"Building a Better Teacher"

Another of my students sent me this article from the NYT (and I have to point out here the wonderful thing about having a bunch of students every year.  I have, generally, at least one hundred new people to learn from every single year and sometimes they keep teaching me things after they've left my classroom.  Reason number 37 that it is great to be a teacher) and I found it intriguing for a variety of reasons.

The first is a common theme, at least for me, and that is the enormous disappointment I feel that no one is looking beyond test scores to measure teacher performance.  Ms. Green writes at length about the other things, but it always comes back to the test scores.  She concludes with the wisdom of Thomas Kane, an economist who studies education (clearly he won't have a very particular outlook on what education should look like or how it should be measured) who says that if we could just improve the teachers we have "we could close the gap between the United States and Japan on those international tests within two years."

Forgive me if you've heard this one before, but why do we want to close those test score gaps again?  Are Japanese citizens happier by and large than Americans?  Are they healthier?  Are these the results of them scoring higher on standardized tests?  What are some of the consequences of the drive to score better on those tests?

While I lived in Korea, one of the things that struck me was the amazing pressure that student are under to perform on the final test they take as high schoolers.  Kids go to school year round every day, often spending at least 16-20 hours away from home either at school, at after-school study facilities, and then at late-night study rooms which they rent for the year.  If they don't perform as well as they'd hoped, they will often take another year just to study for the exam.

According to my relatively limited understanding, the tests in Japan are even more insane, and the response among students is similar.  They use incredible amounts of time and energy spent to study for them and are often crushed when they don't rank as highly as they hope. 

In an article written in 2007, Leila Madge describes some of the incredible focus placed on these tests by parents and students alike:

In the last year of middle school and high school Japanese
students go through what they call “examination hell.”
In February and March they take highly competitive
exams. How well they do determines not only the next
school they will attend but also what kind of job, spouse,
social status and lifestyle they will enjoy in the future.
The importance of the exam in the current Japanese
educational system started in the Meiji period (1868-
1912). Before that time, government positions had been
filled by samurai. With the end of that system, and the
end of the caste system, education began to be used to
decide who would have what kind of jobs. Since the end
of World War II, education has been a means for upward
mobility, especially for the middle-class who have no
business or land to will to their sons.

Economic growth, the democratization of Japanese
society and new job opportunities in the post-war years
meant competition for higher education increased along
with the pressures of exams. This period of  “examination
hell” is not unique to Japan but characterizes much of
East Asia (Korea and China) which share a heritage of
Confucian respect for scholarly endeavors and family
obligation. China and Korea also currently understand
exams as a way to get ahead in society.

What is school and home life like for students and
parents during examinations? As the time for exams
draws near all non-academic activities such as music and
sports clubs are put on hold. All classroom learning is
geared towards memorizing factual information. After
school, children attend cram schools (juku in Japanese
and hakwon in Korean) or study with tutors, and
vacations are spent attending special study camps.

Many students of more ambitious families have been
participating in these activities since kindergarten. Some
students barely eat, sleep or even bathe. A common
expression in both Japan and Korea is “Pass with four
(hours of sleep), fail with five.” Parents have felt the stress
of this time since their children started school. Fathers
feel they must earn enough to provide the money for
tutors and tuition at cram schools. Mothers strive from
the time their kids start kindergarten to provide them
with a home life to reinforce school lessons, fulfill the
child’s physical needs and work with teachers to make
sure their kids get lots of attention at school. Mothers 
are often praised or criticized by family members, and 
in newspaper or television shows, for their children’s
school successes.

Parents, students, business leaders and government
officials like the exam system, even if it is hellish.
Ironically, just as American corporate leaders, politicians
and educators are looking to imitate the Japanese
exam system with standardized exams, the Japanese
are thinking of changing their own system. During
“examination hell,” suicide, violence at school and home,
and dropout rates increase. Since the 1990s, with an
economic downturn in Japan, the rewards of the system
aren’t so great any more. In addition, many business
leaders and government officials are blaming Japan’s
economic woes on workers’ inability to creatively compete
in a 21st century global economy. For this, they blame the
education system. Many wonder if the pressure of exams
is worth it and educational reform is now a hot topic in
Japan. Reformers often look to the United States and call
for more flexible curricula, fewer school days, abolishing
uniforms — all to encourage more student creativity and
engagement with the real world.


So, if educational leaders in Japan are trying to make their system more like ours, and we are trying to make ours more like theirs, couldn't we try to communicate with them to learn the pitfalls of the increased emphasis on testing?  Shouldn't we spend some time looking at the developments in their society over the last 100 years with this incredible emphasis on these tests and on the standardization of students' experience?  If they are thinking seriously about less time in school, more flexible curricula, abolishing uniforms, etc., perhaps there are values to those things within our current system?  Perhaps more time in school, more tests, more nationally mandated curricula are not the answer?

So back to the problem at hand and the one addressed by the article.  Despite a stated focus on things other than tests when it comes to "good teachers," it turns out to be the single determining factor in this article as well as so many other recent publications about "good" teachers including the recent article in the Atlantic about "What Makes a Great Teacher."  (On a personal note, I have to admit that I don't really think great teachers would fill one ear on their head (of only two that they have) with a bluetooth headset, but that is just a personal opinion.)

I will do my best to point out some of the very good things about the article, but I have to finish this post with just one more glaring omission.  The article assumes, as most do, that teachers are actually able to decide what they want to do in their classroom and how they want to go about doing it.  The fact of the matter is that even in most of the "best" schools in the country, teachers are completely and totally bound by the decisions of the administration.  They are told what to teach, what to test for, when to teach it, and often how to teach it.  So if you want to hold people accountable, a great place to start is with administrators since they are the only real "principals" making decisions in most school situations.  Teachers are agents only of the school, the district, and the state and as such cannot be held accountable because they don't get to decide for themselves what their students really need, etc.

While I am happy that so many intelligent people are thinking hard about how to fix education, it is disheartening to find so many of the basic assumptions avoiding real questioning.  I do not claim to have the solution, so perhaps I cannot be the one pointing out all the faults, but I do know that perhaps a better place to start would be asking questions like "What are students learning from preparing for and taking so many high-stakes tests?"  "Has education improved since we made it compulsory in the United States?"  "What things have improved since education was made compulsory and have they improved at a faster rate since we started focusing on standardization?"  "Is it possible to standardize human experience in any healthy way?"

In fact, I will end with my personal favorite.  Can someone define for me in a meaningful way what the term "student achievement" means?  We spend lots of time and money focusing on it, and Ms. Green's article focuses on finding teachers that are good at or helping teachers improve their students ability to "achieve" on these standardized tests.  What are they achieving exactly?