Framing Teachers: No Child Left Behind, the media, and teachers and teaching

Note: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Midwestern Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, 2008

As an urban teacher educator who is very interested in how education policy shapes the lived experiences of students and teachers in schools, the above moments intrigued me. After all, it’s been standard practice for some time now to employ lobbyists to get one’s interests supported in government. In the public sphere, we call it advertising (sometimes pandering), but the effect can often be the same. What I found so interesting about this was the fact that it leads me to wonder what, if anything, the public can believe in the media. For years now, conservatives have been critiquing the media in the United States for what they perceive to be a liberal bias. Liberals have shot back that the media, is in fact not liberal, but under the thumb of conservative pundits. And so it goes. While it might be nice to engage with this discussion, I have a different goal: to explore how the media frames No Child Left Behind.

Let me be clear. I am not a scholar in media studies. I am a teacher educator who is deeply committed to the promise of public education. Given the longstanding ambivalent relationship that the polity has with its public schools, investigating the political discourse surrounding NCLB has been of great interest to me. Debates over what schools should teach and to what end serve as a backdrop for much of the educational reform efforts we have seen, for a large part of the history of public education in the United States. Further, the pressure for public schools to perform for political and economic reasons have had an impact. From the first news that the Soviet Union won the space race and the initial approval of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to its latest reauthorization as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), public education has been viewed as the means to effect change (moral, social, cultural, and economic) in all of society in the United States even though the schools themselves are not independent of the communities and society they serve. And, as Arthur Lippman pointed out so long ago people can be manipulated in multiple ways to hold certain beliefs about the state of the nation, and the MSM plays a role in this.

When I poll my undergraduate teacher education students at the beginning of each semester to explore what they believe to be true about teaching, learning, and public schools, they express a number of beliefs about public schools that are firmly rooted in the American psyche: parents don’t care, the schools are failing students, teachers are lazy, teachers don’t care, progressive education is too soft, we need to go back to basics, money to fund schools isn’t important, understanding education theory isn’t as important as practical experience, etc. The list goes on. When I prod further to explore the origins of these beliefs, many students reference what we expect; they just know it, it was their personal experience, their parents told them, they have read/heard about it in the media, and most recently, because “we have NCLB.” It is important to note that the course in which I informally poll my undergraduate students is a required course they must complete BEFORE they apply to the teachers education program at the university at which I teach. And yet, their list is eerily similar to the one that Shaker & Heilman (2004) note has become the accepted view of public education today. Thus, while the above anecdote cannot and should not serve as a statement of truth about college students’ beliefs regarding the public schools, it does serve, on a number of levels, as the inspiration for this paper because it reflects the larger trends regarding perceptions of education.

If one were to take a closer look at the lists above, much of what is there reflects deeper held ideas, beliefs, and values that Americans express and hold about the purposes and functions of the public schools. In fact, many of these deep-held beliefs serve to organize people’s understandings about the world around them. This is what George Lakoff talked about in his work on metaphor, politics, and language. Lakoff illustrates how two contradictory metaphors, the strict parent and nurturant parent, can be utilized to explain the differing political worldviews of conservatives and liberals, and that these metaphors are intricately tied to the process of framing. At the same time, it is inappropriate to consider the media an independent entity that simply reports the news. Lippman (1922; 1997) wrote extensively during his lifetime on the ways in which the elite are able to harness venues like the mass media to shape the perceptions of the public. Herman & Chomsky (1985), building upon the notion of the “manufacture of consent” (e.g., the media serves to entertain, inform, and manipulate viewers based upon the interests of the powerful and the elite, so that viewers’ beliefs and values are shaped by the media), remind the reader that media outlets, after all, are not nonprofit organizations that function simply to serve the public good. Indeed, media outlets are businesses. Because they are subject to the control of owners, the market, and profit margins, they are not just in the business of reporting the news; they are also in the business of producing the news. As evidenced by the GAO report and later news reports about the Department of Education (ED) and its role in paying Armstrong Williams, a prominent African American commentator to tout NCLB when asked to guest on any news program or print outlet, what the public is exposed to is, in fact, shaped by very explicit goals. The choice of visual imagery (e.g., photos, graphics, advertising, etc.) indeed, whether the article itself is cover story, front page, above-the-fold news, is not randomly chosen. Decisions are made to sell papers, and more importantly, to win supporters.

