Obama's Disappointing Blueprint for Reform
By Leonie Haimson & Julie Woestehoff
This is a long, excellent piece; it was difficult to choose a small portion to post. I hope you will read it all. I'm a teacher, and I'm also a parent, and a grandparent of a public school student. While the current direction public ed policy is taking is disheartening, I can't tell you how heartening it is to know that there are parents who have the same concerns that I, as a teacher do.
It refers to the Obama administration’s "blueprint for reform," the effort to reauthorize ESEA/NCLB, which can be found here:
http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/blueprint.pdfWe object to the reform blueprint’s focus on privatization and its push to radically expand the charter school sector. Though some charters may offer students a quality education, one of the largest national studies shows they are, on average, no better, and frequently worse, than neighboring regular public schools. Charters also draw money, space, and other resources from district schools, while enrolling fewer of their communities’ immigrant, special-needs, and poor children.
The punitive approaches proposed by the administration are also likely to deter rather than attract qualified teachers to work in the highest-need schools. Blaming teachers and threatening them with the loss of their jobs in underresourced, overcrowded schools that enroll the most at-risk students is like blaming doctors for all the problems of our inequitable health-care system, and it will lead to even greater inequities in the distribution of experienced teachers.
Tying teacher pay and tenure to gains or losses in students’ standardized-test scores will make the prospect of teaching in inner cities less attractive. According to the National Academy of Sciences, such tests are also a highly unreliable basis for judging teachers. Too many schools have already become joyless test-prep factories, rather than centers of real learning. All children, especially those in inner cities whose parents cannot afford to supplement their schooling, need and deserve a full complement of social studies, science, arts, and physical education. Yet these subjects are being driven out of the curriculum by the high-stakes testing regime imposed in recent years. The Obama blueprint pays lip service to the need for a well-rounded education, but its proposals to link teacher evaluation and pay to the results of high-stakes exams are likely to make a bad situation even worse.
Finally, this blueprint pays almost no attention to the need to address enormous disparities in funding across and within states, saying only that “states will be asked to measure and report on resource disparities and develop a plan to tackle them.” In a plan filled with heavy-handed threats and promises of financial windfalls for states that adhere to the administration’s preferred approaches of closing schools, firing teachers, tying their pay to test scores, and opening more charters, this statement seems to be a mere afterthought, with no consequences attached.
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/16/35haimson.h29.html?qs=Woestehoff
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