In the ongoing discussion about strengthening our charter school laws, I am glad to see excitement in my home state of Mississippi about having more school choices (even if I am, so far, disappointed with the political results). I was also happy a few years ago when Davis Guggenheim’s produced his film Waiting for Superman (2010), which showcased some (if not enough) of the problems I have noticed with our public education system.
However,
despite Lt. Governor Tate Reeves’ warning to voters that charter schools are not a ‘panacea’ for all educational woes, I’m concerned that human nature (being what it is) might see the creation of charter schools as some sort of magic wand. I worry that the long-term cost of such euphoria will transform the public mood into something either (1) more cynical about dealing with educational issues or (2) launch us into a frenzied and more large-scaled state of trends and fads that has consumed public education.
Charter schools are not another ‘cure-all,’ but are part of a larger struggle surrounding all educational conflicts in America today. To make sure we don’t fall into this fashionable thinking, I have an old anecdote I’ve been saving.
Teachers love to talk about ridiculous school policies. I think talking is therapy to keep us sane, and every teacher has a favorite story. Many of the stories are hilarious and full of irony and elasticity.
One of my stories (sorry, it’s not funny) comes from when I worked at a badly-managed school: one problem we had was that there were no printers at our desks. Our faculty area had a reliable risograph for 50 or more copies for a class (assuming that it wasn’t jammed or out of paper!). However, there was no central printer for us to make a single ‘master copy’ for the risograph. Every teacher had to print all of their master copies at home—tests, quizzes, notes, daily activities, study guides, etc.
Needless to say, most of us were sore at the administration for making us do something at our own expense that was both work-related and an absolute necessity if we were to fulfill our commitment to our students.
We raised this concern with our administrators at faculty meetings—by the time I was teaching there, they were obviously numbed by everything they called a ‘gripe sessions.’ They told us not to worry about master copies because we did not need paper anyway! We should go ahead and put all of our assignments on our online learning system and let our students complete them that way.
No problem, right?
The difficulties with that solution, as we always pointed out, was that (1) we didn’t have enough computers to do that amount of in-class online work on a daily basis, and (2) we knew our students would not do extra online work outside of class because they rarely completed the supplementary work we were already giving them.
For the teachers, putting a significant number of work and daily grades online would mean that we would be giving out Fs like fluffy popcorn in a mega-sized movie bucket—which would mean, in the long run, that we would be blamed for their failure to achieve their learning outcomes.
‘Psst…Hey. Anyone want to be unemployed next year?’
After all the threats and counter-suggestions, I still didn’t understand why they just didn’t get the printer? Sure, it would cost some money, but it was for the benefit of the students, right? And besides, weren’t printers and paper something you were supposed to budget anyway? Finally, one veteran teacher told me—I cannot recall her answer word for word, but I can audibly remember how her answer began:
“Well, a few years ago Dr. Buckles went to a conference where he was told that…”
Years in education, years of talking to fellow teachers about some of the silly administrative things that make their jobs more difficult than they need to be, I have heard this opening phrase (or some variation of it) many, many times. However, I think it reveals something larger about our education system.
It is easy to blame the teachers for the failure of our students, or to blame the students for being lazy or the parents for not raising better children. Of course, all of us should be more involved, and all of us can do better.
However, one of the biggest problems is an obstruction that is hardly discussed: we have an entrenched class of educators who will not surrender their long-held power and influence to teachers and parents, and so they fight any form of school choice. I will save most of what I have to say on this for another blog post.
For now, I will say that while this entrenched group insists on clinging to their power and prestige, they have no new ideas about how to help our students because everything they've tried to do has failed. As a result, these people have become addicted to the latest trends in education, and they keep pushing fad after fad onto their teachers in more meetings and workshops (taking the teachers out of the classroom to do all of this, away from instructing the kids).
All of this accomplishes nothing except to exhaust the teachers, and the students end up becoming an ancillary concern in the midst of this scramble when they should have been the primary focus of everything we do! But it does not matter because in the scheme of things, they-the-empowered must at least appear to be doing something!
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