Capturing the imagination of the polity

Historically, the use of pictures on the covers of magazines and front pages of newspapers has served as a means to entice people to buy, but also to function as a means of knowledge production by tapping into people’s emotions. My father collected certain issues of Life Magazine and was crushed when he discovered they were destroyed by water damage in the basement of my childhood home. After my grandmother’s death, my mother and I found several newspapers from the day President Kennedy was assassinated. For my Irish Catholic grandmother it was a horrible day (she mourned the loss of the first Irish Catholic President of the US even though she abhorred his politics). Each of us probably has a similar story to share.

While the examples above derive from my own family narrative, there are other examples that derive from a more collective national narrative. Take for instance the iconic images of the “Little Red Schoolhouse” or the one-room schol house in the historical narrative of the United States. In 1921 a progressive school named the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School was founded. Begun as a progressive school, it persists today, in spite of the pressures of NCLB. Numerous other schools and a national curriculum share the same name. In contrast, the one-roomed schoolhouse is much more a rarity today. But what makes the notion of the one-roomed schoolhouse so iconic is the fact that the vision endures in spite of so many changes in society (transportation, population explosions, reform efforts, etc. The image of the little red school house or the one-room school house exists to this day because it harkens back to what people think of as being a simpler, less violent, more stable life. These images are so much part of US popular culture that one can find popular Clip Art capturing the iconic essence. Finally, the ED has also employed this imagery as part of the façade surrounding its entrance, including the words No Child Left Behind emblazened above the entryway.

Teachers unions

In the case of framing the state of public education, there are similar images available in the NYT and Time. And, some of these images literally leap from the papers and into larger than life icons because they can communicate on multiple levels in multiple ways (Mitchell & Weber, 1995). While recently attending the 2008 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in New York City, a colleague asked me if I had seen a 70 foot billboard that was located across the street (see Figure 5). This billboard was a replica of a full-page add taken out in the NYT by the Center for Union Facts (see Figure 6) and part of a recently launched campaign to draw attention to incompetent teachers and the unions that supposedy protect them. Other ads like this one from the NYT and other media outlets had been brought to my attention by my graduate students. Particularly in the last few weeks. On the billboard and in the ad was a picture of an apple with a bite taken out of it with a worm sticking out. The text above the apple read, “Vote for the WORST unionized TEACHERS (who can’t be fired)” (font size, etc., approximated). While standing in front of the billboard, my colleague and I watched two women stop to read the text. As they walked away, one of them laughed, and said “How funny is that! There really are so many bad teachers.” Another person walking by said, “You can read that because of a teacher.”

The irony that such a billboard was positioned outside an educational conference was not lost on me. Nor was the use of the iconic apple, often associated with teachers. The fact that there was a worm sticking out of a spot where a person had taken a bite was a great example of visual imagery. But what makes this billboard and the NYT ad important to this discussion is that the women I mentioned completed missed or overlooked the word “unionized” on the billboard. In fact, when one looks at the billboard and the NYT ad, the term “unionized” is in a font size much smaller and finer text than the rest of the text. If one were to glance, one might mistakenly read vote for the worst teachers. When exporing the background of this ad at www.TeachersUnionsExposed.com, there is no mention of from where their support comes other than a mention of the Center on Union Facts. Richard Berman, a Washington, DC lobbyist who has worked for the tobacco industry and other large-scale political interests for years founded the Center on Union Facts. This information is not immediately available to the public, unless one digs much deeper.

In addition to their general critique of teachers unions, the Center has also launched attacks on particular communities, including Newark, NJ, a high-needs district with which my home university partners. Upon exploring the website, the reader learns that they (the designers of the site) are not against teachers; they are against unions, union corruption, and union abuse. However, this message may not seem clear to the viewer of the ad. Indeed, by asking people to vote for the worst teachers, the focus is off any role the unions may or may not play in teacher employment. One’s attention is drawn to the teachers themselves. No mention is made of the conditions in which teachers work, particularly those who work in urban communities. And, these are the teachers whom are the focus of the Center for Union Facts attack. As a result, the critique of a collective, in this case teachers unions is reduced to an attack on individual teachers themselves.

The Labor Movement in the US itself has long been viewed in complex ways. On the one hand, its history of fighting for the rights of workers in terms of a living wage, safe work conditions, and the right to organize is well-known among some circles. In addition, unions also were a site of educational and intellectual development among the working class (Aronowitz & Giroux, 2004). This is not necessarily the image of unions, teachers unions in particular, the media has focused on, historically or today. A second ad by www.TeachersUnionsExposed.com framed teachers unions as bullies in schools. The photo is that of a young, blue-eyed, white boy with light brown hair. He is hung by the back of his coat over a coat hook hung on a brick wall. The image draws upon many-an-adults’ memories of the kid who was always bullied: hung up on hooks, shoved in lockers, lunch money or homework stolen. Instead of the bully being the bigger kid, however, the bully this ad points to is the teachers union. The text above the photo reads, “The Biggest Bully in Schools?” Below, it reads, “Teacher Unions.” The subtext reads, “Teacher unions bully principals into keeping bad teachers, scare politicians who support school reform, and block efforts to pay great teachers higher pay. It’s time to stand up to the bully.”

