Mission Impossible: Teaching
Plus: Tennessee Repackages a Terrible Idea
Educator Ellen Dahlke talks about the challenges teachers are facing this year - again, in some cases, the pandemic has accelerated or highlighted challenges educators were already facing. Here’s some of what she has to say:
The problem is teachers are not mental health professionals, and schools can’t or won’t budget for kids’ mental health needs. Nonetheless, children won’t thrive academically until their physiological and safety needs are met (e.g. food, housing, safety from bullying and other violence, etc.). We let shameful numbers of our children rot away in school all day, while horrified but largely helpless adults attempt to offer them something helpful.
Anyway here we are, three months back in the buildings full-time: School and district administrators are doing a bad job at the work public health administrators do, and teachers are doing a bad job at caring for children’s mental health. Predictably, kids are failing a lot of classes because they can’t figure out why they’re not motivated to do anything at all.
I’d desperately like to stay in my lane and let a whooole other field of professionals do what they do — because they devoted years of careful study, research, and practice to subjects like psychology, community organizing, and mental health care when I was devoting mine to subjects like literature, language, and curriculum design. I’m so cosmically tired, and it’s only November. I’ve been getting these migraines with nausea and vomiting every week or so. The migraines are debilitating, but there aren’t enough substitute teachers (anywhere), so it’s difficult to take time off with confidence that an adult will be with my classes while I’m gone.
I’m a teacher, and I can’t live like this. | by Ellen Dahlke | Nov, 2021 | Medium
Other educators are also sounding the alarm. Jena Benton recently noted:
We are short staffed, even with substitute teachers. There are no subs. So they pull the specialists to cover classrooms and cancel gym or library or whatever. Kids get no break and teachers lose planning time. Again. Preschool and SPED TAs are also pulled to teach. What does that say about all the training and education I had to do to get this job? Basically this: anyone can cover a classroom because the system is desperate to keep it going.
So, of course all these alarm bells being sounded by teachers will result in policymakers changing course - building in the supports students and teachers need to be successful, right? Wrong. Nashville education blogger TC Weber reports on Tennessee’s efforts to repackage that state’s failed school turnaround model.
In the case of the ASD, legislators decided to move the failing program from an off-broadway production and bring it on to the big stage. To do so, they are going to recast the whole production, out go the current crop of underperforming actors, and a whole new lot will be cast in the starring roles of turnaround schools.
Of course, while proceeding down this path we’ll neglect that the “turnaround school” designation is an adult concept created so people can write “turnaround specialist” on their resume. After all, “turn-around specialists” command a higher salary than your run-of-the-mill high-quality educator. Not as much as a “trauma-informed” educator, but any leverage is good leverage.
Don’t believe me? Define when a school is considered “turned around”? If a school improves its test numbers and then after 2 years reverts back to its previous numbers, was it ever turned around?
Since school outputs are generally related to the socio-economic status of their communities, that reversing happens quite often. I encourage you to go look at the district report cards supplied by the state that give you a trajectory of scores for a number of years. Scores go up a few points, then go back down, then maybe rise a little again, but the level stays pretty consistent with a few wild swings.
If anybody had any sense about them, the whole ASD production would be shut down. Relegated to the history books as a lesson of what not to do. But since too many legislators don’t believe that people will do the right thing unless you force them to, and they like having the vulture glaring over educator’s shoulders, the program limps on.
More on the failed Achievement School District:
Underachievement and Mission Creep
Gary Rubinstein noted of the ASD:
Since 2011 I have been following the biggest, and most predictable, disasters of the education reform movement — the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD). It was formed in a perfect storm of reform theory. First, Tennessee won Race To The Top money. Then they hired a TFA-alum and the ex-husband of Michelle Rhee, Kevin Huffman to be their state commissioner. Then he hired TFA-alum and charter school founder Chris Barbic to design and run the ASD. The initial promise of the ASD was that they would take schools in the bottom 5% and convert them into charter schools in order to ‘catapult’ them into the top 25% in five years. They started with 6 schools in 2012 and grew to over 30 schools within a few years.
They completely failed at this mission. Chris Barbic resigned, Kevin Huffman resigned, Barbic’s replacement resigned, Barbic’s replacement’s replacement resigned. Of the 30 schools they nearly all stayed in the bottom 5% except a few that catapulted into the bottom 10%.
Teachers are begging for help - not just more pay and better working conditions, but HELP - and they aren’t getting it. Instead, those making the policies around our public schools are repackaging failed “solutions” that make enterprising edu-preneurs rich while leaving kids and communities behind. It’s telling that in the North Carolina school funding “victory” in the courts, the end result may well be that there is no new funding forthcoming.
When policymakers have the resources to invest in schools and the students that depend on them - when they are hearing warnings from frontline practitioners and ignoring them - they are making a clear choice.
As Dahlke suggests:
Children deserve to have food, housing, health care, and safety from physical and emotional violence. Children also deserve to be challenged intellectually and creatively in community with other kids and adults. Children need us adults to allocate their time (and our money) accordingly. Not to do so is lowkey mass homicidal. As a species, we literally cannot live like this.