In today’s culture of reform, it is governors, corporate leaders, politicians, and a few organizations founded and funded by the previous mentioned groups–people who know little of teaching and learning–that are determining the direction of reform. And that reform is one of standardization, holding schools and teachers accountable by testing the “heck” out of kids using tests that according to these outside experts, measure what students are supposed to learn. If they don’t learn it, its the teachers fault.

Today I read two articles that highlight the importance of learning about educational reform from people who know best: teachers and educators.

The first article was written by Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School, in Alexandria, Virginia.  The article, entitled Schools can’t manage poverty, was published in USA Today, and was written after Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan gave the keynote speech to more than 1,200 educators in the Alexandria Public Schools.  The author expresses the view that is held by many practicing teachers, and that it is unreasonable to use the No Child Left Behind mandate that schools will be labeled failures, and teachers fired if they don’t meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).  As Mr. Welsh pointed out, the assessment of schools and teachers can’t not be done without factoring in the social issues that affect student learning such as family, income and class.

Welsh used an analogy comparing successful or failing schools with Arne Duncan’s 1986-1987 Harvard basketball team, which had a 7 – 16 record.  Here is what Mr. Welsh said:

We teachers were told that Duncan would take questions after his speech. Being an English teacher, I prepared a little analogy to ask him about the rationale for labeling schools on the basis of Adequate Yearly Progress. Duncan’s biographies often mention that he was co-captain of the Harvard basketball team during the 1986-87 season, his senior year. I reminded him that that team won only seven games and lost 17. Such a record, I told Duncan, was the mark of a “persistently low achieving” team, which made no “annual yearly progress.” I meant the analogy to be humorous, but teachers sitting near Duncan said he didn’t seem to take it that way.

I went on to say that I assumed Duncan and his teammates did the best they could with the talent they had, and that no matter what improvements they tried to make, it would be foolish to think their team could ever reach the highest benchmark in college basketball — the Final Four. Like his basketball team, I said, many schools are doing the best they can with the students they have, and it is unfair to label such schools as failing.

The other article was written by Alfie Kohn, and was entitled What Passes for School Reform: “Value-Added” Teacher Evaluations and Other Absurdities.  Kohn is one of the most vocal critics of school reform as conceived by the Standards Movement and the No Child Left Behind Act.  Kohn raises some important questions, and indeed suggests that instead of accepting standardized tests as a means of measuring student achievement and being used to assess teacher performance, we ask questions might result in a conversation about reform, e.g. Does this model provide valid and reliable information about teachers (and schools)?  Does learning really lend itself to any kind of “value-added” approach? Do standardized tests assess what matters most about teaching and learning?

As Kohn points out, there is little conversation about these questions, and it might be because:

Unfortunately, the people who know the most about the subject tend to work in the field of education, which means their protests can be dismissed. Educational theorists and researchers are just “educationists” with axes to grind, hopelessly out of touch with real classrooms. And the people who spend their days in real classrooms, teaching our children — well, they’re just afraid of being held accountable, aren’t they? (Actually, proponents of corporate-style school reform find it tricky to attack teachers, per se, so they train their fire instead on the unions that represent them.) Once the people who do the educating have been excluded from a conversation about how to fix education, we end up hearing mostly from politicians, corporate executives, and journalists.

These are two articles that I recommend to you.