Indeed, groups like the Education Policy Institute (www.educationpolicy.org), and others have presented teachers unions as the primary obstacle to reforming education. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, blamed the unions for the problems in public education in February of 2007 at an invited talk at a conference on technology and education w. Rod Paige’s new book, The War Against Hope is subtitled How Teachers’ Unions Hurt Children, Hinder Teachers, and Endanger Public Education (2007). To present teachers’ unions as bullies, not only ignores the long standing struggles for access, equity, and justice in which the unions have participated; it also frames them as an obstacle to justice. In doing so, the media frames school reform (and justice) as a process that must occur outside the realm of teachers and unions. They cannot be trusted to do what is just and right. They must be told what to do because if left to their own devices, they will cut a swath of destruction through their students, because they are lazy, incompetent, abusive, and above all, a threat to the American public.

The coverage of former Secretary of Education Rod Paige’s claim that the National Education Association (NEA) was a terrorist group is a case in point. On Tuesday, February 24, 2004, several US media outlets carried the story that Secretary of Education Roderick Paige called the National Education Association “a terrorist organization” the day before. The next day, Secretary Paige issued a written apology:

"It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics the NEA’s Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind’s historic educational reforms. I also said, as I have repeatedly, that our nation’s teachers, who have dedicated their lives to service in the classroom, are the real soldiers of democracy, whereas the NEA’s high-priced Washington lobbyists have made no secret that they will fight against bringing real, rock-solid improvements in the way we educate all our children regardless of skin color, accent or where they live. But, as one who grew up on the receiving end of insensitive remarks, I should have chosen my words better." (Secretary Paige Issues apology for the comment about the NEA, February 23, 2004)

Understandably, teacher organizations (and teachers themselves) responded to these statements with fury and disappointment, given that the Secretary of Education discursively situated the nation’s largest teachers’ association at the heated center of political violence and intimidation. Granted, he was most likely responding to the NEA’s resistance to NCLB, which critics consider to be poorly conceived. However, in claiming his comments were nothing more than a poor choice of words, Paige dismissed the reaction of the NEA and teachers as them being overly sensitive and naïve about the fact that NCLB was good for students and society.

The NYT carried no front-page coverage of this event. The Opinion section hosted five commentaries: two editorials, one op-ed, and two letters to the editor. While all five pieces were scathing of Paige’s remark, the fact that they were located in the Opinion section framed their content as clearly partisan. In contrast, the Education section hosted nine articles that referred to Secretary Paige’s comment. The first was an article reporting on the initial discursive act (2/24/2004). In the first article, Robert Pear, NYT reporter, noted that Paige said the NEA “was like ''a terrorist organization'' because of the way it was resisting many provisions of a school improvement law pushed through Congress by President Bush in 2001”. In further reporting of Paige’s apology, Pear noted that Paige stood by the intent of his words, noted that he (Paige) still had great respect for individual teachers (not teachers as a collective), but that he had merely made a “poor choice of words.” The remainder of the articles addressed calls for removing Secretary Paige from his position. All of these articles focused on the unions, individual teachers, some politicians and their reactions to the statement, not its implications for teachers, their work, or public perception of teachers. There was no mention of knowledge of or reaction to Paige’s comments from the wider public.

On one hand, it’s politics as usual; it is a classical rhetorical device to “demonize” what one perceives to be a threat. In this case, Secretary Paige saw the NEA as a threat to implementing NCLB, and therefore a threat to the Bush Administration’s perception of how to achieve justice for all children in the US (through testing, accountability, and choice). On the other hand, to call the teachers unions in general “bullies,” let alone the nation’s largest teachers’ association a “terrorist organization” politically detracts from the work in which unions and teachers engage, especially when the American public is already concerned about teachers and teaching on the national level. To only report the reactions of those who were victims of the attack, serves to further minimize the initial attack (the terrorist comment) and marginalizes the object of that attack (the NEA in particular, teachers unions in a broader sense, and teachers in general) because it is framed as a localized and individual concern, not one of larger social, political, and economic concerns.
Teachers

