Sandwiching thirteen years of teaching between two periods of policy work, I have acquired an unusual perspective on the culture dominating the teaching profession. I learned early on that we teachers are a sensitive bunch. My warning to non-teachers: never question the martyrdom of teachers.
In commentary about and by teachers over reauthorization of No Child Left Behind you can see only the most recent examples of how teachers are portrayed, and how we portray ourselves, as downtrodden, underappreciated and overworked. For some time, we have cloaked ourselves in a mantle of martyrdom--though this may be fine for the halls of Congress or the bargaining table, it leaves us all pretty miserable on the job.
Teachers didn't always feel like martyrs. We're simply responding to the wildly unrealistic demands that now go with the job. In the last few decades we've had a revolution in our schools that places demands on teachers that few mortals can satisfy for more than short stints. Except when we're compelled to teach scripted lessons (often of questionable quality), we're asked to devise instruction to match learning styles, be culturally sensitive, allow students to construct knowledge on their own (preferably in "cooperative groups" that are rarely all that cooperative), and assess through multiple modalities. We've been told to guide instruction that is sufficiently differentiated to cover a range of student ability and background knowledge, including the range extended by special education students and students whose first language is not English. We're expected to teach critical thinking skills and higher-order thinking, often to children whose knowledge of subject matter is so scant that they have little about which to think critically. We must cope with students for whom failure in school and difficult family circumstances create a witch's brew of bad behavior.
In this context in which we continually come up short, teachers have felt stung by the many critiques of education that have followed the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983. Is it any wonder that we get a little testy when policy-makers and the media point out the many uncomfortable facts about student failure, rather than commending us for being willing to set foot in the contemporary classroom?
Were we succeeding in educating most children, sticking with this approach would make sense. But with only one-third of our children graduating from high school truly prepared for college or the workforce, we need to question the current teaching construct, both for the sake of our students and for our own self-image.
Unfortunately, teachers haven't questioned the construct to date because of two large deterrents: the fear that one's competence will be doubted, and the threat that criticizing the status quo will be portrayed as a traitorous skepticism about the need or capacity of schools to educate the disadvantaged.
The profession as a whole is also reluctant to question this construct, and conveniently enough, it's found that martyrdom is lucrative. Rather than advocate for more realistic, achievable expectations for teacher performance, professional organizations have nurtured heroic expectations, the impossibility of measuring progress towards them, and the inevitable failure to meet them as the basis for increased funding appeals. As I sought traction to improve performance in increasingly diverse advanced math classes, I would have appreciated union advocacy to help clear accountability waters muddied by practices such as regarding borderline and catastrophic student failure as identical and having many students change instructors in full year courses each semester. Instead, my union and school district trumpeted the challenges that I and other teachers faced to lobby for higher salaries that would reward us for attempting to meet them.
Moreover, the implications of this focus go beyond funding. Schooling itself has been molded by this ethos to make the classrooms "bearable" work environments: Teachers demand smaller classes at all grade levels, even when this extremely expensive reform improves student performance only in the primary grades and only for students already performing at a high level. While well-executed projects can be engaging and educational, teachers plan an inordinate amount of activity-based learning because it's easier to keep children occupied than to teach them.
Even more important, we have created classroom environments that make it difficult to advocate for necessary assessments of student and teacher performance, and in which required testing is likelier to generate a "test prep" culture. Even as a strong testing proponent, I share my colleagues' resistance to current standardized testing. It's simply not fair to use standardized tests to evaluate year-end performance of either students or teachers in classrooms in which few students are at grade-level. Nonetheless, the skirmishes waged by many teachers against testing feed into the war, waged on spurious grounds, by those who promote a very plastic definition of "learning." The net result has been a long delay in developing tests based on growth in knowledge that might be fair to use even in today's classrooms.
Teachers have another choice. We could take another road. An ethos based on performance rather than aspirations would be both healthier and ultimately more gratifying for teachers. Establishing realistic expectations for professional performance, demanding the educational infrastructure in which they can be met, and welcoming accountability measures that demonstrate to ourselves and others that we have attained them is a recipe for professional-level salaries and less, not more, professional frustration. Even more important, it is a recipe for more, not less, success in educating our children.
We must develop an ethos that doesn't settle for the rationalization that aspirations count as much as or more than results.
Julie Greenberg is Senior Policy Director for NCTQ.