This month’s Atlantic Monthly has an excellent profile of Michelle Rhee, District of Columbia School Chancellor and up and coming education rock star (Obama debate shout out!). You can read the profile here. There’s also a Web-only interview with her that you can read on the magazine’s website. In the profile I could detect some of the same currents that are swirling around Montgomery County, foremost the worship of data.
The reform camp, of which Rhee is the new hero, is shot through with divisions. But its members share a few common characteristics, and perhaps the most important is a belief in the primacy of teachers. This sounds banal, but it’s actually quite controversial. Many people believe that teachers and the classroom are only one part of a vast web of relationships and environments that determine educational success….
In her opinion, external factors simply underline the need for better educators. And while she pays lip service to the realities of urban poverty outside school walls, she dismisses the impact that poverty and violence might have on achievement. “As a teacher in this system, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for ensuring your children are successful despite obstacles,” she told me. “You can’t say, ‘My students didn’t get any breakfast today,’ or ‘No one put them to bed last night,’ or ‘Their electricity got cut off in the house, so they couldn’t do their homework.’”
(I’m sure she’d be happy to cite the example of Florida high school student Michael Rodeman, whose teachers are functioning as virtual parents to this talented kid.)
It continues:
Behind the fighting lie basic questions: What makes a good teacher? And how do you recognize one? For Rhee and her fellow reformers, the answer is data. Lots of data. There may be many unquantifiables in teacher quality, but most of the traits that matter to reformers can be put into numbers.
The Atlantic article ends with this point:
Rhee is confronting the great divide over American public-education reform—not between left and right but between two philosophies about education. To Rhee and her fellow reformers, schools can, by themselves, produce successful students. To her opponents (and they include liberals and conservatives), schools are not enough, however “successful” their students. They are an important, but hardly the only, means with which children are inculcated with the skills and mores of their community.
I don’t know…put me in the skeptical column. The whole zealous, “100 percent of students can be/will be proficient,” data-driven mania is what gave us No Child Left Behind. What are we measuring? What is “successful?” What is “achievement?” And what of the “raw stuff” aka intelligence that each kid walks into the classroom with? That doesn’t matter, for good or for ill? I think it’s going to give us more cases like this (from the NY Times. Be sure to check out the comments too.)
For an alternate view of Rhee click here and here. I went looking because she struck me as so dispassionate, so focused on “achievement” and yet so vague about her time in the classroom.
I keep wondering, with all of the raising of children we’re asked to do as educators, with the intrusion of too much homework into home hours, with the 8-5 schools… at what point will the “reformers” decide that it’s simply time to take the children of those who really aren’t raising their kids well, and from the rest of us who aren’t doing things the “reformers’” way, and put those children in boarding school? Then we really can make sure they’re studying 24/7 without any subversive influence from the outside.
We cannot get 100% of children to grade-level proficiency, but we can strive to get 100% of them to perform up to their own individual capabilities. I’m not sure we’ll ever manage to achieve that feat, but we have a moral obligation to try our best. Right now we’re not anywhere close and that’s something that needs to be remedied.
I don’t think there’s any “one size fits all” answer to fixing K-12 education in this country. What works well for one child may be very inappropriate for another. That’s the big beef I have with most education reformers. Too often they want to take a solution that is helpful to a certain segment of the student population and then impose it on everybody.
In a word: “Yup.”