Interesting observations.

However, I am a self-appointed standard-bearer for all sports-and-K12 analogies, and your NBA analogy falls short.

But I know what you meant: all you need to do is amend “free agent” to “free agent mid-level exception” ($5.3 million this year).

That exception is the same across all teams. However, most NBA “free agents” get very different amounts of money. Go Celts.

In a “growth model” their individual prowess as a teacher is recognized. But guess what: the school still fails to meet its benchmark, the district panicks, mandates curriculum, the jobs sucks, and they move on to greener pastures.

NCLB does one thing right: bad schools are in generally being accurately identified. Teachers who can teach well just move to upper middle class schools. NCLB has had the most success in mandating data driven evaluation of teachers. In the abstract that is absolutely where we should go. But if a struggling school only has twice picked over rejects and the occasional gem who will not stay, how exactly has education benefitted? There are absolutely some terrible teachers that need to leave the profession. If NCLB helps with that, then it can be a good thing. But I have seen zero evidence that its actively improving anything else.

If you want to improve education we need to either:
(a) find and support methods that have been proven to work with 90% of teachers. That includes the “MRS” degrees, C students at regional teacher colleges, and change-of-career alternatively certified teachers. The remaining 10% of teachers need to be coached out of teaching.

(b) recruit such talented teachers that overall teacher quality improves.

A good teacher is like a free agent in the NBA. The salary cap means that their salary has little to do with where they teach. So if you are going to be paid the same regardless, why teach at a school that will constantly be under the NCLB gun? NCLB just pushes “good” teachers out, aka teachers who can get a job elsewhere or leave the profession altogether. Sure we can wish that teachers are such high minded individuals that they want to teach the most challenging kids in the places where their efforts will do the most good. And I think many teachers are like that. Until they start a family and start having to make the normal rational decisions that all adults make. Because the reality is that a school facing NCLB penalties in the face (a) is more stressful, (b) requries more time and effort, and (c) does not pay an appreciable amount more to make up for a & b.

If you were a teacher, what would you do?

You take NCLB, and I’ll take reasonableness, and then we can do the same with tomato, potato, etc.

But I have to ask whether you have ever stepped foot into an inner city school? If so, how did you like all that wealth we were showering on our poorest kids?

Add up the hours you spent with your kids preparing them for a 21st century education, and then multiply that number by the minimum wage, and what will the total be? Will it be one hundred times the amount we spend on one of my students? a thousand times?

Regarding the royal “we,” I don’t believe I know a teacher who STILL supports NCLB. I believe my experience is similar to the national numbers where the majority of us teachers once told pollsters that we basically supported the law, but we have changed our minds.

I hope this doesn’t sound macho but I’ve never understood this question. Where can you get teachers with the backbone needed to help our most challenged kids, and yet not have the backbone needed to stand up to NCLB?

Regarding an approach other than accountability, how about love?

OK that may not fly politically, and we need a reasonable amount of accountability along with money to pay for early childhood education, nutrition and health services, drop out prevention and retreival programs, etc. All would have a much better bang for the buck.

But why has NCLB failed and done so irrevocably? It gambled everything on a narrow portion of the intellect while education is fundamentally about love. Sometimes it has to be tough love. Sometimes we have to protect our kids from some pretty scarey realities. But if we – and in this case I mean the great majority of the adults in my school – will all turn out in a moment’s notice to stand up to armed gangsters, don’t expect us to wimp out when faced by NCLB mandates.

I don’t know what you do for a living, and for all I know your co-workers had as much blood spilled as mine in the last year. Maybe you attended as many funerals and helped as many injured children as we did. But if you want to join us, I’ll be glad to watch your back.

John

> We all assumed that we were doing it for the good of the kids.

Nonsense. We assumed that “we” were doing it because the public education choo-choo train has hurtled off the tracks and, startlingly, more funding wasn’t going to put things right. That was a safe prediction because public education funding has handily out-paced inflation for, oh, a couple of decades with no obvious benefit to the society pouring money therein. Nine out of ten doctors, it turns out, agree that doing the same old thing with an expectation of novel results isn’t an indicator of a piercing intellect.

“More funding” has been the mantra pointing toward public education salvation for so long that it was assumed that there wasn’t any other factor worth discussing, let alone implementing. Well, there is and it’s accountability.

And when you use the word “we” you’d better have a mouse in your pocket because you don’t speak for me and you’re not a member of royalty.

What *we* assume is that when you juxtapose the word “public” with the word “education”, one of those words is going to be the pivot around which the institution revolves. Is it going to be more public, i.e. political? Or is it going to be more educational? A quick glance at pretty nearly any large, urban school district tells you exactly what’s driving the system and it isn’t educational considerations.

So thanks, but warts and all, I’ll take NCLB in preference to the self-serving “reasonableness” offered by the loyal opposition.

I enjoyed the nuance of your post and the three comments and I’ll be reflecting on them as I reread them.

But we all need to watch the hypocrisy. Changing to growth models or multiple measures will help. But nothing will work if we persist in seeing accountability as the most important part of reform. We human being won’t build a system of accountability that will guarantee national improvements for generations.

We need to shift gears and view accountability as ONE component of reform – not the “be all end all.”

And as I commented before you published posts, I was stunned the first time I read the opinion that playing games with the NCLB accountability rules was wrong and hurt kids. I participated in those meetings. We all knew what we were doing. We were consciously deciding on the “Balloon Mortgage” that would delay failure for the longest time.

We all assumed that we were doing it for the good of the kids. In retrospect it seems obvious that we were doing good for kids. And I have no doubt that educators continue to have the responsibality to evade NCLB rules.

If we could abandon utopianism and get back to realistically discussing ways of helping kids, I’d love the opportunity to do it in an honest manner.

You may think that we are wrong, but we’re not going away. And since its teachers who must implement NCLB, along with our administrators, you might as well stop demonizing us for doing what we perceive as our duty.

Besides, there is so much good we could do if we could get out of this stalemate.