Reply #3

I listened to this on my long drive to work, and it reminded me of everything I love about teaching, and everything I hate about it.

I started out as an elementary then high school education major, and moved on to teaching college because I hated the micromanaging of teachers in K-12 that went on even 20 years ago.

The school that does well in this show is run roughly like a college: teachers make decisions about what and how to teach together, which is encouraged by their principal, and leads to markedly better test scores (even though that wasn't what they were aiming for).

The bureaucrats in their district, including at the time now Education Secretary Arne Duncan, insist on conformity with their policies and procedures, they gradually snuff out the enthusiasm of the teachers, and kids interest and achievement starts to show the consequences of that.

The corporate education "reformers" say we need privatized charter schools as "incubators of innovation," but the same people want strict regimentation of traditional schools. If they were sincere in wanting better schools, the solution is obvious, and doesn't require giving our kids to the tender mercies of Wall Street: give teachers in real public schools the room to try different things and do whatever it takes to help kids learn.

Administrators, bureaucrats, and politicians stood stick to what they know: budgeting and making sure there's enough chalk, the lights turn on, the AC works, and there's enough computers to go around. When they mess with the actual teaching, it helps about as much as Soviet central planning.

In higher ed, few teaching decisions are made by those who won't be a part of implementing them, most are made by consensus, requiring varying degrees of conformity and freedom, but never to the point that it squeezed out my own creativity and ownership of what I was doing in the classroom. Also, everywhere I have taught college, I've been evaluated by other instructors either primarily or exclusively, not remote bureaucrats or formulas.

The kind of regimentation that is killing K-12 schools is starting to creep into higher ed too, in the Trojan Horse of endlessly written and rewritten Student Learning Outcomes. I hope we figure out how to stop it before they kill us too and sell our parts to the private sector education cannibals.