Teach Kids Credibility Before Chutzpah
21 03 2007Teacher performance pay is hot news here:
“Pinellas County educators recently rejected a state merit pay plan by a huge margin, saying no to millions. Here’s what they want state legislators to learn from their vote.”
SO not the point imo.
I’m more interested in what our state’s KIDS learn from their vote, indeed from everything unionized, politicized “educators” do and say and believe, and how it gets transmitted to the next generation, and the next, ad nauseum . . .including me, who as an earnest junior high school student completely idolized my teachers as “educators”, never realizing they had cast themselves in a different primary role as political muscle. My role was not star student so much as prop in the political drama (farce?)
John Taylor Gatto writes brilliantly about hidden curriculum, how stunningly effective schools are at teaching some life lessons — you know, the ones we don’t acknowledge because the cognitive dissonance would kill us if the pure shame didn’t? So I commented on the news story this morning at Nance’s test reform blog:
“Maybe the real problem with education politics is coming from the kind of student mind School invariably puts on the top of the heap and sends into the world to teach, chair education committees, etc.? If there’s truth to this, then educating our own isn’t enough, to turn it around before our whole system collapses of its own hubris.
. . .Children will listen!
How about we write some better stories into the school experience of kids now, whole new models for critical thinking, creative problem solving, collective wisdom, community action and conflict resolution — isn’t that what we claim to be teaching already? — so that when they become teachers, they will approach education as something other than ideological warfare between home and school, competing to claim the very influence they are squandering all the while . . .
Several comments now at the PS testing reform blog but I wanted to crosspost this of mine (responding to Nance) for Snooking too:
Nance writes:
“If a big chunk of the day is eaten up with administrivia and test prep and squabbling over bonuses and gold stars, what kind of sad little world is public school?”
Man, I wish we could fit that on t-shirts!!
Oprah and Dr. Phil — a combo in whom most politicians might find something palatable for one reason or another? — counsel that “we teach people how to treat us.” I think in the case of teachers and especially teacher lobbying and politics, this is quite literally true.
The real question then, is how (whether?) today’s teachers can un-learn yesterday’s teacher leadership and politics, and dare to imagine some whole different answers.
I personally remember at least three major “merit-go-rounds” in Florida, and was myself actively lobbying for public education during one of them. In any decade teachers oppose performance pay not because they just want a different formula that is “fairer” etc etc — it’s because they’ve been taught (and continue to teach all of us) that all differentiated pay is “divisive” and the school system is out to screw everybody without a strong union to make things right.
Hmmm - but kids will never have a union, guess they’re SOL. Is it any wonder the public is finally learning public school is not “for” the public’s kids?
(What kind of peculiarly American lesson this is for teachers to be paid to teach, is for another discussion. Despite his defiant leadership of the ‘68 walkout, for example, it turns out Pat Tornillo was a big fan of special compensation for special performance, for himself anyway. After completing his prison time, he told the newspapers he still believed everything he did was for the kids.)
So I’ve stopped listening to the details of any particular pay proposal or working conditions platform, or the specific objections to same, because there is no possible right answer.
I’m reasonably bright and I’ve had effective teachers all my life in Florida public education and legislative work. I’ve learned that it’s a trick question. I suggest the lesson IS the box.
(also posted as comment to “sincere ignorance”
So now STAR is scrapped for MAP. Big whoop.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Senate passes replacement for ‘flawed’ teacher merit pay plan
By BILL KACZOR
Associated Press Writer
Confrontation and acrimony over performance pay for teachers that has distracted school districts for more than a year neared an end Wednesday when the Senate passed a bill to repeal and replace Florida’s existing program.
The bill (SB 1226) would do away with the Special Teachers are Rewarded, or STAR, program the Legislature passed last year. Instead, it would create the Merit Awards Program that will give local unions and school districts more flexibility in developing performance pay plans tailored to their needs.
“This gets closer to what we believe would be a true workable compensation reward system,” said Florida Education Association president Andy Ford, whose union includes locals across the state. “The STAR program has really torn school districts apart.”
Critics complained STAR has been too rigid, puts too much reliance on standardized student tests to determine which teachers would get bonuses and gave districts too little time to develop local plans. Teachers and their unions filed administrative and legal challenges, and some districts refused to participate even thought it would cost them millions of state dollars allocated for the bonuses.
A 39-0 roll call sent the compromise legislation to the House for a final vote scheduled Thursday. It is supported by House leaders, the statewide teachers union and associations representing school boards and superintendents.
Ford said bill should remove a wedge that STAR has placed between school boards and unions. That could have been avoided if lawmakers and other state officials, including former Gov. Jeb Bush, had seriously considered what teachers and their unions were saying before STAR passed, Ford said…
What about politicized church then — does “religious education” through politicized Church/School have the same nasty unintended result as politicized public schooling had on me?
Is the hidden curriculum that kids wind up learning from religious education, that their parents (as teachers) and their church leaders care more about using them to advance self-serving political goals and economic benefits, than about developing those actual kids themselves through “education”, helping them learn to love learning and equipping them to think for themselves as truly “educated” individuals?
And never mind that economic-political hidden curriculum. Let’s get down on the very first rung of Maslow’s needs hierarchy. What do kids learn from being beaten and threatened with eternal damnation?- and NOT just for sinful behavior but for authority-figure-suspected thoughts and feelings!
See April 30 as National SpankOut Day.