I was recently reading an article in the New York Times entitled Report Card on Education Reform, not with great expectation, but with a bit of curiosity. Three men were being interviewed about education reform - Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Education, Mitch Daniels, former Indiana Governor and now President of Purdue University and John Engler, former Governor of Michigan who now runs a corporate lobbying group called Business Roundtable. For most of the article there was the standard quoting of national and international statistics which always includes test scores of some sort, and graduation rates, which always leads to the same conclusion - that our education system is in dire need of fixing.
But within the article I found some telling quotes, like this one from John Engler:
“we are the consumer groups here at the table. All the products of K-12 system are either going to go to the university or they are going to the work force.”
Does that bother anyone besides me? As people in power, these men view our students as products for their consumption! K-12 is nothing more than a factory for spitting out a product that the business world to consume.
Later he says this:
“I think we need to keep data and academic performance the way we keep it on sports. I mean, we know everything about where we stand in football, but we could be last in the league in mathematics for a decade, and we’d never know it.”
Speaking as a consumer, I can see where that would be frustrating, although if you are really too dense to figure out the product you are consuming is horrible in an area you deem to be important, than I think the problem is in his own ability to evaluate the product, not in the information being provided for him. Speaking as a human, however, this comparison of education to keeping stats in a sporting event sounds like an appalling comparison. Maybe we should throw away teachers the same ways professional sports teams throw away coaches (if only we could do that in politics) - you know every three or four years we just fire all the teachers and hire new ones. All the teachers that got fired from one district can go to another district and start over again, until their is new ownership and they decide to bring in a whole new group and the musical teaching positions game can start all over again. That sounds like a great model for quality, stable education reform.
With all the constant talk of education reform, we (in the education world) are constantly inundated with data and statistics that tell us what a horrible job we are doing and how important it is for our country, that we get better, quickly. But it wasn’t until I read John Engler’s words that I realized what that really means. If you look at the roots of most reform it is driven by business (consumers) who want a product (students) who fit their need for the sake of making money... and more money. In the same article Mitch Daniels refers to other countries as the “competition” and Arne Duncan laments that. “If you look at any international comparison.. on no indicator are we anywhere near where we want to be.” Unfortunately there is no international measure of humanness. One of the most constant complaints about the “product” put out by “high achieving” countries, is the seeming loss of humanness. Awhile back I read an article about high achieving Asian countries exploring reforms to produce creativity that has all but disappeared in the midst of the insatiable pursuit of “academia.” But you don’t hear much about those kinds of stories.
I would be the first to say that there are problems with our education system, but neither the problems nor the solutions can be measured in test scores, data analysis, graduation rates, international competitions or the bottom lines of corporate america that is dissatisfied with the current product. Until our leaders stop looking at our students as facts and figures in a data table, or products spit out of an assembly line for the consumption of our ruling class, or pawns in a global competition of power and wealth, we will never see true, meaningful reform in our education system. When teachers are allowed to... no, EXPECTED to be compassionate, loving, caring, HUMAN, role models for our students, and EXPECTED to teach lessons beyond math, science, reading, writing and cut-throat consumerism, then there will be reform. When integrity is demanded from teachers and administrators alike and when positive relationships with students (beyond knowing their latest assessment score), becomes the norm, rather than the forgotten exception, then we will have reform. When teachers are given permission to be humans caring for humans to develop better humans, and even more, when that becomes the highest priority, then we will have true reform.
The thought that I am seen as a tool to create a product out of a student, for manipulative utilization by the very people who believe our vary existence is dependent on increased consumption, does very little to motivate me to be a better teacher. But the thought of encouraging a student to be a person of integrity and honor is one of the few things that actually keeps me teaching (and right now I am grasping for anything I can find!)
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