The Trouble with Teachers

    Over the past twenty years, the overwhelming theme of “educational reform” has been that the problems of public education have been wrought by the ineptitude of America’s teachers.  Of all the critics, perhaps the most vociferous has been Diane Ravitch.  Ravitch helped launch her career with What Do Our 17-year-olds Know? (1989), written in consultation with her amigo Chester Finn who has famously called teachers in public schools “incompetent” and teacher education programs “Mickey Mouse” (2000).  Although Ravitch and Finn asked some esoteric questions about English authors before students had a chance to take their first course in Brit Lit, the theme of What do Our 17-year-olds Know? is that everyone in high school is pretty dumb, especially the teachers.  

In particular, Ravitch decries the idiocy of teachers who try to make learning “fun, relevant, and like real life” (2005).  The implication of Ravitch’s argument is that schools are full of eager, compliant students who are anxious to have a go at The Republic and Paradise Lost—if only their teachers would stop holding them back.  

Unfortunately, my experience in secondary schools does not jibe with Ravitch’s description.  While public schools continue to welcome some exceptional students, I have found many to be apathetic.  Others are oppositional; a few are openly hostile; more than one in five struggles with emotional and/or mental disabilities (U.S. Department of Education).  How can anyone believe that making learning dull, irrelevant, and unrealistic will improve achievement?

Ravitch contends, accurately I think, that most teachers are more concerned with students’ overall well being than maximizing test scores.  She shares with Finn her belief that academic achievement is the only reason for students to go to school. 

“We have to make changes across our educational system.  The most important is to stress the importance of academic achievement” (2005).

 The focus on achievement as the sole barometer of success is akin to the focus on profits as the “bottom line” in business.  Indeed, in their writings, both Ravitch and Finn invoke the language of business when writing about education.  Schools should pay “what the market will bear” for teachers, charter schools are good because they “crack the cartel and create competition for the monopoly,” expenditures in education are too high because “performance is stagnant” or “appalling.”  Extending the analogy, students become products, teachers are line workers, and the principal serves as foreman.  The logic of business expects that when more money is expended, profits (achievement) should rise.  It seems not to matter that teachers, unlike foremen, cannot dismiss students whose raw materials do not “measure up.”  That is, teachers cannot send students who enter the classroom with below-grade abilities back to the scrap heap.  In fact, most teachers take it as their sacred duty to welcome them, teach them, and even help them discover heretofore uncharted talents.

The obsession with achievement is particularly troublesome for English teachers, who are usually as concerned with student attitudes—towards reading, writing, the arts, the welfare of the planet,  peers, themselves—as achievement.  Do aesthetics matter?  Does character?

I keep thinking about W.C. Minor, the man who contributed over ten thousand entries for the Oxford English Dictionary (Winchester 1999).  Although Minor was a brilliant doctor and linguist, he happened to live in an asylum for the criminally insane because he was also a convicted murderer.  If not for the rap sheet, I feel certain that Ravitch would consider Minor an ideal choice as teacher—intelligent, reliable, well-mannered (except for a few dead bodies).  Ditto for Hannibal Lecter. 

For Ravitch, issues of character, not to mention compassion and understanding, are less important than insuring that America’s teachers are able to flex their intellectual muscles.  Although Ravitch holds most teachers in contempt, lately her fulminations have been directed at elementary school teachers.  In a New York Times editorial, she writes, “It is hardly fair to blame high schools for the poor skills of their entering students.”  Then, a paragraph later, she reiterates: “It makes no sense to blame the high schools for their ill-prepared incoming students.” 

In other words, incompetent high school teachers cannot be expected to salvage the damage already inflicted on students in elementary school.  Clearly, Ravitch doesn’t play fair, even when she sets the rules.  For example, she rails against America’s poor showing in international comparisons, such as TIMSS—Trends in International Math and Science Study and PISA—Program for International Student Assessment, at the same time that she claims that “our high schools are better than our primary system” because students are “most likely to have teachers who have a degree in the subject they are teaching” (2005).  

Yet, these same studies (TIMSS and PISA) consistently place America’s elementary-age students at the top of rankings, while America’s adolescents are at the bottom.  Such a result suggests that elementary teachers, who take more courses in teacher education, are more effective than secondary teachers, who take fewer courses in teacher education.  Using Ravitch’s logic (that better preparation leads to higher test scores), secondary teachers should have more courses in teacher education, not fewer.

According to Ravitch, there is nothing wrong with public education that a return to the concept of learning as drudgery will not cure.  Given that her Ph.D. is in history, not education, her ignorance of learning theory, the realities of public schools, and the need for student engagement is not surprising.  Other than teaching a few graduate history courses as adjunct professor at Columbia University, she has never been a teacher.  By her own admission, she considers herself a “historian and a writer.” 

That an individual with no experience in K-12 schools since 1956 (the year Ravitch graduated from high school) has become one of America’s most powerful educational reformers is an absurdity that defies logic.  Incredibly, Ravitch still shows up as keynote speaker at teachers’ conferences across the country where she always delivers the same message—that teachers should stop being such crummy, bow-headed, anti-intellectuals and start teaching Plato and Milton.  But, in a land where the Secretary of Education, the highest education office in the country, is held by a lobbyist with a bachelor’s degree in political science, I suppose I should not be surprised by Ravitch’s continued popularity.

Still, I can’t escape the feeling that Ms. Ravitch has had her run.  For more than twenty years, she has managed to forge a comfortable living by lambasting teachers from the comfort of her cozy, well-appointed offices, far from real classrooms where the cries, whispers, and dreams of real children rise and fall every minute of every day.  As any teacher who has taken a course in class management knows, a saboteur must be dealt with before educational progress can take place.  Pardon me, Ms. Ravitch, but the time has come for you to sit down and shut up.

Works cited

Finn, Chester.  “Improving, Empowering, Dismantling,” The Public Interest (Summer 2000).  http://www.policyreview.org.

International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.  The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2003.  Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004.

Lemke, M., Sen, A., Pahlke, E., Partelow, L., Miller, D., Williams, T., Kastberg, D., Jocelyn, L.  International Outcomes of Learning in Mathematics Literacy and Problem Solving: PISA 2003 Results From the U.S. Perspective.  Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004.

Ravitch, Diane.  “Failing the Wrong Grades,” New York Times (15 March 2005): A27.

Ravitch, Diane.  Left Back.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Ravitch, Diane and Chester Finn.  What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?  New York: Harpercollins.

U.S. Department of Education.  The Condition of Education 2004.  Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004.

Winchester, Simon.  The Professor and the Madman.  New York: Perennial, 1999.