Our States are Falling Behind in Employing High-Quality Teachers!
Subtitle: The Sky is Falling
Everyone knows that our nation has high quality, highly motivated, industrious and over-working teachers who over-deliver student achievement results. Teachers who work under low compensation and even lower appreciation, teachers who work for bureaucracies that under-fund and and under-support instruction...while these same bureaucracies clamor for test score improvements.
So, why did the Ben Feller (of the Associated Press) article for the Washington Post look so negative? In this article Mr. Feller summarizes the latest No Child Left Behind (NCLB) data. Answer: He used a Department of Education Press Release to acquire the "facts" for this story.
Link to the original Ed.Gov Press Release
Major findings:
- Four states failed to meet even one requirement
- Hawaii
- Missouri
- Utah
- Wisconsin
- Seven states were evaluated as having seriously flawed teacher quality programs and face the loss of Federal money
- Idaho
- Iowa
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Virginia
- Washington
- Thirty nine states "tried, but failed" to come up with a good enough plan
- Nine states satisfied all the requirements
- Kansas
- Louisiana
- Maryland
- Nevada
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- Ohio
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
What does this Mean?
"Under the No Child Left Behind law, states were supposed to have highly qualified teachers in every core academic class by the end of the last school year. None made it."
Source: Ben Feller, http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/review-finds-states-still-fall-short-on/20060816232209990001?_ccc=3&cid=842
(Note: This article is no longer posted by AOL™)
With information like this presented by the Washington Post and the Department of Education, you might think that education in this country is disgustingly poor.
But, actually, this commotion is all about making sure that "economically poor " students get highly trained teachers (a goal that everybody wants). Yet, getting highly trained teachers for lower socioeconomic (often minority) students is made more difficult by the insideous affects of the No Child Left Behind Act.
The Rest of the Story
When you examine this information closely, you find that this "teacher quality" issue is only about some "statistics" that state education agencies were ordered to collect about degrees and professional development for teachers who work with minority students.
What the states failed to do was collect six categories of data in a "bureaucratically significant way", i.e., in a way that was complicated and expensive enough to appease the "Feds."
And the "Feds" can be mean taskmasters...
"The department can withhold money from states that fall short on teacher quality.
Based on a separate review earlier this year, seven states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico face the loss of federal aid if they don't improve their compliance.
Those states are Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Virginia and Washington." Source: Ben Feller, AP
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/review-finds-states-still-fall-short-on/20060816232209990001?_ccc=3&cid=842
(Note: This article is no longer posted by AOL™)
But, why would our Federal Government "badmouth" teachers like this? Why would our Federal Government, a minority investor in our public schools (with a nine percent stake) want to make our nation's schools seem worse than they are?
Hidden Agenda
As we have speculated before, the answer may be a desire of some politicians to promote "Voucher Programs" so that children can attend private (religious) schools at government expense.
The logic seems designed for something like this...
"Let's show that instruction is horribly bad in our public schools so that we can 'Voucher students' into a backdoor funding ploy for religious schools."
And, if there is any degradation in teacher quality, the "Feds" are complicit in creating the climate for that slide by driving teachers away from teaching lower socioeconomic (minority) students.
The Issues Human Nature Terms
Imagine how much cheating a teacher would promote if each student who achieved a 100% score on the weekly test received $100.00 USD for their effort.
When the stakes are high, motivation soars. And, sometimes this motivation glides under the radar of ethical and moral restraint.
But, what happens if self serving behavior is legal, ethical and moral? Won't people, such as teachers, embark on a course that brings themselves the most advantage?
Here is how the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) subverts education. There are several steps to the process...
- The Feds pressure school district to increase test scores
- District administrators pressure teachers to "increase test scores"
- Quality teachers bail out (transfer) from sites where delivering high test scores is more difficult (such as in schools filled with lower socioeconomic status students
- Quality teachers, (under-compensated, over-worked) look for easier places to increase test scores (by teaching the more affluent)...or leave teaching altogether
- The Feds cite states (and individual school districts) for failing to live up to the bureaucratic letter of the NCLB Law
The US Department of Education berates states and pillories teachers
So, there is increased pressure from the hollowed [sic] halls of Congress for voucher programs and "competition" for our public schools
Sidebar
Of course the professional political proponents of this benighted course of educational interference take extraordinary steps to quench any competition for themselves. Our Federal bureaucracy needs competition, especially in the form of common sense.
Wild Fantasy
Imagine the mad dash to increase federal funding for education by certain incumbents if a new category of support for religious schools were to become constitutional.
But, this is idle speculation because these zealots would have to complete this shell game before November 2006, because a number of them won't make another term.
But, let's offer (tongue in cheek) a strategy of allowing the federal funding for religious schools. Why. Because this would be the best way to ride on the coat tails of the religius schools to flush funding of public education.
Sure, the public schools would only get crumbs while the religious schools got loaves. But, those crumbs would be a lot more than the "Feds" deliver, now.
Even better, once their real agenda (i.e., increasing funding for religious schools) were achieved, the "Feds" could drop the pretense of the No Child Left Behind law, and stop one source of their interference with education.
What Education is Really About
To end this article on a positive note, let's consider the wisdom of a single sentence from an 11 year old student in Mexico who seems to have more insight into education than the whole pack of our politicians combined...
"The teacher is to the students what the rain is to the field."
Zaira Alexandra Rodriguez Guijarro, age 11, (Mexico)
Source: UNESCO (1996) What makes a good teacher? Paris: UNESCO
http://www.unicef.org/teachers/teacher/teacher.htm
Enough said!
