Educators ought to defend public education
In 1998, San Francisco Unified School District became “The Mouse that Roared.”
Even before No Child Left Behind, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson implemented standardized testing, demanding that all students — even recent immigrants who spoke not a word of English — take the full battery of tests in English.
Only one school district, San Francisco Unified, contemplating the prospect of subjecting kids to a full week of incomprehensible testing, called it what it was — child abuse — and refused. To forestall the threatened sanctions, San Francisco sued.
The state Department of Education quickly settled out of court and buried what might have emerged as a dangerous precedent: educators standing up to defend children.
What about all the other California school districts that recognized as well the absurdity and harm of Wilson’s edict? Silence. I call it “The Silence of the Lambs” because for decades we educators have allowed ourselves to be led about by politicians and reformers with insidious agendas as if we were lambs. Or lemmings, perhaps. We’ve plunged off various cliffs — forsaking Whole Language; eliminating shop, art and home economics classes; insisting all California kids take algebra in eighth grade — with nary a “Baaaaa!”
Indeed, most educators knew from the outset that No Child was not only destined to fail but destructive of most that was good in teaching. Instead of standing up, we meekly complied. The results for public education have been devastating.
More recently, our teachers unions — perhaps influenced by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s generous grants ($4 million to the National Education Association, NEA, and $5.4 million to the American Federation of Teachers, AFT) — blithely cheer-led its Common Core Standards, although mounting evidence against them and a burgeoning parent opt-out movement finally convinced the AFT to express some doubts.
My local NEA union, the New Haven Teachers Association in Union City, similarly signed off on a federal Race to the Top grant, which required using standardized test scores to evaluate individual teachers. Never mind that even value-added scores have proved to be invalid measures of teaching quality and counterproductive at improving it.
Not all educators are so sheepish. The Mexican National Coordinator of Educational Workers (CNTE), for example, recently mounted a national strike in protest of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s market-based reforms. And even here in the United States a few maverick school staffs are just saying no, led in 2013 by Seattle’s Garfield High School:
“We, the Garfield teachers, respectfully decline to give the [Measure of Academic Progress] MAP test to any of our students. … We are professionals who care deeply about our students and cannot continue to participate in a practice that harms our school and our students. We want to be able to identify student growth and determine if our practice supports student learning. We wish to be evaluated in a way so that we can continue to improve our practice, and we wish for our colleagues who are struggling to be identified and either be supported or removed. The MAP test is not the way to do any of these things.”
Unless more teachers find the conscience and the courage of Garfield High, Mexico’s CNTE and San Francisco Unified, public education is doomed.
We educators must finally defend public education and the children to whom we’ve dedicated our lives.
Or, we can continue to utter a pathetic “Baaaaa!” as we herd with them to the slaughter.