Today’s discussion of Teacher Research for Better Schools dovetails nicely with this Washington Post blog post by an Ohio principal, who touts all the great things his (non-charter) school is doing in an age when it is all too easy to criticize the public school system as a whole. Check out what they didn’t do:
We did not fire the staff, eliminate tenure, or pay teachers based on student test scores. We did not become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year short-term teachers.
And somehow, this school is still successful! So much of the talk of school reform these days is about gutting the system of bad apples. Believe me, I know there are bad apples out there; I’ve seen them firsthand. But of this group, a certain percentage are well-intentioned people who could use some professional development, and a slim minority are the true slackers who collect paychecks while they wait for retirement. I’ll concede that it takes only one awful teacher to light a fire under a “reformer”; there’s one at my alma mater who has been there for at least twenty years. He was incompetent then, and he’s incompetent now, but for some reason, nobody bothers him. It angers me to think about my friends who had him as an English teacher, many of whom were stuck in remedial English when they went to college. Nevertheless, this is one lousy teacher at a high-performing school. Should we bring about sweeping reform just to get rid of one guy (or a few people)? Should we euthanize someone with cancer, or should we just get rid of the cancer?
I would be willing to bet money that the vast majority of public schools in this country are good schools, and that the vast majority of teachers in those schools are good teachers. It’s easier, however, to point out problems than celebrate successes, or to take something that works in one area and expect everyone to implement it, even if things are fine everywhere else. There are places where schools are failing, but there is rarely a single source for that failure. I do not want to risk complacency, and the proposed solutions might work. However, I have yet to see a workable systemic model for what is so far working just in miniature, with specific populations.
