Fighting the Silver Bullet Approach: An Open Letter to Newsweek

Dear Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert,

When I picked up the March 15 edition of Newsweek to read about "Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers," I was excited to see that its focus was education.  I was disappointed to discover that it did little more than promote the ill-informed, misguided, and destructive contemporary mindset concerning quick fixes to a system that, as you point out yourselves, is enormously diverse in terms of both the communities it serves and the instructional quality it provides.

As someone who’s just beginning my career in education, I’m concerned when I read articles like "Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers" in national periodicals with large readerships.  They have a lot of power to influence our democracy and the decisions we make about educating our children.  And in this case, I find many of the proposed solutions to be off the mark, which should be no surprise when one considers who’s been advocating the ideas you promote.  Over and over again we hear the arguments your article put forth made by people with little to no teaching experience.  They’re most often supplied by education journalists (like you, Ms. Wingert, or Jay Matthews of the Washington Post), educational leaders who are in the business of convincing the public that they’ve found the silver bullet solution to fixing all of education’s problems so that they may keep their positions (like DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who taught for a brief period with TFA, or US Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who never taught at all), or people who have a vested interest in seeing youthful educators teach as a form of AmeriCorps-type service (like TFA founder Wendy Kopp, who, as a young Princeton student, decided she could improve education by training a core of youthful idealists in doing something that she knew nothing about herself: teaching).  I have no doubt that most of these people mean well.  On the surface, without the experience and context of being a teacher, many of these arguments seem reasonable and extraordinarily palatable to lawmakers and the American public.  However, the experience of actually working in the urban classroom and all of the nuances that go along with it have led me to believe that the underlying premise of your article is largely off-base and should be reconsidered.  I’d like to use the remainder of this letter to flesh those disagreements out, and I hope that you’ll seriously consider my experience, and the experiences of thousands of educators like me, before you go on to print arguments similar to the ones you put forth in your most recent article.

There is little evidence that American schools have been declining since some mythical heyday of American education.

In your opening paragraph you contend that there has been a decline in American education in comparison to other nations.  I’m not sure where you gathered this information from, but, as far as I know, the only way we’ve been able to compare ourselves to other countries has been through two tests, the PISA and the TIMSS, neither of which were administered prior to 1995.  And in every round of tests, the performance of the US in comparison to the rest of the world has been extraordinarily mediocre.  Please tell me where you found evidence to suggest that “once upon a time” US students tested better than any other students in the world.

I realize that you need to provide a foundation for your article; you need readers on board with your premise that US schools are bad if you’re going to lead them to your conclusions. But there are better ways to build this foundation. 

As you point out yourselves, one of the many hypotheses for our continued international mediocrity is the extraordinary inequity in terms of access to quality education in the US.  Nobody would argue that we provide a stellar education to ALL students.  Reference the traditional funding gap between rich and poor districts; the common policy of allowing property taxes to account for the majority of money that goes into public schools; the 1973 US Supreme Court Case, San Antonio School District v. Rodriquez, which declared that the US Constitution does not protect against class discrimination; that it’s the American way to allow poor kids to receive fewer resources in their public schools in the same school district than rich kids.  Any one of those pieces of evidence in your opening lines, and I would have been hooked.  You would have had me convinced that schools in the US need improvement, and I’d be ready to move on and listen to your arguments.  Harkening back to a heyday of American education and suggesting that our schools are now only roughly comparable to Lithuania (which, I think most statisticians would tell you, is at least a misuse of the available data) was unnecessary.

There are no silver bullets.

A disturbing trend in education journalism has been the emphasis on quick fixes.  As you point out by referencing New Math and open classrooms, the education system goes through a series of quick-fix ideas decade after decade.  One thing my mentors told me during my first year teaching every time I stressed out about trying to master some new strategy was, “Don’t worry about it.  If you just wait a little while, they'll stop talking about it.” They were right.  The focus on those strategies generally just disappeared.  I sense the same short-term, quick-fix push with arguments for charter schools like KIPP, Teach For America, and firing bad teachers.  Your argument seems to be: If we only hired the top ten percent of college graduates to work in schools like KIPP for a few years and got rid of the older, more jaded teachers, American education would improve drastically. 

Three problems:

1)      Requiring teachers to tutor students every day late into the evening, to give out their phone numbers so that can be reached at home, and to come in on the weekend to work with students means asking them to work 70-90 hours a week for somewhere around 38k.  You’re not a teacher at that point; you’re a candidate for martyrdom.  I know; I’ve been there.  You harass yourself for not doing enough for the kids to the point where you develop a sense of enormous guilt when you realize you’re not making the impact you’d hoped and begin to think you could be more successful in a different career.  And it’s not just teachers at places like KIPP that invest such hours.  Teachers all across the country, especially in the early years of their careers, invest enormous amounts of time trying to figure out what this profession is all about. Many find it unsustainable for more than a few years, especially when these young people decide that they want to have a social life and a family.  You even made this point in your article, but then went on merely to say that it’s like being in the Special Forces, only for a select few.

So your solution to our problems in American education is to create a Special Forces branch of our teacher core and pay them poorly?  You don’t think that we should hire more teachers and support personnel to make education in disadvantaged environments more sustainable? You don’t think we should pay teachers more for their sacrifice in order to provide a greater incentive for top graduates to go into and stay in the teaching profession?  You don’t think that putting more resources into community programs in our inner-cities to lower teenage pregnancy, educating parents on how to raise their children, providing drug counselors for struggling families, and enacting reform in housing development and job creation would go a long way to closing the achievement gap?  My point here is that you, like the rest of our quick-fix advocates, are looking for cosmetic adjustments and refusing to acknowledge the root causes of so much of our students’ academic failures.  It’s so much more palatable your way.  Let’s not do the hard, hard work that may or may not lead to immediate jumps in test scores; let’s go for the relatively cheap solutions that may or may not lead to immediate jumps in test scores (with a better chance that they will since their advocates are in positions to mess with the numbers).

