist because why would we not trust the engineers to design quality lessons for the students.  It’s not as if they are just teachers.  Problem solved!

USB ready kids

          Why do we think that those who are successful in business will automatically be successful in all venues.  We seem to implicitly trust that the Bill Gates and Annenbergs know how to “save “ education.  How quickly we forget that businessmen make mistakes.  Remember New Coke?  Remember all those Windows OS bugs? 

Thinking as any good businessman, Gates’ would like to retool schools to reduce the bottom line while increasing the productivity of the manufacturing process.  He would like to standardize the product so it can be a plug and play device for the program of college or work.  Let’s look at this goal. 

Students as standardized outputs, able to be plugged into the USB port of any job with no further formatting required... what efficiency!  Who cares that some students have flash memory and some are more like 5 inch floppy disks.  It doesn’t matter that some students have a math coprocessor and some have a fantastic graphics card.  We can increase productivity by measuring the product using the bubble sheet ruler.  What about the students who have only serial port inputs?  They are out of luck because the bubble sheet only accepts a USB connection.  Of course that is the fault of the charter school receiving department.  They were to only accept shipments of USB ready students.  The serial port students were to be shipped to the public school factory, who, of course, still has to use the USB bubble sheet ruler

How about increasing the productivity of the manufacturing process?  Gates’ has pontificated that a good teacher can teacher 40 or more students at a time and achieve the same results as with a classroom of 20.  After all, with the advent of computer controlled assembly lines and just-in-time inventory, the productivity of the American worker has been increasing.  Why can’t we just speed up the school assembly line where the physics teacher unscrews the kid’s cranium, dumps in the equations of Newtonian physics, and screws the lid back on before it all pops back out.  Or maybe we should forget the screws and just use Velcro- that would shave precious seconds off the whole production process!!  But wait…we are in the digital age.  Those USB equipped children will just plug into the physics teacher port and download the knowledge.  Since they are all the same, there will be no compatibility issues, just like when we switched to Office 2000.  No problems there, right?

Obviously the business model breaks down when we talk  about manufacturing people.  Even Huxley’s Brave New World runs into problems when even the most tightly controlled process goes wrong with Bernard and the introduction of the immigrant John Savage.  We all know that children are not products to be taken off the shelves to fulfill some predetermined role.

So what is the allure of allowing the business world to run our schools?  Why are we are willing to hand over our school districts to these mega foundations because they will “save” us. 

First of all, we wrongly believe that we are in a sinking boat on the ocean of a global economy and need to be saved by moving into a new chartered boat.  Captain Bill Gates claims that our schools cost too much money and are not producing enough high quality product.  Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute has quite clearly debunked most of Gates’ economic claims by putting them in a 40 year perspective.  For example, the costs of educating our youth has increased, but most of that increase has occurred because we no longer put our special education students in a windowless room in the basement to be babysat by a person not trained in working with children of various special needs.  We now educate them to the best of their abilities, allowing many to enter the workforce and help to support themselves.  We have increased the educational levels of the most fragile members of our society all while the poverty rate is increasing.  This does not sound like a failing boat. 

Second, we have been brought up to worship the power of big business  We were brought up to on the fairytales of  Rockefeller and Carnegie starting from humble beginnings and rising to the pinnacle power on the wings of their astute business sense.  They used their self-earned money to fund libraries, universities and other public works.  Of course, as educated adults, we know there is more to the story, but first impressions last.  If these giants of industry could transform the industrial worlds of steel and rail, just think what their ilk could do for schools!  We forget that the Gates’ of the modern mega foundations were born wealthy, went to private schools and have no experience in world of education. 

Third, the feminist in me can’t help but attribute some of this “crisis” mentality to an awakening of the world’s powerbrokers to the importance of education which is dominated by…WOMEN.  How can women be in charge of something so important?  In Germany, where the teachers were traditionally men, teachers are given incredible autonomy and the students do not fill out bubble sheets.

