I have avoided wandering into the crossfire about New York City’s plan to study the effectiveness of individual teachers based on test scores. Since I taught in a struggling South Bronx elementary school, I’m afraid that my reaction would be driven by my personal experience to an unhelpful degree. I prefer to bring light not heat to a discussion when possible.
But in reading the coverage and the ensuing debate, I’m left hoping there will be as much focus on effective curriculum and pedagogy in New York City as individual teachers. If the product is flawed, it’s hard to see why attention would focus exclusively on the person delivering it. The waiter is rarely blamed for the undercooked meal; the car salesman for the lemon. Before you say those are not comparable analogies to teaching, consider: As a teacher, I was required to use Everyday Math and the Teachers College Writer’s Workshop pedagogy (it’s not a curriculum) in my classroom. I found neither to be particularly effective for various reasons. Left to my own devices, I’m sure I could have devised more effective ways to help my students grow as writers and as mathematicians. In my mind, my students test results had at least as much to do with what they were being taught as how I was doing as a teacher. I certainly felt my effectiveness constrained by choices I could neither make nor influence.
If it were in my power, I would gladly make the following bargain: tell me what to teach, but let me decide how to teach it. If I don’t deliver the expected results, fire me. But if you insist on telling me what to teach and how to teach it, then the results are beyond my control.
Core Knowledge board member Diane Ravitch recently wondered how American education fell under the control of “Know Nothings from the world of business, law, and politics.” Here’s what I wonder: why they didn’t bring with them one of the business world’s most effective and powerful management practices: hire good people, give them the goal and get out of the way.
There were only two times in my 25-year professional life when I was explicitly told both what to do and how to do it. The first was when I was a 16-year old Taco Bell employee. The second was when I became a New York City school teacher.
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I could not agree with you more. Or, rather, should I ever figure out how to agree with someone more than 100%, I hope to trade in those extra percentage points for books for the kids. In any case, I have written and spoken on this matter, and am overjoyed to find some agreement out there.
As you say, the TC model is not a curriculum. Not only that, it can stand in the way of curriculum and learning, through its insistence on groupwork and the ever circulating teacher-facilitator. The taboos against chalk, class discussion, facts, desks in rows, love of subject matter, and memorization are so bizarre that many teachers, new and old, spinning in daily vertigo, wonder what twisted and tilted world they have stepped into.
Then you have some “anti-constructivists” (to avoid referring to specific programs) who go so far as to deride creativity altogether. They believe teachers should follow scripts verbatim, and to do otherwise is to risk diminishing a child’s chance of “success.” Some of these believe their programs have “proven” more successful than any other, and that any teacher who chooses to teach in a different way is self-indulgently neglecting the children’s needs. It is amazing how they will lash out at any suggestion of a grey area or overlap between the two schools of thought.
The polarization in educational discourse is at times frightening. Yes, there should be explicit instruction, based on a curriculum! No, this does not mean the teacher has to follow someone else’s dictates regarding the arrangement of the desks, the teacher’s location in the room, or the specific words uttered. Those who love their subject (another taboo), and love teaching it, will bring many ideas to the classroom, based on and around the lesson, which they teach thoroughly and soundly. Yay for that!