OPINION: Teachers need assistance to do jobs properly

The profession of teaching requires life-long learning. In fact, there is no way, in a single lifetime, that a teacher can learn as much as one needs to know about the subject one teaches and about how young people learn. (That’s one of the attractions of the job.) Professionals need to be self-directed with the freedom to experiment. Continuing learning is essential for teachers, but teachers in the United States spend more hours each week teaching in the classroom and fewer hours in professional development than those in any other industrialized country.

The best forms of professional development for teachers come from those who are already in the schools, not from outside sources who have likely never been in a classroom. Continuing learning is most effective in interaction and collaboration with other teachers both in one’s field and in other fields.

The underfunding of professional development is a handicap our teachers have to make the best of. Ask any educator what the major challenge is in providing the effective professional learning needed to implement Common Core State Standards, and the answer is the same: Time.

In many high schools several times as much money is spent per student on athletics than is spent per student on academic subjects. One reason for the high cost of athletics is the high teacher/student ratio so that students in athletics can get individual attention. The countries we seem to envy because of their higher international PISA scores have no athletics in the schools. All of their school tax money goes to academics. One wonders what would happen to math scores if the same amount of individual attention given to athletes was lavished in a math class.

That’s not the end of the difficulties. Professional teachers must be defended against the obscene paper straightjacket of standardized tests. Teachers lose 60 to 110 hours of instructional time each year dealing with standardized testing and the clerical work surrounding it. Why must we cram teachers into the same bureaucratic paperwork strait-jacket that we are putting on physicians? Taking evaluation away from teachers decreases the quality of education. The effort that goes into standardized testing should be put into providing teachers with the wherewithal to do their own evaluations.

The educational purpose, rather than the totalitarian purpose, of testing and assessment is to inform the teacher, student, and parents of both the progress and needs of the students so that appropriate next steps can be taken. There is no educational value in tests given at the end of the year when it is too late for the teacher to work on deficiencies. However, testing that informs teacher, students and parents is an essential ingredient in quality education. The jargon term for it is formative assessment. Formative assessment gives the teacher a continuing understanding of student progress or lack of it so the teacher can use professional development to know where to go next. The time for formative assessment needs to be provided by funding.

Standardized tests undermine education in another way. They treat all students as the same. They don’t take into account some basic facts. For instance, a recent study found that, at age 3, children of white-collar parents have a working vocabulary of 1,116 words; children of working-class families know 749 words, and children of people on welfare know 525 words. The disparity continues into school years. Treating all these kids the same with the standardized test crushes some kids. Only a teacher, face to face with students, can compensate for the handicaps some kids bring to school.

Also essential to the professional development of professionals is the national professional organization which informs its members of advances in the field. The Legislature should include funds for membership in the national profession organization of all teachers including journal subscriptions and convention travel.

When end-of-the-year test scores are used to fire principals and teachers, education is corrupted because passing the tests becomes the purpose of schools. Passing tests, however, should never be confused with getting education. The tests tell us nothing about how a student thinks, how much they understand about history or science or literature, or how prepared they are to cast their votes carefully or serve as jurors.

Under the gun, teachers waste educational time on drilling students on how to take tests, but taking standardized tests is one thing the students will never do in the real world. It is not surprising that one result of No Child Left Behind testing has been rampant cheating. The evaluation of teachers is the responsibility not of standardized tests but of principals and senior faculty. Reliable evaluation involves multiple kinds of evidence such as student work portfolios and student engagement in challenging work. In order to evaluate teachers, principals and senior faculty need to be provided with funds for classroom visits and evaluation of student work.

Under all of this standardized testing and imposed curriculum there is something sinister. Something that threatens to take control of the classroom away from the public and professional teachers and give it to a coterie of corporate and government bureaucrats.

Bill Gates, who is very involved in education and who has never taught one hour in a classroom, inadvertently gave away the underlying purpose of Common Core in a 2010 speech to the National Conference of State Legislatures. He said that testing companies are receiving $350 million  from the Department of Education to create tests — “next generation assessments aligned to the common core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well — and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time there will be a  large base of customers eager to buy products…”

This top-down, totalitarian assumption is that schools can be improved by outside directives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core and, at the same time, provide a nice profit. These measures are destructive to quality education, but what a lovely profit can one get from having captive customers!

But schools can only be improved by professional teachers, on the job, in close touch with students, teachers who are free to use their talents and skills in collaboration with their colleagues. It is the job of those outside the schools to give them adequate resources; it is not their job to gorge themselves on profit from taxpayer-supported public schools.

So, what can the public do? The Legislature can begin by doing something that will make a significant difference. Today school funding comes from several sources. Most of the money comes from property tax and state income tax. The preponderance comes form the property tax. The Legislature can reverse that ratio. That is, transfer the preponderance of the school tax from property tax to the graduated income tax (benefiting home ownership on the side).

Levying the school tax on property is archaic and should be brought up to date. It was imposed before there was a graduated income tax. No need for new income taxes, just put the upper tax brackets back up a few percentage points to where they were a few years ago and add an additional point, if required, to cover the cost of adequate professional development and formative assessment. (Of course, we won’t go all the way back to the 90 percent top income tax rate of the prosperous 1950s and ’60s.) What argument is there against asking upper income people who have had the greatest benefit from free public education to shoulder the major burden of improving instruction? And who can argue against property tax relief?

But let’s always remember this. Here in Montana we have excellent schools. There is one reason for it. We have excellent teachers. We must keep their support and control with the public and keep it away from a coalition of corporate and government bureaucrats.

O’Neil is a resident of Kalispell.