Knock It Off With the Chainsaws Already

This week's cover of Time sure pegged my Pissed-Off-O-Meter. The unsmiling woman in the photo is Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools. She is one no-nonsense broad. She's determined to make sweeping (hence the broom) changes in the D.C. system, damn the torpedoes.

More power to her. The public school system in this country is, let's just admit it, bloated and overly bureaucratic and in serious need of some housecleaning. But I have, to quote one of my more favorite movie lines, "reached the end of my tether" with the "public schools are broken!!" meme and the frantic calls that they need to be "fixed." Because when people say they want something fixed, they want a quick, clean, one-shot solution to the problem that leaves them with no more worries and the ability to walk away.

That is never going to happen with something as complex as public schooling. Believe me, if there were a magic bullet, someone would have found it by now. We teachers don't just sit around and drink coffee and talk to kids all day, you know.

What no one seems to be willing to admit is that schooling in general is highly complex work. No other profession, save possibly health care, requires its practitioners to deal with the day-to-day idiosyncracies of individuals at such a complex level. There is a huge difference between dealing with the idjit in the next cube who wastes company time playing online games so you can't finish your project goals on time and working with a third-grader who's just been kicked out of his house who still can't read as well as the average suburban kindergartener. Huge. As in, most of the blowhards who dismiss teachers and their supposed inability to hold a "real" job wouldn't last a week in a classroom, while many teachers have easily made the transition to corporate America and become quite successful, thank you.

What the Time cover story and the "broken schools" meme often suggest is that it's just bad teachers who keep all the schools from relocating to Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average. Get rid of bad teachers, and your battle's won. The problem is in how you identify a teacher as "bad." If you rely solely on test data, you're going to be tossing out plenty of fabulous teachers who choose to work with the toughest kids in the school. Many of those kids have learning issues so intense, Annie Sullivan wouldn't make a dent in them easily.

Test data don't tell the whole story. If a kid puts down his pencil and sleeps through the test, is it fair to judge the teacher? If another kid bombs because her anxiety over the test is so large, she's spent the past four days throwing up in the school nurse's office, is it fair to judge the teacher? Numbers don't lie--but they don't tell the whole story, either.

That's what's missing in an honest dialogue about public schools. The whole story. Don't just fret over the systems in crisis, like DC--find out what works in the leafy suburbs and see what they have that the crisis systems don't. Until there's equitable distribution of resources, you're not going to have equitable schools. Period. Can charters work? Sure--but if charters get state money, hold them to the same accountability standards expected of the public schools who survive on state money. That goes for the voucher folks, too. Take a voucher to attend a private school? Fine. But you have to take the state test along with it. If we're going to pass out state money, make the people who use it accountable for it.

And yes, be realistic about what teachers can do. If someone is doing nothing but drinking coffee and passing out worksheets, that person needs to find another line of work. But don't create "accountability measures" for teachers that would unfairly penalize those who choose to work with the toughest kids in the system. The solution, folks, is not a chainsaw. There's not that much wrong with the public schools. But we sure could use a great surgeon.