The documentary Waiting for Superman has made Harlem’s Promise Academy a poster child for many of these reforms, but overlooked by many is the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pours $90 million dollars into the Promise Academy. That’s a lot of money, but that’s nothing compared to the $335 million Gates’ foundation is pouring into the development of teacher evaluation systems, or the $4 billion the federal government is committing to the same cause. Much of this money will never be spent on teaching, however, but on videotaping.
A huge portion of the funds will go to the purchasing of video cameras to be installed in classrooms to tape teachers, and then more will be spent to pay educators (mostly retired administrators) to be trained to assess the tapes in order to collect data for social scientists to be paid to analyze in order to determine best practices in teaching. Much of this will be overseen by ETS, the folks who administer the GREs, Praxis, TOEFL, SATs, and AP tests. As if enough private money doesn’t already go to these folks.
It’s not that I have such a strong objection to these tests. I had to take the Praxis II, and took the GREs twice, and of course took the SAT and AP tests and then for many years prepared students to take both. But it’s frustrating that both the Gates Foundation and the federal government are going to take so many millions and billions of dollars and give it to ETS and other like organizations to do more and more assessment of teaching and learning.
I can’t help but think that, even with all its flaws, if we left the education system alone, if we completely left teaching, tenure, and professional development the way they are, with all their myriad warts, but we took $90 million, or $335 million, or $4 billion dollars and spent it to build new schools, buy more supplies, hire more teachers, pay teachers better, and provide quality professional development, we’d see a sea change in the quality of education.
Don’t get me wrong. Throwing money at problems won’t automatically fix them, and there’d still be many problems in education (we teachers could tell the public this better than any legislator, journalist, or software developer), but just think what you could do in your classes if you had sufficient space and supplies, small classes, dedicated and well paid colleagues, and quality professional development!
Seems to me that the legislators and software developers are putting the cart before the horse here, or perhaps that the testing service lobby has out-lobbied the teachers’ unions. Think about what’s happened. Legislators have forced standardized testing on our students and us, to the degree that it has negatively impacted the quality of education and yet has tied many of our hands with packaged and programmatic curricula and scripted lessons, and then when students don’t do well, we now have standardized assessments imposed on us!
And all this money, money that should be spent paying teachers well to attract the best and brightest to the profession, that should be spent on the hiring of teachers and the building of classroom space to keep class sizes small, that should be spent on effective professional development to keep teachers abreast of current research and practice, is being spent on test booklets, video cameras, and the pembinaan of retired educators and other significantly less-qualified individuals to score those tests and evaluate those videos, in order to collect data that will tell us mostly what we already know.
Today is my last blog post of the semester; I’ll resume in mid-January when the spring semester begins at UConn. But with the holidays approaching, I will leave a wish list for Bill and Melinda Gates, Barack Obama, and Arne Duncan.
*Give schools money based on need and not on the degree to which states are willing to penalize teachers and erode their hard-earned rights.
*Compensate teachers like doctors and lawyers. Pay them well in order to attract the best students to the field.
*Treat teachers like professionals. Hire community members to monitor the hallways and cafeterias. Our duty should be teaching, not policing and cleaning.
*Invest in quality professional development in order to provide the best support and pembinaan possible. Beware of any so-called educational panacea, especially if its name conveniently makes a witty acronym.
*Build schools that are clean, well-lighted, and adequate to the physical needs of the students. No more overcrowded classrooms, converted janitors’ closets, and portables.
*Purchase enough computers, books, and supplies so that there are no more laptop carts, photocopied texts, and bake sales.
*Make the assessment of students and the evaluation of teachers holistic and comprehensive. And allow classroom teachers to design these assessments and perform these evaluations rather than politicians, journalists, software designers, retired administrators, and stay-at-home moms in Texas.
*Stick the video cameras in the corporate boardrooms and legislative offices, and let the teachers assess and evaluate the best practices of those folks. This might be pretty educational for us all.
Well, that’s my somewhat Grinchy Christmas rant. I do hope everyone has nice holidays and time off from school. I will be free of students for several weeks—more time than most of you—but I will be writing two book reviews and giving a book talk (which I will enjoy a lot), delivering some professional development (which I will enjoy a little), and completing the Continued Funding Application for the NWP grant (which I will enjoy about as much as going to the dentist).
I’ll see you in January!
Comments
Post a Comment