Education is not one size fits all

Attached is the retirement letter of a 40 year teacher who laments how the education system is failing our children with reforms that demean teachers. Coming from a family of teachers, I can see his point. While the current reforms may be great for burnt out teachers who mail it in, and can excel in the reform system of teaching to the test now in place, it must be maddening for those who went into teaching for the love of sharing what they have learned with younger generations.

I had some wonderful teachers when I went to school in the 1970s and 80s (and more than a few duds). For the ones that simply phoned it and taught to the test there were others who conveyed their love of the materials they were teaching us to get us interested in the discussion. Almost 30 years after high school, many of the details are long gone, but I still remember the hobbit English teacher, explaining the Hobbit trilogy and Mice and Men (that may have been for a different class) or the social studies teachers who used drawings on the blackboard to bring life to the industrial revolution. I recall classes that let us wander with reports, classes that would be so much better now with much easier access to information that can be obtained almost instantly.

I used to believe "No Child Left Behind" was enacted with good intentions and what we see now, such as teaching to the test, are unforeseen consequences. Now I wonder if what we are seeing today WAS foreseen and is exactly what the proponents of this law wanted. Already we are seeing our college graduating students chained to jobs because they need to pay back soul crushing college debt unable to speak out for fear of losing that necessary job. However, they realize they have been wronged. The next generation won't.  

My children are in school now and while I believe their teachers are dedicated and creative, I have seen them teaching to the test. And while they are still at an age where they don't really question what they learn, I fear they never will. Worse, I feel they will not let them learn the basics that will allow them to do followup reading when they are older. I may never have read, for example, a series of books about Theodore Roosevelt as an adult if I wasn't entranced by stories of him as a child battling asthma and boxing in the White House when I was in school. We can only hope that true reformers step in to teach our children how ideas are developed and tested and aren't dissuaded  by those who profit from the status quo before it is too late. 

And before you get the wrong idea, standardized testing isn't the problem - teachers should be held to some level of accountability and a simple basement standard may only be found through standardized tests. It is taking the concept of standardized testing too far that has created an inflexible system that doesn't really accomplish anything, aside from giving corporations,  such as the standardized testing companies, looking to make money over making sure our children are educated, a nice pay day. And we can't lay all the blame on the test companies without first looking at ourselves. After all we wanted this, didn't we? Oh we may have had good intentions, making sure all our children were equally educated, but this has devolved into something more, as things usually do when money is involved.

We spend our time cramming students with testing strategies and other efforts to improve a child’s ability to do well on a standardized test. We all want to see our town with a high score; that means we have  a ”good school system.” Not only will our housing values go up, but so will our property taxes, which coincidentally finance the schools, thereby providing them with more money - a vicious circle that benefits homeowners, municipalities, bankers and realtors, but not necessarily our children.   if you’re in a “good system.” It means that others will want to move to your area because of your “good school system.”

More troubling though, is the the though that this inflexibility is what the powers that be want -- a citizenship without the ability to question what they are told, without the ability to think of alternatives, to not even know how to question which is what this inflexibility is leading to. We are willingly and silently indoctrinating and conditioning our children to think there is nothing better than America.  Shame on us all for simply selling off what was the greatest experiment in human history to the highest bidder.