Impressions from "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants"

As a fifteen year high school math teacher, this past year of turmoil in public education has hit me hard. Conflicts across many states and severe budget problems in my home state of North Carolina have placed the spotlight firmly on public education, and the results have not been pretty.

It's not been just the attack on schools, teachers, and teacher's unions from newly elected politicians - those are almost expected. The troubling part for me has been reading, over and over again, negative and hostile comments from average Americans towards those in the field of education.

Teachers are categorized as unprofessional, incapable, selfish, greedy, and lazy. Read the comments from members of the public on any article about teaching or education and you will find that there are seemingly large numbers of people out there who believe that educators are almost solely responsible for everything from failing students to the federal deficit.

As a teacher, I struggle to respond.

I know how passionate I am about my work. I know the heart that I have for my students and how badly I want for them to succeed. I also know that the vast majority of my colleagues feel the same way.

At the same time, I know that something needs to change in the American public education system.

Recently Mark Tucker from the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) released a paper/report that is the result of several decades work comparing the approach to public education in some of the top performing countries of the world, with the approach to public education in the United States. The paper is titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants," and I highly recommend that you take the time to read and digest what he has to say.

The basic premise of the paper is that the five top performing regions on the PISA exam (Japan, Finland, Canada, Shanghai, Singapore) are doing NONE of the educational reform steps that are currently en vogue in the U.S. Meanwhile the U.S. is doing NONE of the educational reform steps that each of these countries have put into practice.

Some of the things these parts of the world are NOT doing at all:

• Charter schools


• Lower class sizes


• High stakes standardized tests for every grade


• Teacher performance tied to these standardized tests


• Emphasis on financial equity


• Focus on rooting out "bad" teachers


• Efforts to remove teachers unions from influence

Some of the things they DO that we do NOT do:

• Rigorous teacher preparation


• Educational schools made as difficult as the best schools in country


• Training in content area commensurate with a major in that content area


• A full year of methodology/pedagogy training in content area (after the 4 years in content)


• Mandatory first year with a master teacher mentor (this mentor is excused from classes for that full year)


• Pay equivalent to first year pay in highest professions (engineer, architect, programmer, etc)


• Gateway exams from elementary to lower secondary, from lower secondary to upper secondary, and upper secondary to university


• Gateway exams that are NOT multiple choice, and that require complex problem solving and essay writing


• A comprehensive curriculum that is entrusted to teachers


• Focus and emphasis on teacher collaboration

There is much more in the paper and I encourage you to read it fully.

Some will say that the United States is fundamentally different from most if not all of these countries. And I will agree. I agree because it is fundamentally true in the United States that our actions have shown that we do NOT truly value education, that we do NOT truly consider educators to be among our most valuable commoditities, and that we absolutely have been more concerned with adults than kids.

I wish every single one of these characteristics outlined in Tucker's paper could come to pass here in the U.S. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that they can.

There are simply too many ADULTS who stand to lose too much in such a system.

Politicians would have to show that they truly do place the highest value in educating our young people. But they would also have to admit that they don't have the foggiest notion of how that would be done properly, and be willing to leave that work to those who do.

Colleges would have to start treating School's of Education like they treat School's of Law, Medecine, or Engineering, instead of allowing them to become the dumping grounds for those who fail in other places. They would have to establish a rigorous training program that would ensure FEWER educational students in the long run.

Teachers and their unions would have to release the reins on some of their holy grails, such as tenure, seniority, class sizes, etc. Just like the rest, teachers and their unions would have to stop believing in the party line just because it's been repeated over and over again through the years.

And perhaps most importantly, parents and communities would have to back up their support of education as a "most important thing" with actions instead of just words. Parents would have to provide an environment at home that emphasizes learning and knowledge instead of entertainment and indulgence. Parents would have to support the educators at their schools, instead of assuming that they were wrong and clueless.

Can we do this as a country?

I'm not sure, but I hope so.

This has been a season of confrontation and adversarial relationships. Some of the powers that be in our states and in the federal government have chosen to "divide and separate" we the people over this matter of public education. They have been disturbingly successful.

The time has come to decide just where we place the education of our students in the priority list of the United States. We don't need another movement. We don't need another politically labled approach.

We need change.