Still other images available in the media play upon assumptions about teachers. Mitchell and Weber (1995) note that there are several images about teachers that permeate US society. One of the most enduring, according to Mitchell and Weber (1995) is that of the prim and proper, white teacher. Both Time and the NYT utilize this image in their discussion of NCLB. Take, for instance, the February 5, 2008 cover of Time (Figure 8), which includes a picture of a young white female teacher with long brown hair, in a blue button down shirt and grey slacks. She is sitting in a student’s desk with an open math book and other books are visible underneath the desk. The phrases “How to make better teachers” and “Who would be the education President?” flank her on either side. The cover story itself, however, includes a photo of a young white male in white shirt, tie, and khakies. His arms are crossed, and he is flanked by blurred shapes of students (see Figure 9). The caption reads, “Ben Van Dyk fled public school to teach at parochial Servite High. Pay isn't great, but there's more support and freedom to teach creatively.” These and other visual images employed by both Time and the NYT present the image of teacher as predominately young, white, and conservative.

Visually, these two images play upon a number of assumptions about teachers and teaching. On the one hand, both publications presents “better teachers” as being young and fresh. The new teachers are presumably better than current teachers who are more experienced, older, resistant ot NCLB, and presumably part of the union. In this respect, NCLB and its focus on the Highly Qualified Teacher frames youth as something that is desirable because new teachers have not yet been jaded by those who would oppose the requirements of NCLB (see Cochran-Smith & Lyttle, 2006; Weiner, 2005).

The text of the article, however, is not about the age, skills, knowledge, or dispositions of talented teachers, nor is it about what challenges teachers face in the classroom. Instead, the focus is on merit pay, and how merit pay might widen the pool of potential teachers, reward teachers, and motivate teachers in general. Analysis reveals that the Time article, like others addressing issues related to the Highly Qualified Teachers Act, prestents recruiting new teachers and learning to teach, as independent of larger social issues. If one is motivated to teach, has the appropriate bachelors degree, and the desire to be successful (evidenced through raising test scores, etc.) then one can become the type of teacher the nation, under the geies of NCLB needs and want. Better teachers don’t need better preparation, more mentoring, a more stable school environment, better leadership, more resources. They simply need more pay to improve. Connecting the preparation of better teachers to issues of pay and the market reflects a wider public belief that if one is better at something, one will be payed more, because one is worth more. Those who do not perform as well, get paid less, or are fired.

My point here is not that teachers don’t deserve better pay, better working conditions, and more respect. Many teachers work second (and third) jobs to make up the difference between their salaries and the cost of living. Many teachers have to wait to go to the bathroom, have to buy their own supplies, and work in classrooms with inadequate desks (too few or the wrong size), lighting, and heating (too little or too much). Too many hard working educators are told they are “just teachers,” not nearly as important as the doctors, lawyers, and engineers who were once their students (some of homw also belong ot unions—which coincidentally, are rarely critiqued. One has to wonder why only teachers unions are subjects of such derision). The point is that the media frames issues related to justice as a matter of economic justice, as if pay, competition, and the market (in the form of merit pay, vouchers and school choice), will level the playing field for students and prepare them for the competitive workplace in a privatized world by incetivizing public education as a competitive workplace for teachers (McCluskey, 2007; Giroux, 2008; Hursh, 2008; Saltman, 2007). Problematic in this view, of course, is the notion that all school districts, students, and communities are the same, and therefore need and get the same.

In fact, those who are critical of NCLB are excluded from the discussion simply because they challenge the prevailing view of those in power (van Dijk, 1998), and therefore are part of the problem, not the solution. In a speech to the Greater Huston Partnership, Secretary Paige reflected this sentiment.

"Now I know…they [teachers unions, those opposed to NCLB] will fight it anyway they can. If those who fear change defeat national reform, then division, exclusion, racism, and callousness win. This is a debate with profound consequences. If we lose this debate, millions of children will be harmed by being excluded, ignored, disrespected, and under-educated, and then sent out into a world for which they are educationally unprepared and uncompetitive. Who among us would wish that on any child?" (12/15/03)

The discourse here constructs anyone who challenges NCLB bitter and unreasonable. They are not doing so based upon reasonable arguments; they are instead irrational obstructionists who don’t believe in the full potential of all children. Those who challenge NCLB don’t believe in equality, they want to divide the nation and maintain the current status quo of inequitable educational experience, no choice and no opportunity. In this sense, they oppose social justice for students, particularly those from poor or minority communities.

