There is a perfect storm coming that could create an opportunity for states and thereby local school districts to enact reforms for our failing schools. I am referring to a massive shortage of teachers. As stated in my first post, our education system is resistant to any and all reforms. The present culture wars which have awakened so many parents with their discovery of just how extreme their schools have become, have resulted in a public battle for the minds and the hearts of the children, even their safety and wellness. With parents taking ownership in some communities not only is it more possible to bring back common sense, but redo the entire damn thing top to bottom. Teacher salaries being a major school budget expenditure, parents have a right to demand that schools not just put warm bodies in all those openings.
Taking on the use of laws and ordinances to make the teaching of Critical Race Theory and sexuality unlawful, states like Florida address primarily what needs to be eliminated, but except for a short list of what needs to be now included the overall vision, and intent of learning goes unaddressed. That so many teachers have chosen to leave teaching and so few will now consider the teaching profession presents the long overdue discussion of how the “system” is antithetical to effective teaching. The top-down system is also mindless, heartless and less teacher-friendly than most parents know. The economics of teaching on its own will continue to keep most qualified individuals from choosing the profession. But as was the reality when I chose to become a teacher in midlife with a mission to teach, not teaching as a job, but teaching as a calling, the system, beginning with the head of the education department at my college, worked against me. Rather than hire adults who have experience in the field of study, school administrators would much rather teach, young and life-inexperienced youngsters right out of undergraduate teaching programs who will do exactly what they are told.
The Five Essentisl Reasons for the Failure of School Reforms
Paper by Joseph Murphy, Journal of Human Resource and Sustainable Studies, Jan. 2020
My second teaching position after not getting tenure at an urban Catholic High School with high demands and low salary and benefits was in the top performing high school at that time in 1997. I was hired because of my life experience as an artist to create a visual art department and curriculum for a collection of county run magnet schools in a single campus. It was one the only high school in the state that adopted the Coalition of Essential Schools reform and one of the only in the United States at the time. It’s architect Ted Sizer, created the reform for secondary education based on his 1984 book Horace’s Compromise. An authorless essay on the www adequately states provides a brief synopsis of Sizer’s book as:
Sizer’s book, Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School, is a fictional story that represents the reality of the true educational system. The main character, Horace Smith, is a highly respected English teacher at Franklin High School who is facing the dilemma of many reality educators; the effects of the very controlled, standardized system of high school. Horace is at the age when many teachers are near retirement; however, he isn’t leaving anytime soon. Sizer quotes that “He believes—perversely, he often thinks—that Franklin High is not nearly what it could be. He wants to stay on and make it better.” As an educator, Horace must compromise his natural intuition when it comes to teaching, for he is faced with a muddled school system in which he must abide by. Throughout the passage, Sizer illustrates Horace’s view on how fragmenting the system is on the school and all the different effects it has. Horace believes that “Everything in the school affects everything else.” Horace sees how the system doesn’t directly affect students, but how it mainly affects the teachers, leaving them with little control when it comes to teaching the students. He believes that “The major elements of schooling are controlled outside the teachers’ world.” This exposes the main root of the problem—the standardized system. Horace believes that the state district, which controls the entire system, is overly powerful, only taking into consideration standardized test scores and using those results to determine how the school system should be constructed, causing the teachers to function rather mechanically in the school setting. Horace’s concept is that “Obviously, they don’t trust us…The folk higher up are sure they know better.”
Ted Sizer
In 2008, Ted Sizer passed after a battle with colon cancer. In December of 2016, the board voted to cease operations. They sent out a farewell email to all their coalition member.
https://Farewell | Coalition of Essential Schools
Probably the most significant reform in over 100 years, the Coalition and its affiliate high schools lasted only 33 years and with a unimpressive number of 1000 high schools out of a total of 26,727 high schools in the United States alone.
Murphy in his 2020 article claimed:
Over the last 100 years, claims that schools are failing have become deeply woven into the fabric of society. This “scorching and unrelenting criticism” can be seen most dramatically in periods of calls for profound changes in the prek-12 school system. Indeed, efforts at reform since the end of WWII have been nearly a complete failure. Things today are much the same in 2020 as they were in 1970 and 1950 “and in some respects not as good as they were in 1930” when asignificant period of school reform was at its peak.
