As the residents of Newtown, Connecticut and the nation attempt to carry on in the wake of last week’s abhorrent shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, many Americans are understandably searching for some small scrap of hope and humanity among the ruins of the violence. Whether the tragedy prompts a long overdue strengthening of the country’s lax gun laws remains to be seen. But there is another societal change we need to make as well.
We need to end the war against teachers.
Indeed, the media’s coverage of the six slain
teachers—the youngest of whom was 27-year-old first-grade teacher, Victoria Soto--represents a curious shift in the press’s typical treatment of teachers.
Certainly, there is no question the teachers are heroes. They valiantly gave
their lives protecting their young students.
Unfortunately, prior to the Newtown shooting it was
quite rare to read the words “teachers” and “heroes” in the same sentence in
the average U.S. newspaper. Instead, one was more likely to see “teachers”
paired with words like “bad,” “unskilled,” “moochers,” “parasites,” and “Cadillac
pensions.” Just three months ago striking teachers in Chicago were lambasted as
“greedy,” and “indifferent towards students.” In fact, the New York Times’ Joe Nocera falsely claimed the teachers were
striking to “maintain the status quo,” with regards to teacher tenure and termination
laws. Untrue.
As blogger David Lindorff writes in a recent post
(Counterpunch.org, 12/17/2012):
How many of the
politicians in Washington and in state capitals and how many conservative
think-tank “researchers” who attack teachers as leeches and drones would have
shown such heroism under fire? My guess is damned few—if any. Yet… not one
teacher in that unionized school fled the scene and abandoned the children to
their fate. They all stuck with their kids.
Since the start of the recession teachers have
become the country’s collective punching-bag. Union-hating right-wingers
baselessly accuse them of causing the economic crash with their “Cadillac-sized
pensions,” and union benefits. There have been many efforts to weed out “bad
teachers”--so designated because their students scored poorly on the rigid standardized
tests that have become the benchmark of education in the wake of “No Child Left
Behind.” And states are rapidly adopting new measures to carefully monitor
teachers at all times. (Yet there is no talk of monitoring the Wall Street bankers
who actually trashed the economy through their fraudulent and illegal practices.
Where, I wonder, is the effort to weed out the “bad bankers”?)
Things are not much better at the college-level,
where even tenured professors must endure the juvenile criticisms of students
on the end-of-semester course evaluation forms they are forced to distribute. (The
forms are ostensibly designed to record students’ overall evaluation of the
course itself, but they inevitably turn into scathing personal attacks of the
professor.) And do I even need to mention the abject immaturity (not to mention
sexism) of the website, RateMyProfessor.com?
Suffice to say, teaching is not easy work. And
contrary to popular belief—or the snide mantra, “Those who can’t do, teach,”—teaching is work. A ton of
work, in fact.
What those who make this accusation do not realize
is only a small fraction of a teacher’s job occurs in the classroom. The vast
majority of it—grading homework, designing curriculum, planning lectures and
classroom activity, generating tests, papers and coursework, updating and
maintaining grade books, attending meetings/conferences, submitting academic
papers, meeting with parents—takes place after school and often late into the
night. And educators at every grade-level are currently being assigned greater
and greater responsibilities, without seeing a corresponding increase in their anemic
salaries. Liberal arts professors, meanwhile, have seen university budget-cuts
exclusively targeted at their “useless” courses in English, Women’s Studies,
Philosophy and the humanities.
Indeed, it is no longer enough for skilled,
experienced teachers to impart their knowledge onto their students. They must
do so while being unceasingly energetic, apolitical and, most of all, likeable.
Those who fail to meet all three criteria will not last long in the profession.
Iconoclasts, critical thinkers, and educators who challenge conventional
orthodoxy (traditionally the purpose of higher-education) are promptly weeded
out of the schools.
To be certain, I have offered a great deal of criticism of our country’s education system on this blog. But, for the most
part, I do not believe the educators themselves are responsible for these ills.
Most teachers I have had the pleasure of working with—both as a student and a
colleague—are honest, dedicated, hard-working individuals who attempt to do the
best they can within the increasingly limited confines of their educational
setting. Does this mean there are no “bad teachers” anywhere? Of course not.
They exist, just as do bad lawyers, bad corporate CEOs, bad police officers, bad
doctors, bad businessmen and bad state governors. However, in my experience the
bad apples in the teaching profession have been few and far between.
Furthermore, the entire concept of evaluating a
teacher’s proficiency through her students’ “learning” (as measured by
arbitrary test scores) misses the crucial fact that teaching is a two-way
street. Even the greatest teacher cannot make his students learn. Students must
want to learn in the first place. As
William Johnson, a special education teacher in Brooklyn wrote in an NYT Op-Ed earlier this year (“Confessions of a Bad Teacher,” 03/04/2012):
Students aren’t simply
passive vessels, waiting to absorb information from their teachers and
regurgitate it through high-stakes assessments. They make choices about what
they will and won’t learn. I know I did. When I was a teenager, I often stayed
up way too late, talking with friends, listening to music or playing video
games. Did this affect my performance on tests? Undoubtedly. Were my teachers
responsible for these choices? No.
In short, the job of educating our youth is clearly
no easy task. Teachers are not our nation’s enemy. If we can salvage any lesson
from the senseless tragedy in Newtown, it is that we need to stop treating them
as such.
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| Victoria Soto, 27-years-old, was one of the teachers killed at Sandy Hook Elementary last Friday. |
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