It is significant that this view of justice is so able to capitalize upon what is collectively understood as core American values of equality and opportunity (Feinberg, 1999; Parker, 2003; Sehr, 1997). While this discourse has not silenced the dissension of NCLB, it has effectively de-legitimized much of it, relegated that dissension to the margins, and is so powerful that it has been able to shape the common understanding of public education and where fault for its shortcomings lies (with schools and teachers, not with larger institutions, see for instance, Cochran-Smith & Lyttle, 2006). And, the media, in its discussion of NCLB, still frames its policies and practices as a viable means for achieving justice (in the form of economic access) even when it presents a critique of aspects of or actions surrounding the legislation (for instance, budget cuts, issues related to state standards, etc.).

Take for instance, the October 13, 2004 NYT article about the 2004 US Commission of Civil Rights report about the Bush Administration. According to Janofsky, President Bush,
“neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues nor taken actions that matched his words."

The draft, prepared by the commission staff, accuses Mr. Bush of civil rights failures in education, voting, gay and lesbian issues, affirmative action, housing, environmental justice, racial profiling and hate crimes and concludes by saying, "Failing to build on common ground, the Bush administration missed opportunities to build consensus on key civil rights issues and has instead adopted policies that divide Americans." (2004)
Instead of continuing to report the findings of the Commission and providing details of the report, the article instead focused on the timing of the report’s release (right before the 2004 Presidential elections) and the fact that a number of Republican voting members of the commission were disturbed by its timing. Janofsky reported that, “Republicans were clearly concerned that politics were trumping fairness. Mr. Kirsanow [the Commissioner] said that the draft "evinces a bias and political slant unacceptable from an allegedly nonpartisan agency." Thus, the focus of the article was more about the individual political concerns of members of the Commission and the timing of the report draft (which was well-known given the process) rather than the content of the report. Instead of digging into the deeper, and more complex issues at stake, the NYT here, and in other places simply presented opposing viewpoints (about the timing of the report) rather than addressing or engaging in a critique of the content of the report (and whether, or not, President Bush’s record merited the critique—see, for instance, Gerstl-Pepin, 1998 on “thin” public, and Gerstl-Pepin, 2002).

The above article illustrates how what some might consider the real news (a report detailing President Bush’s record on civil rights, particularly in relation to education), is not nearly as important as the politics surrounding the release of that report. Instead of focusing on the content of the report, the concerns of individual Republican members of the Commission are deemed more news-worthy (and of more value) than the polity’s right to information prior to an election, whether about an administration in general, or public education specifically. Instead, the issues are framed in terms of the idea that “it’s politics as usual” and therefore not news of a serious issue.

The point is that the media, in the images it produces (whether in the form of advertisements, or journalist photos), in what it reports, where and how, frames issues related to NCLB and education in general in ways that do little to transcend what people’s current beliefs about them are. It simply “reports the news.” As a result, the message is left unchecked. In the case of how the media frames issues of justice as it relates to NCLB, the connection is not necessarily a direct one in the MSM. Indeed, as this discussion illustrated, media representations of unions and teachers frame the discussion more in terms of what and who impede justice, not in terms of what was necessary to achieve it.

Conclusions: Imaging unions and teachers as anti-justice

The discussion here is by no means an exhaustive one. It is a first foray into interrogating how the media contributes to the framing of NCLB within the wider community. It is interesting to note that while many people in the United States are suspicious of the main stream media, they still engage in consuming it and repeating what it reports. In this respect, the media then wields a great deal of power in terms of how it frames different issues, particularly those related to NCLB. In his discussion of television and the media, Bourdieu noted,

"The political dangers inherent in the ordinary use of television have to do with the fact that images have peculiar capacity to produce what critics call a reality effect [italics original]. They show things and make people believe in what they show. This power to show is also a power to mobilize. It can give a life to ideas or images, but also to groups. The news, the incidents and accidents of everyday life, can be loaded with political or ethnic significance liable to unleash strong, often negative feeings, such as racism, chauvinism, the fear-hatred of the foreigner or, xenophobia. The simple report, the very fact of reporting, of putting on record as a reporter, always implies a social constructions of reality that can mobilize (or demobilze) individuals or groups." (1996, p. 21)

When the media continues to simply “present” the story or report the facts, it fails to take responsibility for the fact that it is complicit in how people interpret those news reports. People bring assumptions and beliefs to every text with which they engage and the media is no different. At the same time, however, the media also has the power to give to or take away voice from different groups, depending upon how it presents the content of the story.

