General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Atrios Nails It: Teachers Are Sick Of Being Dumped On [View all]Igel
(35,269 posts)"A Nation At Risk" and "Why Johnny Can't Read" started it.
The problem was that the schools hadn't gotten worse in the preceeding 20 years. It was just suddenly a problem.
Part of it was the civil rights tensions from the late '60s and '70s had to find an outlet. The bottom achievers tended to be non-white, so it was a natural fit, civil rights advocates coupled with overachieving Boomer parents. This was especially true when the schools' performance was important--if you got a reasonable C in a crappy school in 1960 you'd stand a good chance of getting a decent job. If you got a reasonable C in a crappy school in 1970 you'd have a horrible low-paying blue-collar job, when everybody knew you needed a college education.
Since then it's been one battle after another, with improvement here and there but mostly around the edges. School funding's tripled or more, class size has decreased, and the results are dismal. Thousands of dissertations and papers and books have been written about how to do it perfectly--most contracting the other, many repeating the same platitudes but based on poorly controlled studies or studies with nonsensical default hypotheses.
We've had fad and panacea after fad and panacea, but it always comes down to the same problem: Teacher's matter. And if kids aren't learning, and the only seriously major thing we have control over are teachers, then we focus on teachers.
We leave aside that other things matter more than teachers. Educators have no control over them and are told not to complain about them, however obvious they are as part of the reason we're being beaten. Now, this is a huge mistake. It's one thing to focus on the only truly major thing you have control over; it's another to act as though there is nothing else important involved, and even worse to insist that those who recognize that there are other things stay mute about it. It lets parents off the hook. It lets "pop culture" off the hook. It lets social relations off the hook. And as the hook gets bigger and sharper, all the other more important things and people and groups suddenly find that it's very much in their interest to make sure that attention is only focused on teachers. Politicians, off the hook, find that there's every reason to say they'll be social saviors and spare the parents the fruit of their mistakes and shortcomings.
One way to electoral popularity, relieve the public of responsibility. (Feed and entertain them, and you're golden.)
Meanwhile, those writing grants all know how to make things work. Until they try to scale them up, then they run into the oddball effect that every innovation has good results when it's novel. Having sold the bill of goods to the government and private foundations, now they have to explain why their panacea doesn't work. Gotta be the teachers.