Education Policy - Donkey or Jackass?

All too often as I listen to current pronouncements about education policy from the current so called leaders and pundits, I am reminded of the old [borrowed] saying my mother taught me. “Better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are a fool, than to open it and prove them right.” The other sad complement to such musing is that in establishing education policy, the “Golden Rule” applies, that is…he who has the gold makes the rules. Consequently, those who establish policy need have no knowledge or expertise about education in order to set policy, only the power to control funds badly needed for educating the nation’s most vulnerable youth. The Secretary of Education’s main qualification for shaping education policy seems to be his participation in pickup basketball games with President Obama. This proximity connection provides him influence over federal purse strings for education and a pulpit for pushing his neoliberal agenda of corporatizing public education. While I would not denigrate student athletes generally, those are not the quarters I would turn to first for intellectual capital and academic leadership. After all, LeBron James is a tremendous athlete, but I would not put him in charge of developing national policy on anything. Moreover, the slash and burn strategy and promotion of charter schools adopted under Duncan’s brief reign over Chicago schools has, in hindsight proven a failure.

We are now told by these vocal “experts” that teachers are the primary problem for student failure to improve academic performance. Teacher unions that seek to maintain a voice in the decisions about school curriculum [to the extent that this has not been totally emasculated] and insight as to what really occurs in the classroom, we are told, should be abolished. Students of impoverished backgrounds, undernourished and with enormous socio-economic disadvantages are branded failures before they start classes and their academic performance [which may take a backseat to mere survival] is to be the measure for teacher competence. We are also told that teaching effectiveness is the same whether a teacher has 20 or 30 children in a classroom; yet any teaching professional with even the least experience will confirm the ample research demonstrating that to be a falsehood. And, to throw salt in the wounds inflicted by these assaults on the teaching profession, we are told that Teach for America is a prime solution to the problem of poor teacher quality. The facts show us that an extremely low percentage of Teach For America participants stay in the teaching profession, if they even complete their required tenure commitment of only a couple of years in the classroom.

My experience as student and teacher is that students can tell almost immediately whether the person who presents as a teacher has the skills and talent to be a good teacher. Having a firm grasp on the course content is important, but not every content specialist can teach. This is a pervasive fallacy that runs through the public consciousness and is perpetuated by bureaucrats who know little or nothing about pedagogy. To be sure, most Teach for America participants leave teaching because it was, from the inception, simply a way to put a “service” marker on their resume. They move on to a more lucrative career that was their aim all along, following “missionary work.” But they also leave because they simply cannot handle the pressures and the demands of teaching and they do not want to work in the substandard conditions and with the poor children that exist in the schools to which they are assigned. It is like joining the Peace Corps, but not having to go abroad or learn another language. And despite these glowing pronouncements about Teach for America's benefits, the evidence that school with Teach for America participants experience lasting academic improvement is lacking.

So despite the repetitious and passionate rhetoric by the likes of Arne Duncan, the factual and knowledge based foundation for many current federal education policies is absent. However, over $4 Billion dollars of federal largesse is handed out based upon unproven theories, misguided policies and directed to largely irrelevant goals. The kernel of truth is that there are a small number of teachers who should not be in the classroom, and that some measure of assessment or accountability is important to the educational process. Branding all teachers as incompetent and demonizing the profession is better directed toward getting the high quality teacher to leave than it is to removing the few incompetents. Seeking accountability by measuring rote learning through standardized multiple choice and machine scored tests is feasible, but actually tells nothing about the quality or improvement of the learning process that is supposed to be measured. As an independent observer, I may risk losing my invitation to Democratic cocktail chats. I have learned not to wait for invitations to those GOP soirees foolishly preaching corporate “free market” ideology as the template for public education. But, if this all leads you to the conclusion that what comes out of Secretary Duncan’s mouth is foolish braying. I can only say that my mother would have warned him….