In the next few months, NCLB will be (hopefully) hotly debated: in homes, in schools, in coffee houses, at the local burger joint, just as it will be in state and federal governments. As the nation moves forward to reauthorize the legislation, hopefully, there will be serious changes beyond the current discussion. Media outlets like the NYT and Time can play a role in not only reporting the news, they can and should engage in a deeper critique about what they consequences might be for schools, teachers, and most importantly, students, as the ED moves forward. If the only changes are to be relieving suburban districts of some of their requirements—what Secretary Spellings has called “triage”—or requiring states to report graduation rates using a set equation, which will undoubtably heighten concerns about a long-standing problem—one that Fine, 1991 and others discussed extensively before the recent reports about dropouts in the the NYT and Time—then little will change in terms of the educational experiences of students. They and their teachers will still be held responsible for achieving their own justice without any real support from those who are making demands for equality, execellence, and justice form them.

The new NCLB, or, how can we once again punish urban communities for being, well, urban?

I will not deny the fact that I have been highly critical of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for a very long time. True, I was hopeful when it was first released in January 2001. A lot has changed since then as I have watched the federal government narrow public education to tests, scripted curriculum, and more tests. I have been enraged at how poor and under-resourced communities have been expected to produce the same results with fewer resources, only to be further financially penalized when they missed the mark. So imagine my reaction when I read this New York Times article this morning.

NCLB is up for reauthorization this year, and a number of different groups have been weighing in on what ought to be changed. There are the “accountability” advocates who say that they will consider no plan that weakens testing. There are those who want to change teacher licensure so that it can be easier for anyone with a Bachelors degree. And now there’s Miller’s latest idea: to ease requirements for suburban schools.

That’s right, folks. Middle class and suburban communities would be held to different standards. Then again, the article notes that states with large immigrant communities would also have different requirements. So why am I not screaming about the changes for immigrant students? It has to do with understanding privilege and language acquisition. This proposal would relax adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements for suburban schools that have small numbers of students in different groups. What that means is that as long as the schools aren’t failing across the board, it’s OK that a student group or two (as long as it’s small) don’t make it. I thought that was the purpose of NCLB: to ensure that all students are counted. Under this plan, suburban schools don’t have to count all their students.

The changes for states with large immigrant populations are equally problematic. Rather than require schools with large English Language Learner (ELL) populations to test their students in English after two years, schools would have five years. This is good because the research on language acquisition indicates that it takes five years of instruction in English before ELL students would excel academically in an English-only classroom. The downside, of course, is that ELL students will be tested in their native languages for five years, which means that schools need to provide tests in many different languages (in my “suburban” district, that would mean up to sixty different languages). That will be a huge burden to individual districts, to say nothing about the educational impact on ELL students.

So why am I so crazed after reading this article? Because it once again indicates to me that NCLB is nothing more than a shell game to achieve the end of public education. If suburban schools aren’t held to the same standards as urban or rural schools, then the federal government is punishing the students who attend urban or rural schools for being “urban” or “rural” students. And, given the fact that urban and rural public schools tend to have fewer economic resources than their suburban counterparts, the federal government is engaging in a very pernicious form of discrimination. Let me be honest, I am a former inner-city school teacher who is committed to urban education. To have a proposal floated that exempts suburban districts because of their access to academic resources and their lack of “diversity” (read: predominantly middle class and of western European descent) while continuing to punish urban districts is unconscionable.

Towards an educated public: Who’s “public” is it anyway?

For those of you who don’t know, President Bush’s landmark education legislation, No Child Left Behind is up for re-authorization this year. As someone who works with teachers on a daily basis (who is not their boss), I can say that NCLB has created some serious trouble for teachers, students, and schools, especially those in resource-strapped communities. On the one hand, there are some good things that have come out of NCLB: content curriculum standards in all 50 states (though 48? of 50 had them prior to NCLB), certified teachers in every classroom (we’re getting there, but there are still shortages in specific subject areas and teachers), teachers not being punished for defending themselves when they are assaulted by students, actually acknowledging students with disabilities and English language learners, the fact that poor and minority kids are getting screwed… But there’s a lot about it that really bothers me. It would be safe to say that it infuriates me.

For instance:

Did you know that a provision was inserted into the legislation that requires all public schools to release the names and contact information of all students to armed forces recruiters? Yep. And there were some reports that the recruiters were pretty insistent and crass in their efforts to get young people to sign up. Parents have to contact their members of Congress to get names removed from the list. Oh, and that information is only made available in English and Spanish. On the surface, I am all for the idea of making that information (about the Armed Forces) available to all students. But it doesn’t work that way. The military has a lot more access to kids in poor and working class communities than they do in wealthy communities. Thus, they have a captive audience of kids who may not have the money or family knowledge about how to get into college.