With the budget of schools being cruelly slashed to the bone, the mega business foundations will find their funds greedily accepted by school boards.  Before accepting money, the school should ask for a prospectus of the foundation’s previous projects.  Ask Bill how that small school initiative turned out.  Ask the Broads how well the teacher pay incentives increased student performance.  I think we would find that most of these foundation’s business models would not make AYP.

Would you like fries with that?

Rereading Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, the phrase which stands out for me so far is on page 12, “We must take care that out teachers are well educated, not just well trained.”  As someone who is interested in teacher professional development and as a teacher getting close to a 20 year career, I see a huge difference between being educated and being trained.  There is a chasm between the two that when applied to the teaching profession, could not and should not be bridged.  The work and preparation of a teacher should not be compared to that of a fast food worker.

            The well trained McDonald’s line chef knows procedures, but had no part in creating them.  The well trained cashier is not expected to deal with novel situations as a routine part of their workday.  After all, there are not that many new problems encountered making French fries that are not covered in the McDonald’s manual.  At the end of the shift, the well trained worker clocks out and goes home without a thought of what will happen at work the next day.  There is no need since it will be exactly the same as all the previous days.  Listening to the news or talking to neighbors will not create thoughts about the role of their job in the future of America.  The well trained drive-thru cashier will not wake up at 3 a.m. will a great new idea on how to ring up a value meal.

            Teachers are well educated professionals.  A well educated professional is responsible for diagnosing and engineering solutions to new problems.  These problems are a routine part of their work day.  A well educated professional has the big picture of how economics, politics, and societal norms play a part in their professional lives.  A teacher is constantly exploring new ways to present content to students or to manage time more efficiently.

Awhile ago I was asked by an administrator to not only describe all my teaching strategies and procedures, but also to describe when I used each one in the specific areas of my curriculum.  I jokingly asked if I was supposed to write a book.  In retrospect, I was not joking.  It would take a multi volume boxed set to describe the decision making process of this one physics teacher working in one specific school with her specific goals for her classes.  It could never be a training manual to be duplicated by others just off a teacher assembly line.

            A manual cannot be written that could approach describing the dynamic school environment, subject as it is to a myriad of unseen forces.  The Aurora Borealis appears to most observers as a random swirl of colors that appear with unpredictable timing.  To a physicist, the Northern Lights are a result of only one of the four fundamental forces in the universe and can be described mathematically.  Has anyone ever succeeded in mathematically describing the “forces” at play in a high school physics class?  Has anyone even tried?  A teacher wishes they only had to work with the four fundamental forces of the universe.  For example, has Johnny gotten enough sleep? Eaten anything since yesterday?  Just broken up with a girlfriend? Just found out mom has cancer? Just gotten a new video game? Just gotten accepted/rejected from college?  Had to work until 11pm at a fast food restaurant?  Totaled his car?  Oh, and note that NOTHING on this list has anything to do with academics.  That’s another list!

Later In Chapter 3, Diane Ravitch goes onto to muse that “it seems curious that elected officials (in designing NCLB) would set such ambitious targets for achieving ends over which they had to little control.”  Looking at the previous list, this comment is right on target.  Education is messy process with many variables out of reach to educators at any level.  Schools cannot control for the previous experiences of the student like McDonald’s can choose the exact variety of Russet potato for their fries.  Schools cannot “store” their students in a great home like McDonald’s can store their all beef patties in a climate controlled refrigerator.  Schools cannot open up their students minds to see why they cannot understand that an object can be moving without a force pushing it like McDonald’s can open up the shake machine to see why the shakes are coming out all runny.  And schools cannot hand teachers a training manual on how much time to give students to complete a projectile motion lab on the Friday before Christmas break like McDonald’s can hand a manual to the fryer operator detailing how long to leave the nuggets in the oil so they come out crispy but not burnt. 

Great teachers are a product of their hard work and creativity, not a step by step training manual on which button to push to set the fryer timer.  Great teachers are well educated, not well trained.