Obama and Education

I have been outraged about this all day. I get my news from the Google news headlines. Every now and then, I come across an article that I want to read (in the few spare minutes I have at lunch). That happened today. Ever since I read the first headline about Obama's wonderful new plan for education, I've been wondering how such a naive, stupid person became our president.

First of all, merit pay for teachers. That is, implementing "a system that rewards our best teachers with more pay for their excellence in the classroom," measured by student performance on standardized tests. Ridiculous. Put quite simply, it doesn't work. Teacher unions don't like it because they say it pits teachers against each other as competitors instead of collaborators. I say that's the least of our problems. Basing our salary on how well our students perform on standardized tests makes no sense. There are too many factors out of our control - how much sleep the kid got the night before, hunger, test anxiety, limited English proficiency, learning disabilities, etc. I can differentiate and account for those differences in my teaching, but I don't have that flexibility when administering a standardized test. Should I, as the teacher, be penalized because half of my students don't speak English? Should I, as the teacher, be penalized because some of my students were kept awake by drunk family members the night before the test? Obama says that merit pay does work and that the rest of us are just dumb idiots: "Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom." Well, if so many of your supporters are opposed to it, maybe you should take a look at the reasons why.

Obama also wants to give private school vouchers for parents who want the option of not having their children attend public school. I say he can go ahead and do it, but expect a drop in test scores. Public schools will be losing the best students, and are left with the ones who have uninvolved parents (by choice or by circumstance) and who don't stand a chance against the "upper-class white student" standardized tests that we have. Test scores will drop across the board.

He also wants to extend the reach of charter schools. I have a simple equation: charter schools = evil. Of course, charter schools do better on testing. There is no accountability, and they can pick and choose their students. As a result, they get more money because of their "excellence" and the public schools once again lose the war for resources. Yet, public schools are the schools that need it most desperately.

The only thing he said that made sense was revamping No Child Left Behind to implement more uniform and rigorous standards nation-wide. That's a good thing! Now, give us teachers a reasonable timeline to accomplish that. Obviously 8 years wasn't enough. Give us 15 years. We will get there, but it's going to take some time.

Supposedly, in Obama's stimulus package, was money set aside for education use. Guess which schools and districts are going to receive the bulk of that money? You guessed it: the well-performing ones. "The money is conditioned on results." Reward the well-performing schools . Looks good on paper, but is an asinine idea. Crumbling schools with poor teachers need the resources to become well-performing schools, but they can't get those resources because they aren't already well-performing. They have to prove progress to get money, but they need the money first to make progress. It's backwards. Where are they going to get the money they need to implement programs that work? Where are they going to get the money to turn their schools around? They aren't. The gap between well-performing students and poor-performing students will continue to grow because all the money is going as a reward to the well-performing students and the rest are being left behind.

The last thing Obama wants to do (that I read about): is extend the school day and the school year. "The challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom. If they can do that in South Korea, we can do that right here in the United States of America." Since when did we care what they do in South Korea? Their teachers spend less time actually teaching than we do. The majority of their days are spent on collaborative planning and professional development. We don't need to extend the school day or the school year! Just give us sufficient resources in the time we have!

Mr. President, please listen to the teachers! Listen to the ones who are out there in the trenches every day. Please don't make a horrible mistake!