If schools fail to make adequate yearly progress (on standardized tests), they have to pay for tutoring and other enrichment programs run by private organizations. That’s right, they can’t create their own programs. Instead, companies like Sylvan and Kaplan get taxpayer money. The feds are using our money for yet another form of corporate welfare. And, because the schools have to pay for the tutoring, even more money is taken out of their coffers which many of them desperately need and more money goes to privatizing education.

Parents of students who attend “dangerous” or “failing” can transfer their children to other schools in-district, Such a transfer, of course, is dependent upon proximity and seat availability. What the feds really wanted to do was be able to give vouchers (again, taxpayer money) to families so they could send their kids anywhere. The idea was to increase competition. OK, in theory (though it makes me nervous to apply this to public ed). Parents could use them for public, private, or parochial schools. My big problem with this? Public schools that receive federal funding must meet the requirements outlined by NCLB in terms of teacher certification, test scores, etc. Private and parochial schools don’t. The irony of course is that NCLB is supposed to make education accountable for how schools use money and get results. Because there is no accountability requirement for private and parochial schools, they are being held to a different standard, and still getting taxpayer money.

Oh, and don’t get me started on how they have decided to disaggregate the data. Basically, what that means is that they break down the data into its smaller representative groups (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, language, English language learner, students with disabilities, etc). Again, really good in theory because schools can no longer tell certain students to stay home on test days (trust me, happens all the time). Every student needs a score (there are big problems with this, but that’s for another diary). But, it is incredibly dangerous when you go macro to the school and district level. How can we compare a school that has 7 groups to one that has 33? It’s much easier to make adequate yearly progress with 7 different groups than it is with 33.

The feds’ definition of a highly qualified teachers simply sucks. Let me be very transparent, I am a former public school teacher who worked in a large comprehensive high school teaching ninth graders. I came to understand that teaching ninth grade was the most important place I could be. The school in which I worked had 1800 students (give or take 200-300, depending on time of year). 900 were in the ninth grade, 900 students were 10-12th grades. That’s a huge “disappearance” rate. That’s why I taught ninth grade. I was certified to teach Spanish and also taught basic schools. I was trained as a social studies teacher, but needed to take extra history courses, even though I passed the state subject area exam. So, I couldn’t get certified. But I was a GOOD teacher, especially in social studies.

My point here is that there is a difference between being certified, being qualified, and being a good teacher. The feds are pushing for content area knowledge only. As a matter of fact, at a national conference last year, one of the talking heads for the Department of Ed. (ED), noted that they were looking into ways to eliminate certification all together.

Currently, I work in a university, preparing people to become teachers. My job now is to help people become the best teachers they can be. That too, is the subject of another diary, which I will get to at some point. But the point I want to make is that knowing your content area is not enough, unless of course, all you want to do is skill and drill. You need to know your students, academically, socially, culturally, emotionally, and developmentally. You need to understand how your content are works, that is, the underlying structures and belief systems that drive inquiry into the fact and content. And you need to know how to make that content accessible to your students. That is what teaching is really about. One of the biggest problems with how math is taught today in the US is that it focuses on procedure. Students don’t learn the concepts and thought processes that lead to choosing different procedures. There’s a great book called The Teaching Gap that talks about this.

The ED refers to the study that is the basis of book’s study. But they screw it up and focus on content and standards-setting (deciding what it is that students should know and how to assess it), as opposed to the message about how teaching in the US needs to be much more complex, theoretical, and philosophical. That part was ignored because it did not reflect the approptiate vision.

Finally, NCLB punishes poor and minority kids, their teachers and the districts that serve them for being, working with, and being geographically located where they are. The ED continues to fail those who have the least and need the most support. I’ll spend more time on this in a future diary. This diary reads like a rant, I know that. It’s needs more citations, I know that, too. But I needed to get this off my chest before I go back to teaching in the fall. Teachers and schools cannot do this alone. Whether you teach or not, have kids or not, this is important. It's about our collective future.

Peace.

Merit Pay: Innvoative solution or new punitive measure?

Cross-posted at Dailykos: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/8/121923/3125

Merit pay, which has been a major talking point in political and public circles for some time now, has gotten renewed attention in the current debates regarding the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Bush Administration’s answer to all things wrong with public education. There are a number of politicians on both sides of the isle who ardently support merit pay, including Mitt Romney, George Miller, Mike Blumberg, and Barack Obama. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings loves it. It’s become a key piece of one of the new proposals to alter NCLB. Called the All Students Can Achieve Act, This proposal, among other things, calls for connecting individual students’ test scores to individual teachers, considering growth models, and merit pay. As a person deeply concerned about public education, I wanted to believe in NCLB, but once you get beyond the soft and fuzzy platitudes, the law is a nightmare. And, while merit pay is not part of the original NLCB package, the fact that people raise it as a way to improve student achievement across the political spectrum means that it could become a reality.