Seven outcome measures have often been employed to document unsatisfactory school performance: 1) academic achievement in basic subject areas compared to suggestions of what is needed for success in the current time period; 2) academic achievement in basic subject areas compared to historical data about the United States and to student performance in other nations; 3) the holding power of schools (i.e., dropout rates); 4) preparation for employment and/or increased levels of schooling; 5) knowledge of specific subject areas; 6) mastery of higher-order skills; and 7) personal character and citizenship. What is reported less frequently is that failure is a dominant element of schooling and that re-forms do not address this reality, that “school reform” initiatives developed to address troubled schools have accomplished very little.
So, like Don Quixote Harvard’s liberally educated Sizer ignored all that history to learn the lessons the hard way.
Culture Wars.Edu has a philosophical departure to replace and not reform how we learn.
In the weeks and months ahead I will share my complete replacement which I call Essential Learning. For not to supply a replacement is to play out the definition of insanity via more and more failed reforms and thinking we can get a successful result. What instructs the creation of Essential Learning is a grounding in biological anthropology. That is a knowledge to application of who we hare as a species and not as has been the case these past five hundred years, what we think we are as humans, as individuals. Essential Learning, as I will demonstrate acknowledges, for example, that humans have a very long nurturing and learning period. Actually when you take into account human development, its a lifetime ( Erickson’s Epigenetic Principles).
Sizer reformed a brief span of learning from age fourteen to eighteen. Sizer educated and reformed basically only the cognitive functions and ignored the emotions and the affective domain that is the driver of learning.
What is possible when you replace the entire way we learn and are schooled all thie boundaries and little boxes give way to authentic learning and living. The one thing Sizer did, and he did it so well was the students and the teachers drove the learning. In Coalition schools, the teach became the coach. In my Essential Learning, the teacher and the entire community become the life coaches.
So in the 25,727 non-Sizer high schools then and today, they match what Jacob and his quoted sources stated about how students and teachers have been traditionally viewed these past one hundred years.
The second damaging insight regularly uncovered and deeply embedded is that the voices of the two most important reform partners in the work, teachers and children, been and are routinely marginalized (Biesta, 2007) . Knowledge from students is almost always unvalued: “Students in school are not treated as people whose opinions matter” (Fullan, 1982: p. 154) . It is rarely even considered in federal and state reform efforts. We know that, as has generally been the case with earlier reform strategies put into play by politicians and corporate leaders (e.g., the most recent business practices) (Blanton, 1920; School Administration and Teachers, 1918), strategy added to the arsenal of school reform, research-based scientific evidence, has continued a century of the marginalization of teachers (Fullan, 2003, 2010). “They are often held in low regard by universities” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990: p. 7) , politicians, and corporate leaders. Indeed, it is difficult to examine reform initiatives across time and fail to notice that teachers are sometimes devalued and treated as second class participants, as subjects, technicians, and as hired hands “doing what they have been told to do” (Sarason, 1990: p. 50) . They are “excluded from project development and often provided a ‘mechanistic role’” (McLaughlin, 1990: p. 12) .
the iron of school discipline has so deeply entered the souls of the great mass of teachers that... in regard to school affairs, they are as dumb [voiceless] as the bricks or stones of their own school buildings
Blanton, A. W. (1920)
I was particularly struck by statements about how teachers have been disempowered which I believe is the unconscious and unstated underlying cause for why so many teachers are leaving today.
Most critically, it increases strain (Lieberman, Saxl, & Miles, 1988) and it reduces teacher efficacy and motivation, helping make teaching “an imperiled profession” (Ashton & Webb, 1986: p. 2). Ashton and Webb label the loss as “the single greatest impediment to school improvement” (p. 1). How much has occurred in the last century since Blanton discovered that “the iron of school discipline has so deeply entered the souls of the great mass of teachers that... in regard to school affairs, they are as dumb [voiceless] as the bricks or stones of their own school buildings” (Blanton, 1920: pp. 156-157).
Returning to what can be a possibility especially if you are in one of the states with critical needs for teachers.
https://www.universities.com/learn/education/top-5-states-with-the-highest-teacher-shortages/
This one article mentions how the superintendent of Polk County Florida schools went and hired all inexperienced teachers, as well as ( Sizer’s model) individuals lacking life experiences in a related discipline. He hired military veterans and young foreign citizens. He did so because for an administrator, all that matters besides the bottom line is that teachers do exactly as they are told.
So the students, the parents and the community got robbed and short-changed. The emergency that then allowed to replace often mediocre tenured teachers in a multitude of disciplines with live-experienced and innovative life coaches was lost.
I may be wrong, but unless these new recruits see teaching the children in Polk County as a calling, there time there will be short and those jobs will need to be filled sooner than later.