Rare News Desk
For what should be obvious reasons, education is an issue of concern for our nation. Regardless of which side of the debate one is on – strong Federal involvement, or State and local government management – the common ground is that we have to ensure that the next generation is well-educated. The debates over the merits of standardized testing as a metric for determining educational success have been raging for years, as have the arguments about having a standardized curriculum.
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Being an educator was commonly considered a vocation as opposed to a job in the past. It still is today, but not as much as before. Laying blame for that shift in perception might make one feel better, but it doesn’t rectify the problem. However, exploring the thoughts of people that obviously believe it is meant to be a vocation is useful.
I came to teaching forty years ago this month and have been lucky enough to work at a small liberal arts college, a major university and this superior secondary school. To me, history has been so very much more than a mere job, it has truly been my life, always driving my travel, guiding all of my reading and even dictating my television and movie viewing. Rarely have I engaged in any of these activities without an eye to my classroom and what I might employ in a lesson, a lecture or a presentation. With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.
A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. This situation has been exacerbated by other actions of the administration, in either refusing to call open forum meetings to discuss these pressing issues, or by so constraining the time limits of such meetings that little more than a conveying of information could take place. This lack of leadership at every level has only served to produce confusion, a loss of confidence and a dramatic and rapid decaying of morale. The repercussions of these ill-conceived policies will be telling and shall resound to the detriment of education for years to come. The analogy that this process is like building the airplane while we are flying would strike terror in the heart of anyone should it be applied to an actual airplane flight, a medical procedure, or even a home repair. Why should it be acceptable in our careers and in the education of our children?
That is a portion of resignation letter from Gerald J. Conti, to WesthillCentralSchool District in Syracuse, New York. It was published in its entirety in the Washington Post on April 6th. Conti’s contention that his profession – teaching – has ceased to exist is an indictment of a systemic failure just about everyone seems to be aware of, but no one can effectively remedy. The blame is left primarily on the Federal Government (No Child Left Behind), and the local school administration in this letter, and that is definitely part of the problem. If the goal of education is to promote free-thinking, and innovation, “one-size-fits-all” education will not yield those desired results. Conti’s statements point out that in the attempt to improve education in America, we’ve degraded the teaching profession to the point where teachers no longer teach – they merely provide content that students must absorb, to achieve reasonably proficient test scores.
And that is what an 18-year-old sophomore in Duncanville High School in Texas pointed out, albeit somewhat disrespectfully. Perhaps one could argue that the teacher earned the disrespect, but either way, Jeff Bliss pointed out something that obviously needed to be said in that classroom, and sadly, in many classrooms across the nation. Teachers need to teach. That means encouraging a love of learning in their students, igniting enthusiasm in the classroom, and challenging students to think for themselves. One does not accomplish that by handing out packets to students, as Bliss stated, and it is not accomplished by adhering to a one-size-fits-all curriculum, as Conti wrote in his resignation letter. Theoretically we know what the problem is, if we’re not going to engage in collective denial about the less-than-stellar results of our dabbling in education reform. Now, the question is, do we need to find a new solution to the problem, or is the answer already in our past? If we take Conti’s word for it, we just need to admit we made a mistake, and return to practices of the past.
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Liz Harrison is the founder of Goldwater Gal Media, host of FTR Radio’s The Right War, and editor at ConservativeDailyNews.com.