I’m not one of those people who fall back on the idea that teaching is little more than a noble profession and that only people who are really committed to students should become teachers. While that is very important, I also acknowledge some very important realities. People need a quality education because it provides access to other things: college, the world of work, social connections, and economic stability. But economics is still only a small part of it. A healthy democracy requires an educated public. Thomas Jefferson pointed this out, and it was one of the reasons he pushed for public education (in the form of University of Virginia). And while Jefferson was still elitist regarding who should have access to higher education, the important point here is that a democratic society requires educated citizens who can make informed and thoughtful decisions. What does merit pay have to do with this?

Those who support merit pay argue that it acts as an incentive for teachers to work harder, it rewards teachers who are successful, and that it will draw people from other professions to teaching, particularly in the math and sciences. The argument is that merit pay has worked for big business, so it should be applied to public education. There are a number of assumptions here that are of concern, the least of which is that public education can be run like a business. Children and adolescents are not commodities. In my mind, the others are far more dangerous.

Let’s take the first reason mentioned above to support merit pay: it acts as an incentive for teachers to work harder. The assumption here, of course, is that most teachers are lazy, and don’t work hard enough. It’s true that there are teachers who do the minimum. That’s true in all fields. And yes, the union protects all teachers, even the problematic ones. But the union ensures due process, which means that an administrator can’t fire a tenured teacher because of politics, sexuality, personality, etc. If an administration documents the problems with a teacher, that teacher can be fired. But, the administration has to do its job, and not pass a poor teacher on to another district.

From this perspective, those supporting merit pay assume that if they reward teachers they can and will work harder. Many teachers are already working as hard as they can. Many work twelve, fourteen hours a day, and eight to ten hours over the weekend. What happens in a rich learning environment doesn’t just miraculously emerge from the back closet in the morning. To suggest that merit pay is a solution to the issue of student achievement ignores the fact that many teachers are already working as hard as they can.

The second argument, rewarding “good” teachers (as defined by achievement on test scores) is equally problematic. The assumption is that all teachers have the “same” kids. By that I mean that all classes are heterogeneously grouped (all ability levels in the same classroom), and all teachers have the same chance of getting the school genius and the student who really struggles. In reality, that just doesn’t happen. Many schools still actively track their students, which means that they are placed in classes based supposedly upon “ability.” So, if a teacher has students in the honors track, she or he will have a greater chance of student success on the achievement tests. The teacher who has the students who are repeating a class (because they failed it the first time around), is less likely to have high test scores. This is not to say that kids repeating a class aren’t as smart, there are many reasons they end up in such a class, and merit pay ignores that.

Teachers don’t necessarily get to choose who their students are. In fact, new teachers frequently have the most challenging student loads. This is bad for novice teachers, and leads to the huge attrition rate of teachers in the first five years of teaching. And honors classes are rewards for seniority in a building. Again, merit pay will not necessarily reward good teachers; it rewards teachers who have the right combination of students. I am not saying that a teacher working with students with a history of failure won’t have great success. I worked with a good friend who was well known for his work with failing students. But, the work is different, and requires different ways of defining success.

Finally, the final argument, that merit pay will draw people from other professions, is equally problematic. It ignores the lack of respect for teaching and teachers in general. Over and over again, when I mentioned I was teaching, people would say to me in that condescending tone of voice, “Oh, that’s nice.” Some people, including family members said to me, “But you could have done anything you wanted to, become a doctor or a lawyer.” I won’t mention what was said to me when people found out that I worked with inner-city students. The disdain was obvious. How is merit pay going to challenge that?

The reality is that merit pay fails to address to two major issues related to public education: the deep structures of public education and public perceptions of teachers and teaching. Tracking is deeply embedded in American society, and it’s important to meet the educational needs of all students. But to ask teachers to do the same things with different students is not realistic. It not only ignores the needs and strengths of students; merit pay rewards and punishes teachers for something that is beyond their control. In addition, how schools are managed doesn’t take into account teacher and student strengths and needs. How schools are governed and how decisions are made needs to change if we are to seriously consider merit pay. And, people need to take a longer look at what teachers have had to take on in the past few decades. They no longer simply teach students. Understanding the roles that American society has forced them to take on would go a long way to change public perception.

So, the next time you have the chance to talk to your local, state, or national rep, ask him or her about merit pay. It might be worth considering before you cast your next vote (especially if you are a teacher or have kids in public school).