“Certainly, attempts by a variety of stakeholders to effectively teacher-proof public school curricula have influenced contemporary notions on the work of a teacher, and the role of a teacher in knowledge sharing and production. An overly cynical view is that the work of an educator is so undervalued, so disempowered, that teaching has been reduced to another cog in the reproductive school-machine. Of course, your blog post can take up this view, but more needed, perhaps, are writings that re-vision and reimagine what it means to teach, now” (Tuck, discussion post, 2011)
Before I proceed any further with my blog post, I must admit something: to some degree, I am one of those individuals who regards the current state of American education with utter dismay and no small sense of despair. I have a few theories about why the state of American education is so dismal, and will discuss them here. I will then propose how the system might possibly be changed and reimagined.
To put it bluntly, one of the main reasons that the public school systems are failing is that, on the whole, education, teachers, and teaching is not something that is truly valued in this country. In America, teaching is work that is more or less considered “easy” and something that anyone can do. Moreover, my personal experience has been that so many Americans feel that since they’ve all been to school and all had teachers, they know how to teach. And yet, on its face, this line of reasoning makes no sense, and is the equivalent of someone thinking, “Hey, I’ve had surgery. That means that I know how to do it! Pass me that big scalpel.”
Programs like Teach for America, while excellent in a number of ways, hold college recruitment sessions in which representatives say, “Don’t know what you really want to do with your life? Why not teach for awhile?” Meanwhile, I’ve heard the statement, “Those who can’t, teach” uttered on more than one occasion.
In my own teaching experience, I’ve had parents express the view that teaching is easy and anyone can do it, along with the proclamation that they personally know all there is to know about the profession. I’ve had parents blatantly and unabashedly interrupt the schoolday by insisting on throwing their child a birthday party in my classroom and I’ve had parents barge into the school during the day with a new family pet so that all the children could see. All such invasions are nothing short of disrupting another person’s work, yet I would be given awfully short shrift if I did the same thing to the offending parents, i.e. “Excuse me, but I know all about law, and I don’t feel that you are arguing this case correctly.”
From a political standpoint, school budgets are always one of the first things on the chopping block and it is always the school systems that can least afford cuts that suffer the most. In New York City, thousands of teachers are losing their jobs, but programs like the New York City Teaching Fellowship and the New York City Teaching Residency are placing young, thoroughly untrained individuals in the classroom with very little guidance, paying them much less than what many of the laid-off teachers made, and expecting them to perform. Though there are many positive aspects to these programs, having unprepared individuals parachuted into a tough, urban school setting has the potential to be a demoralizing experience and has the potential to shortchange both the students as well as the teaching fellow.
Jonathan Kozol wrote his searing expose Savage Inequalities twenty-years ago and has been discussing the problems of “separate but unequal” education for years. Yet there are far too many school systems in this country that exhibit the same appalling conditions that Kozol presented in 1991. How can this be?
While other countries like Finland (which has been able to turn around what was once a poorly functioning system in a matter of decades and now boasts the world’s top rated education), Japan, Canada, and South Korea have been able to consistently produce highly educated citizens, for a developed country, the U.S. considerably lags behind.
How can positive, effective, and permanent change take place? One thing that needs to happen is that teaching needs to be nationally recognized as a highly important and skilled profession, not something that just “anyone can do.”
Since the Finnish school system was in dire straits as late as a few decades ago, looking at the steps that were taken to institute change in Finland is helpful.
First of all, in Finland, parents respect teachers and value education.
Teachers do not begin teaching until they have undergone a certain level of training and all must obtain master’s degrees. The training that teachers undergo does not drastically vary from one person to another and is based on a solid educational approach and foundation. One issue we have here in America is that teachers are entering the field with dramatically different levels and quality of education. While there are definitely many instructors who are extremely well versed in their field and extraordinary at what they do, there are also teachers that did not learn much in terms of exactly how to teach. There are teachers in American classrooms who cannot write well, perhaps cannot read well, do not employ correct rules of grammar, know nothing about classroom management, and think nothing of traumatizing children. This, in turn, does not provide students with the best of role models.
In Finland, there is a set, standard curriculum that was agreed upon and recorded in the Education Constitution. All students are provided with a bi-lingual education and at a very young age can speak both Swedish and Finnish. Children coming from other cultures are taken into consideration in the Constitution and are able to be educated in their own language before fully entering the Finnish system.
Finnish children attend extremely well-run and intellectually stimulating preschools that are of high caliber and available to virtually all citizens. As a result of this, parents do not have to worry about childcare and children officially enter standard school having already been exposed to a certain level and quality of education.
Finally, the educational approach in Finland is one that is dynamic, interesting, and takes into consideration multiple intelligences.
In order for American education to reach its full potential, a massive overhaul of politics, values, and priorities must take place, one that results in a desire to give all American children the best start they can possibly have in life.
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