2)      A teacher’s experience should be valued.  The prevailing sentiment, implied by your article, seems to downplay experience in favor of enthusiasm.  Both are important, but let me be clear: teaching is hard, and it’s a true profession that requires hours of study and practice to become good at – i.e. years of experience under the belt of an inspired teacher who has a passion for students is an invaluable thing.  It’s what makes the biggest difference in a teacher’s effectiveness.  If we reorganize our education system so that we’re working with a model that runs young, inexperienced and enthusiastic teachers through a system that doesn’t value experience or expertise (as your article seems to promote), we will lose that experience.  Your article lends credence to a movement that would deprofessionalize a career that desperately needs more respect, not less.

3)      Charter schools have had mixed results.  There are plenty of arguments against them and plenty of arguments for them.  A good school is a good school, regardless of whether it’s a charter school or a traditional public school, and there are plenty of each. 

The arguments you put forth, those in favor of silver bullet solutions, are the arguments we hear from Wendy Kopp (makes sense since the more TFAers there are, the more successful she looks), Michelle Rhee, Jay Matthews, and Arne Duncan.  This is disturbing.  None of these people work with our nation’s children face-to-face on a daily basis, nor do they have to deal with the effects of such policies.

The reality is that there are no quick fixes and no silver bullets.  Providing a quality education (especially in our most challenged environments) is hard, unrelenting work that will sometimes provide immediate results (like higher test scores or graduation rates) and sometimes will not.  Unfortunately we live in a society that demands immediate gratification, and in the arena of education, that means higher test scores.  But in a challenged community like Central Falls, RI, you don’t achieve long-term higher achievement in just a few years, and you don’t achieve it without looking at some of the more fundamental causes of poor achievement.  I think it’s unfortunate that you suggest that firing ALL of the teachers is a step in the right direction.  It was also disheartening to hear Secretary Duncan and President Obama support the decision.

Firing bad teachers should not be our focus.

I agree that a major problem in American education is teachers who should be doing something else with their lives.  I’ve run into more than a few of them in my limited experience teaching.  And I agree that getting these people out of teaching could greatly benefit thousands of students across the country.  However, I’m afraid there are a few problems in making this the focus of our educational reform efforts.

1)      There is widespread disagreement over what good teaching really is.  There are a multitude of teaching styles and personalities that might be considered “effective.”  However, the only real way to gauge whether a teacher is doing their job or not is to attempt to measure their impact on students.  Unfortunately, the only way we know how to do this in the US is through the use of standardized tests, which, in most states/districts, only asses two or three subject areas and are riddled with problems. 

This past year, my effectiveness as a world history teacher was judged based on how well I was preparing students for the English test (since world history is not tested and therefore does not impact the school’s statistics).  I was told by administrators (who risked losing their jobs if test scores dropped) to spend less time focusing on history and more time focused on literacy.  My ratings were based on it, and my job depended on it.  I was, in effect, not allowed to effectively teach my content area so that I could be rated as “effective.”

The numerous pitfalls with standardized testing are what make Florida Senate Bill 6 so scary for educators, and it’s articles like yours that provide fuel to the lawmakers that would suggest such a bill.  Tying teachers' pay and job security to student performance is not a recipe for long-term, widespread success.  The results of this bill will be the increasing draw of young, inexperienced teachers to schools and states that treat their teachers with the lack of respect Florida Senate Bill 6 demands and the fleeing of experienced, more professional teachers to schools that appreciate their experience and professionalism.

2)      A focus on firing teachers will not have changed anything about the way that we recruit and train incoming teachers.  As a result, a continued focus on firing bad teachers will dominate our efforts as we would presumably continue to bring the same proportion of lame ducks into the profession.  A much more effective method of transforming our teaching force would begin by requiring all teachers to do a 1-2 year residency program at an excellent school under the guidance of a master teacher.  I would additionally advocate paying teachers more to start off in order to draw more people into the profession.  I can’t tell you how many people I talked to in college who told me that they were going into teaching because they didn’t know what else to do OR how many very intelligent people told me they wouldn’t consider education because it didn’t pay well.  The unfortunate reality in our society is that prestige and status depend largely on how much you make.  If you want to change the image of teaching, and thus the people who go into the profession, you’re going to have to change the amount they make to start out.

I can hear the response to my arguments: “You teachers just don’t want to be held accountable for your teaching.” Nothing could be further from the truth in my experience.  Good teachers hold themselves more responsible for their students learning than they probably should.  A well-trained teacher assesses their students day after day and works continuously to meet the needs of his or her students.  I doubt many would resent a fair assessment method that takes into account their students’ backgrounds and willingness to participate in the classroom.  Unfortunately, standardized testing doesn’t do that.

Ultimately, the biggest problems in American education include our democracy’s lack of concern for the quality of education being provided to our most disadvantaged communities, the direction of education organizations by politicians with little to no experience in education (see the recently publicized Texas Board of Education), and our predisposition for quick fixes and immediate gratification when it comes to overcoming large-scale political challenges.  None of these, however, were mentioned in your article.

I hope you have read this letter in its entirety and will consider the nuances it raises concerning education reform that you overlooked in your article prior to writing anything further on the topic.  I would be pleased if journalists and policy leaders could be more considerate of the real-world classroom environment encountered on a daily basis by teachers across the country in this debate, and I think our democracy would be far better served were that the reality.  I realize that you write articles as a means of generating income (and necessarily have to produce something that aligns with your editors' and readers' dispositions), but a more careful consideration of the consequences of such articles would be beneficial. 

I thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

The Reflective Educator