By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor
(On 21 Feb. 2013, Bonnie Bracey Sutton, ETCJ associate editor, shared Valerie Strauss’s “U.S. Teachers’ Job Satisfaction Craters — Report” [Washington Post, 21 Feb. 2013] in our staff listserv. In response, I posted the following comment, which I’ve revised for this publication. -js)
Thanks, Bonnie, for sharing these stats. With teacher morale so low, the outlook for U.S. schools is bleak. For me, the elephant in the room is the impact of poverty. As a nation, we can’t continue to blame teachers for the consequences of poverty. We can’t expect them to resolve the causes of poverty. This is and always has been a social issue — not a pedagogical one.
What’s the answer?
For me, reading between the numbers, it means we ought to stop pushing highstakes testing and the common core. We need to allow teachers to do their job. They’re trained to determine where their students are and where they could be in terms of their classes, and for each student and each class, the profiles vary widely. This “diagnosis” is not only academic. In many if not most cases, it includes affective factors. Thus for variable portions of their classes, the teacher’s challenge may be motivation, attitude, rather than academics. For example, in writing instruction, the hurdle may be pull rather than push. How to attract students to writing may be the primary question — not how to push them toward earning higher scores on a standardized test that purports to measure writing competence.
To generate pull, teachers may decide to put their red pencils down and work with the language that students bring from their homes and neighborhoods. It may not be pretty in terms of common core standards, but it’s the reality. Preliminary goals may be to simply get students to enjoy writing and sharing their interests and concerns, in their most intimate and affective language. Giving them personally meaningful reasons for learning to write may be the fundamental pull that’s necessary to gradually incorporate the pushing of our beloved standards. We must find ways to recognize and reward teachers who are able to pull, to motivate, to change attitudes rather than simply move the needle in standardized tests.
Bonnie has been saying this for years. STEM must begin with a pull toward science etc. And for some student populations, the key is definitely out in the field, in museums, on day trips, at fairs. Frank Withrow has mentioned in countless articles the pull potential of NASA programs, educational TV programs, websites designed to combine play and learning. Harry Keller, ETCJ science editor, has spent the better part of his professional career creating online lab activities that engage students in personally gathering and manipulating data.
Harry, in one of his listserv messages, says that the buck must stop with teachers. He’s right. But to hold them accountable, we must empower rather than hogtie them, allow them to set goals and learning schedules that fit their populations. And most critically, as Bonnie continues to remind us, we must provide teachers with the resources they need to create the kind of pull that inspires students to want to learn.
But none of this would work without parent, principal, school board, and community buy in. We all have to be on the same page. For many teachers, the primary problem is getting students to want to learn. Teaching them how to learn is secondary. In some cases, especially where poverty reigns, simply getting students to show up in class prepared to learn is the greatest challenge. Health, nutrition, hygiene, personal safety, school supplies may be the primary obstacles.
With so much on their plates, teachers need everyone’s help to do their job. We need to listen to them — not, as Bonnie continues to remind us, politicians and journalists and business leaders and other so-called experts who haven’t spent at least a year in the shoes of a teacher in a classroom full of students who are victims of the poverty syndrome.
In the final analysis, better test scores are a poor reward for teachers who find their calling in the love of learning. Students don’t learn and develop in a lockstep continuum. Like an open marathon, they’re spread out over a wide range of circumstantial abilities. To finish, the amount of time required varies widely in a single race and over many races. The student who walks rather than runs can also succeed, and we need to honor the teacher who is able to inspire the student to stay the course, to inspire the student to enter other marathons and gradually improve her/his performance.
Filed under: Instruction, K-12 Schools, Teacher Training |
John Mark Walker: "If educational communities can continue to push platform integration and content portability, in the future, students may be able to design their own personalized degrees from smaller, modular chunks that cross institutional barriers" (
Richard Koubek
Judith McDaniel
Tim Fraser-Bumatay: "Although the format leaves us far-removed physically, the online forum has its own sense of intimacy" (Judith McDaniel, "
Ryan Kelly: "For me to be able to work with people clear across the country for an extended period of time opened me up to new things" (Judith McDaniel, "
Daniel Herrera: "As a Mexican American, I know that words of identity are powerful; so to discuss white privilege with my professor and classmates in a face-to-face class would have been terrifying and impossible" (Judith McDaniel, "
Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (
Educational Technology and Change Journal 
What a great job you did in explaining, sharing, pointing out the problems we talk about
Let’s hope that some others will join us in using reality to help solve the problem. Valerie had a new essay today. I liked the part where the person talked about all of the “experts” who were telling him how to teach who had absolutely NO teaching experience.Going to school does NOT qualify one to be an expert in teaching and learning.
I find it interesting that some people think that two years of teaching is enough to understand and get the hang of teaching. Common core, the variables of the subject matter areas, the curriculum delivery and the understanding of the learning process take time.
There are so many learning landscapes, so many variables of learning.
Even in the best of circumstances there are individual problems.
There are schools that have the best of resources , and for whom the students seem to get a fair shake in trying to get learning accomplished, but .. but… let’s wait to see what others say.
We know this is my soapbox.
I had the privilege of serving with some people on a national commission and they listened, learned and got it that we have a lot of ways in which we can educate. Children are not cut out like cookie cutters , at a grade level… all arriving at an age level, learning ready. I wish Seymour Papert could respond, but we know what he would say.
Experts should be made to demonstrate their skill. I have worked with some experts with really, really good ideas that do not translate in reality to the classroom for most students and certainly not for teachers. I understand why they do not know .. it is that they are idea people ,never having to demonstrate that what they say works. Many people shout from the mountaintops and then go on to share their ideas at another mountaintop without proving that their method works.
Poverty is a cancer on the culture. It drains energy; it drains spirit.
And so we come to the challenge of overcoming hopelessness and despair.
That means the journey we are on is fundamentally a spiritual journey, not an economic one or a political one or an educational one.
There is a way to infuse and restore enthusiasm into the process.
Enthusiasm cannot be taught, but it can be inspired. Enthusiasm is contagious.