“We’ve gone to a bad place with data,” said Timothy Eagan, president of the Long Island Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, to tremendous applause. “We’ve taken the art of teaching and tried to quantify something that shouldn’t be.”
That was the resounding sentiment of panelists at Stony Brook University Thursday night, where more than a hundred people filled the Wang Center theater to discuss the New York State Regents Reform Agenda.
School superintendents from Southold, Shelter Island and Shoreham-Wading River schools organized the forum out of concern over recent education reform policies such as Common Core and Race to the Top that they say are harmful to educators, schools and – most importantly – students.
“When Common Core was implemented, the achievement gaps grew – and not by a little, by a lot,” said Southside High School principal Carol Burris. “That shouldn’t have happened.
“We can’t be so obsessed with some kind of an ideal of excellence that probably doesn’t really exist.”
Public educators have been thrown into the national spotlight in recent years as a slew of policies and assessments designed to increase student performance have zeroed in on “low-performing” teachers.
“There’s this big myth that it all falls upon teachers, and that we can fire our way to excellence,” said Burris. “If we got rid of those low performers and everybody was perfect, everything would be okay.”
Burris pointed out that statistically teachers only account for 10 to 15 percent of the variance in test scores, and that more important factors such as equity, poverty and teacher autonomy are pushed aside for a superficial, “business-minded” solution.
“No country in the world that has been successful has used the policies that we’re talking about here,” said Michael Fullan, co-author of Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School. “There’s no track record. Nothing.”
The seven panelists shared their experiences with the data-driven evaluation policies they say have demotivated teachers through standards that encourage “negative accountability, excessive individualism and alienation.”
Teachers are barraged with hundreds of state-regulated standards that are expected to fit the needs of a very diverse body of students, the panelists complained. The policies that outline these standards, said Fullan, do not leave room for the decisions teachers need to make in every classroom, decisions that are specific to individual student capability.
“This is the time to build up the teachers’ collective capacity to make pedagogical decisions in the face of these standards,” said Fullan, “so that the learning is actually informed by the professionals that are doing it.”
One solution, Fullan suggests, is to look toward the teaching practices of other countries that have historically outpaced American students in assessment scores.
Panelist Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish educator and policy adviser, described the standards that govern the Finland education system as “skeletal.” Rather than standards that dictate the curriculum of only the second grade, for example, their standards are outlined for blocks of that span several grades, such as kindergarten through second grade. That way, teachers have the power to choose when it is appropriate to teach their children each subject based on the needs of a specific classroom.
“Schools and teachers have a great deal of autonomy to make decisions,” said Sahlberg.
The key to this, according to Fullan and his co-author Andy Hargreaves, is a school environment that encourages collaboration and communication between teachers, rather than competition and alienation.
“These teachers need time to talk and figure things out during the day,” said Michael Hynes, superintendent of the Shelter Island School District. “At our very small school district, we’re going to try to give them the time to meet every other day to talk about what’s best for the kids.”
Both Southold and Shoreham-Wading River school district superintendents also said they are partnering to implement the principles of professional capital as outlined in Fullan and Hargreaves’ book.
“We should be setting out to develop the professional capital of teachers so that they can sort out the most powerful pedagogies possible,” said Fullan, “and not be at the mercy of standards that they have to run around figuring out how to implement when these standards are unproven.”
