I was inspired this morning by an article in the L.A. Times given to me by a colleague...
Imagine for a moment that you wake up at five-thirty every morning and drive to work. You work with about thirty clients for six to seven hours on a variety of projects. After work you take projects home to guide your plans for the clients the following day. You repeat this process for nine to ten months of the year. Then, your clients are given four to five days to complete a project independently. If they do well on the project then you keep your job or get a raise, if they do poorly than you lose your job or are penalized. None of the work you did the rest of the year matters. All that your boss looks at is the project completed by your clients on those four or five days. Maybe they didn't sleep the night before, maybe they had a fight with their family, or maybe they just didn't care about the project. None of those facts matter. If they didn't complete the task they way your boss wanted then you fail.
One last thing, the clients are between the ages of seven and eighteen. Would you want their work from four or five days of their life to be singularly weighed as the "value" you offer as an employee? This is the fate that soon awaits teachers. Gone are days where the focus of education is on the education of the whole person or teaching life, communication, or social skills. Students' success on one test will determine a teacher's success or failure.
This is value added in a nutshell: a teacher's ability to increase a child's performance on one test in one year compared against the student's peers is the "value" added to the child. If the child's performance on the test falls compared to that of their peers than the teacher decreased the child's "value". Districts want this "value added" data to drive decisions about teacher retention and pay.
Teachers should be held accountable for the success and failures of their students, but this type of measurement is wrong-minded. Any type of system that doesn't assume inherent "value" in our children for more than just a test sore should cause parents to cry foul. I know that I don't want my son's "value" to be determined by how he did on one test for just a few days of the year. Academic performance should be measured, but it should not be the only measure, and it should certainly not be the criteria for determining the value of our children. Yet, this is the way education is heading. A child's sole value to society is their performance on one test, and the solitary measure of an educator is their ability to make a child achieve on that one test. Wow!
Despite this trend, teachers still show up to work. They don't only show up, but they dedicate their lives to the students they serve working nights and weekends, and spending their own money to make up for continually declining budgets. However, with all they have to face today who knows how long we will continue to show up. Fifty percent of teachers leave the profession the first five years. Society often discusses teachers as the low end of a college graduating class who couldn't find anything else to do ( I can vouch for myself and many other teachers who graduated in the top percent of their graduating classes). With all they have to face who do you expect to attract to this profession upon which the success of our future generations depends?
So lets say a teacher sticks it out and they don't give in to the stress and make it past five years. They hone their craft. They continue to develop as a professional educator. They collaborate with their colleagues. They obtain advanced degrees. They touch children's lives and teach them to think and laugh and to appreciate their education. They add "value" to society, not the kind measured by a test but the kind measured by their impact on the lives of the children they inspire and empower. After all that they get a pink slip.
Maybe its time we all start to rethink out definition of "value".
No comments:
Post a Comment