Ask a Teacher

Do you all remember those bumper stickers that were popular a few years ago? If You Can Read This, Thank a Teacher.
Banal or not, I find it ominous that these sentiments have disappeared. Nowadays public school teachers are to blame for everything. American youth are falling behind academically and it is our fault. Graduation rates for American students are dropping from high school to college and it is our fault. Students don’t write well enough, don’t read well enough, don’t calculate well enough, they have no critical thinking skills, and they don’t understand how to research and to support their opinions with facts. All, all our fault.

In fact, Florida legislators want to strip us of our salaries, our certification, our tenure and our benefits.

Here is what I think- instead of the Thank a Teacher slogan, we could have avoided this whole mess if we’d substituted Ask a Teacher, instead.

Who is better equipped to understand how the broad spectrum of public school students think, learn, and succeed than their teachers? But no one asks us.

President Obama was touting charter schools and merit pay during his candicacy, and I didn’t hear one peep from the teacher unions or anyone else in public education challenging two really bad ideas from a politician, however good his intentions, who clearly didn’t understand public education. To address both of these bad ideas, briefly-

Charter schools are businesses, prey to all of the inherant corruption that downed giants like Enron and WorldCom. There are no standards, whatsoever, other than a blind trust in the ethics of administrators who may not even be qualified to run a school. And merit pay is just ridiculous. How can public school teachers be held solely responsible for outcomes that are largely beyond our control? Blaming us for student test scores is like blaming Christa Mcauliffe for the Challenger disaster- she did her part, but how was to know about the O-rings?

I watched a special on 60 minutes about Bill and Melinda Gates and their valiant efforts to save public education through common core standards. Please explain to any public school teacher in Florida, how these are different from Sunshine State Standards or the “benchmarks” that we pursued so vigilantly for two plus decades? Or is just another name for the same old thing- like “content-based writing” and “writing across the curriculum.” Like “whole language” and “literature-based curriculum.” Like “phonics” and “sounding words out.”

On the other hand, there are a lot of things we do know about education that could help students if only someone would listen to us. We know that the class-size reduction act is a great idea in the strictest sense of the word. We know that relevant professional development, with topics requested by teachers, would help. We know that teachers are too isolated, that administrators are too removed from the classroom, that parents need to be brought into the fold. We know that students need to write a lot, read comprehensively and analytically, that they need encouragement, understanding, discipline and adult mentors who care. They need standardized tests, too, not whining excuses for avoiding the test. And, OK, go ahead and use the test to grade my school. Then show me research-driven methods to improve my teaching.

But don’t threaten me, scold me, and treat me unprofessionally. Keep your crackpot schemes, your second guessing, your unsubstantiated novice suggestions to yourself. If you don’t, I may leave the profession, and you don’t want to lose teachers like me and my collegues. You could learn a lot from us.

Just ask.