Education Reform – Are We Testing the Teachers?
October 8, 2010
4 Comments
On Thursday, October 7 faculty, students, staff and alumni welcomed Diane Ravitch, the 2010 Hauben Distinguished Lecture. Dr. Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a historian of education. In addition, she is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. In an hour long speech Ravitch discussed her perspective of the systemic mistakes of the education reform movement.
Students in my Leadership in Community Engagement and Education, Poverty and Society classes attended. Comments are encouraged and posted below.
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You Make a Difference,
Drew
Categories: Academics, Community Engagement & Service, Faculty & Staff Blogs
4 Comments
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Well for starters, Ms. Ravitch is definitely passionate about what she does, as one can tell by her experience and work.Yet the lecture came across to me, and to some of my classmates, as more of pointing out everything that is wrong with the system, rather than focusing on how we can make it better.The majority of the lecture seemed to be targeted against certain teacher assessments and charter schools and such rather than concrete things we can actually do to make the school better. She targeted charter schools as schools trying to attract young teachers (often from Teach for America)that will have high turnover rates and make education a volunteer work rather than a profession. According to Wendy Kopp, in her book “One Day All Children”, in 1999 60% of Teach for America Alumni were still in education, and of the 40% that weren’t 70% were involved in education somehow. (Kopp 152) Furthermore, according to a study done by Mathimatica Policy Research Inc., there is no reason to assume that Teach for America teachers leave earlier than other new teachers, because the rate of attrition is usually high in all difficult urban schools where Teach for America places its recruits.As we’ve been learning about some of the benefits of charter schools in class,I found her almost complete disapproval of charter schools somewhat unfounded, as they have been shown to produce some results. She seems also not to be a big fan of “Waiting for Superman” by some of the asides she makes, but I think she should give it some credit for bringing educational reform to the national agenda and no doubt helping her book sales by the attention it has now placed on education.
Diane Ravitch stated that, as a result of the widespread implementation of the charter school movement, only the top 60% of students attending public schools are given the option of applying and attending charter schools, leaving the lowest 40% in underfunded, low performing regular public schools. In addition, charter schools often receive less funding than their non-charter counterparts within their districts. I do not understand, then, how schools left with students that require more resources and higher academic needs do not utilize the funding they receive to better address the needs of their more challenging students. It seems to me that the comperably-higher funding the public schools receive should go towards addressing the needs of the students that remain in the public schools. Logically, the schools that are tasked with education the lowest-achieving 40% of students and receive more funding should be adequately prepared to deal with the more challenging task of teaching these students. Why, then, does Diane Ravitch, argue that this is a bad thing? I understand, of course, that in reality, it does not wok like this. However, I believe that with some restructuring and better programs, etc. this theoretical situation could ultimately be used to address the discrepencies between charter school and traditional public education.
I agree with Aamina’s first point on the overwhelming negativity of Ravitch’s book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”. Having read “Savage Inequalities” we saw just how bad public schools in America could be on a personal, individual level, and Ravitch gave us the overarching negativity and condemnation of the entire system of reform. Its outlook was critical of every major reform that has occurred since the early 1980s. The only solution-oriented part of the book came (and I counted) in the last 12 pages, in which she ironically states something like “well, that’s what’s wrong- here’s what we can do right.” The crux of her ideal reform was to restate that there is no silver bullet to education reform, and that the only way to improve schools is by enforcing a strong curriculum taught by talented teachers. She offers no way to implement this idealization. While it is informative on what does not work, I think, for someone of her qualification level, that it should have focused on how we may solve the problem.
After attending the Diane Ravitch lecture a couple of weeks ago, I had to take a step back and digest all of the information that she presented. After taking some time to think about all of the material I have determined that there are two topics in particular that I would like to discuss with all of you. One is the idea of accountability and the connection this topic has to public school education. Initially, Ravitch advocated for standardized tests and “annual yearly progress” to determine the success of a school, however today she stands against these tests as a measure of accomplishment within public schools. While this change of opinion is interesting, the question that I have is: If public schools are not held accountable through test scores, how does one measure the success of a school? If I could take a wild guess, I would say that this is a topic that many people in education currently struggle with. When one puts the emphasis on test scores, important skills are often lost in attempts to master the subjects that are covered on the test. For example, there is no way to measure someone’s musical success; however music teaches student valuable cognitive lessons through contact with an instrument and discipline skills in time management to practice in order to perform well in the classroom. Today, with teachers cramming all of the material for the standardized tests, there is little time to emphasize these important skills. Another topic that I find interesting is merit pay. I am personally a huge advocate for increasing teacher pay and providing more incentives to get better teachers in the classroom, however I am still not certain that merit pay is the best way to achieve this goal. Certainly, teachers should be acknowledged when their students succeed, but it may not necessarily be a good teacher that produces good test scores. There are a combination of factors that contribute to the success of students including their home life, background education, and attention span in school. So, what if instead of giving merit pay to teachers who did well in the class room, we instead increased the salary of teachers all together? Not only would this provide incentive for the teachers, but it would attract a wider diversity of teacher applicants and thus increase the caliber of teachers in the classroom. Granted, a major issue in today’s economy is the lack of funding in public school systems, but in a perfect world it would be amazing if teachers received a salary equivalent to a so-called “special” profession. I’m not saying that I have all of the answers, but make some simple adjustments here and there and we might just be on the way to solving our education issues!