Several months ago I had attended an education reform event by the Connecticut Forum at the Bushnell Theater in Hartford, CT. Among the panelists to speak were Joel Klein, who has or will soon be leaving his post as the Chancellor of Education in New York City, and Davis Guggenheim, the Director of the movie Waiting for Superman. From advertisements I understood there to be the opportunity to email advance questions for the panelists as well as the opportunity to submit them during the intermission before the Q&A segment of the event. I emailed several well thought out and constructive questions ahead of time and developed several more during the intermission which specifically and directly pertained to statements made by individual panelists. Sadly, not one of my questions was remotely addressed. I left the event feeling melancholy, not because I felt ignored but because the event seemed more like a propaganda maneuver to support the current education reform paradigm initiative than a forum to discuss the problems currently contributing to our failing education systems and develop strategies to compensate for them while establishing mechanisms to correct the situation on a long term, permanent, basis.
One thing that said “Old Boy” like nothing else was when Joel Klein portrayed Dr. Steven Adamowski, the also recently or nearly intending to do so departing Superintendent of Schools in Hartford, CT., as a wonder child of school redesign to overcome failing status. There are really two issues here. One is if these individuals are the men on white horses who have come to save us, why are they going away so soon? I know Hartford has been looking for a good Superintendent for many years. I am sure that if they found one they would do anything to keep him at their helm short of strapping him to his horse like El Sid. But no, these head administrators have turned their systems inside out, redistributed the administrative hierarchy and funding avenues and corrupted the assessment and accountability processes for teachers by circumventing their professional resources and union protection affiliations to the point that there is no semblance of the prior system or access to it as a lifeline. The result is mass confusion, carnage of educational property, devaluation of teachers and their intellectual properties, ineffective distribution of curriculum and squanderous spending of the budget without effective oversight. While everyone’s head is still spinning and no one is certain what is working if it is and if it is not, what’s not or why not because there is no actual architecture to these plans. There are only endless irreconcilable directions which further contort and twist the vortex that has been initiated. Then the masters of the design say… “I’m going to leave now.” However they leave someone whom they have groomed in charge or move on in some other capacity that offers high personal return for their influence and association with education all the time claiming it is all about the children. The successor head administrator has one go to if faced with questions of situations beyond their immediate grasp, their groomer/predecessor who I am sure will remain at their service on an as needed consulting basis. That would be a considerably well paid basis I assure you. It seems it is all about the dollar at the expense of the children who do not understand the reality yet due to their cognitive stage and experiences. This is the very reason we educate. So, what you are seeing is a monumental perpetual drain on school budgets that are already strained, no long term guarantees on fixing the original problem and a case Humpty Dumpty concerning trying to turn back and regroup.
A second remarkable incident occurred when Davis Guggenheim responded to a question about education methods and strategies. He commented that he witnessed, while directing Waiting for Superman, an innovative, exciting, revolutionary and effective thing happening in schools in NYC that was developed by Joel Klein and differed to him to expound on it. I was flabbergasted when Joel Klein said it was something he called differentiated instruction. Folks, I do not recall from my Master’s Degree program in Secondary Science Education, professional development opportunities while teaching or any other source that Joel Klein developed differentiated instruction. I know from my teaching experiences dating just several years prior to his ascension to his position in the NYC school system that differentiated instruction has been a known education methodology since before he became involved in the industry and take great disgust at his allowing Davis Guggenheim, the Connecticut Forum, the audience and anyone else to believe, even if by omission of clarification, that he single handedly developed differentiated instruction. He exuded tremendous confidence as he sat in his chair and elaborated on his conceiving the notion and incorporating it into his redesign format for schools in NYC. My maternal grandmother was a teacher in Appalachia in the 1920’s and I know she did it even if she didn’t know it would be given a name 80 years later. It is more than just good teaching but Joel Klein did not discover it in the past couple of years.
Much of the rest of the event was a series of volleys between panelists that took aim at “traditional design” teachers as being inherently bad and cowering under the protection granted by tenure and protected by unions while lauding the promise of “new design” teachers being actively recruited for Teach for America to replace “ineffective teachers who should get out and go do something else.” This remark was made and defended by several panelists. The term “ineffective teacher” also seemed to reflect any teacher the new design empowered supervising administrators did not want to keep without preference. This means someone with minimal classroom experience can be made a principal of a new design school and determine effectiveness by their own whim because their authority supersedes previous teacher assessment systems because, oh yes, they too are bad.
In total I found the evening to be enlightening. It showed me how deeply in trouble our education systems are. Not deep in trouble because of the long road to failure they are deemed to suffer from but deep in trouble because the new education paradigm is like Grant’s Total War. It is not reinventing the wheel but it is destroying the framework. In building renovation it’s called “good bones”. Basically a renovator looks at the fundamental structure for flaws. If the fundamental structure is sound the interior, utilities, trim, appliances, trim and landscaping can all be gutted, removed and replaced with quality materials using a skilled workforce to produce a good building. Only when the fundamental structure is not viable is demolition an option and that too has a cost. Just because you tear down a building does not mean it is a cost free initiative without risk to the environment or community. In American education today we are seeing the seemingly effortless and cost free demolition of school entities and career educators’ livelihoods, some of whom would have gone on to become administrators and superintendents, to create an infrastructure wasteland where businessmen with self serving agenda can propagate their own version of lesser quality education services with autonomy over the tax budget money to create outlandish personal revenue streams for themselves. The winners: Them. The losers: The students.
So, perhaps yes, it is all about the children. It just is not about their benefit. The path we are on will almost certainly provide our students with an amazing and inspired, second class at best, educational opportunity while destructively draining the school budgets, destroying the careers of truly compassionate educators and flooding the workplaces and post secondary education institutions with graduates who are actually less prepared than ever before for the next step. Just because a new design administrator says scores and graduation rates are up while dropout rates and grade retentions are down does not mean that the problem is solved. Sixty percent up also means forty percent away from where it should be and you still do not know what you are actually measuring. Ask a high school student to spell a word or count you change on a purchase? I know it sounds archaic but in general, using random populations, I think the results will astound you. Recently American Education was reported to rank 24th out of 30 some developed nations. The slide from the #1 spot has occurred over the past 20 years. If the fix is so certainly the intellectual product of these wonder child administrators why are their tenures so short? Why do we not make then stay and finish the job? Why do we pay them so highly for this product? It seems that they should pay us, our children, to experiment with their lives and futures.
I will generate another post soon about my attempt to become certified in New York State and my job hunt in NYC.
No comments:
Post a Comment