When I hear an incredibly bright, passionate, motivated young
woman express a desire to share that passion with younger students, I am of two
minds. The heart that brought me to teaching has never forgotten the yearning
for a journey of discovery shared with young, inquiring minds. I would like
very much to encourage this young woman to go into teaching because our
profession, our students, our society would benefit from her choice. But would
she? How can I, in good conscience, encourage an intelligent, capable young woman to
leave a highly paid STEM career track for a profession that is becoming increasingly
deprofessionalized, for a job whose demands and dictates are driven by non-educators
who presume they know better than teachers what is in the best interests of our
students?
Our state has adopted the national narrative of failing
schools and underperforming teachers, while refusing to address the systemic
long term effects of underfunding both public education and the social safety
net. There are too many articles that address both of these issues for me to
cite them all, but belief in and response to ideas promoted by education “reformers” are addressed in this
scholarly report by The Economic Policy Institute: Fact Challenged Policy by Richard Rothstein. Even if you buy into the notion that most schools are failures, starving them into greater
failure hardly seems like a reasoned response, not to mention that it puts the
legislature in contempt of the McCleary decision.
Our most grievous concern when it comes to the education of
children should be the number of children in poverty. As a scientist, I rely on evidence and data, and the science is very clear
that socioeconomic factors are the biggest predictor of academic success. The
devastating effects of poverty are well documented in a recent study featured
in Nature: Poverty shrinks brains from birth by Sara Reardon.
If you choose to dismiss my previous points by invoking the
need for the NCLB waiver, I would respond by saying that many states have figured
out it will cost them more to implement the tests and evaluations demanded by
DoE than the states will receive in federal funding. The legality of the
waivers are questionable at best and, I would argue, unconstitutional. But, since
they apparently fit the “reform” agenda of both parties, they go unchallenged.
Integral to obtaining the waiver is an agreement that
teacher evaluation be tied to student test scores. There have been many news
reports describing how these methods have been poorly implemented in other
states. There are many scholarly articles that raise scientific concerns about
using test scores for evaluations. I provide one from the Economic
Policy Institute: Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers by Richard Rothstein, et al.
I hope that Washington State will not follow the path of other states that are destroying their public schools by using unscientific evaluation systems and diverting public funds to untested charter schools. Lastly, briefly, I will suggest that we begin to address long term funding shortfalls by implementing the Washington Investment Trust once championed by Senator Bob Hasegawa (see Washington State Joins Movement for Public Banking by Ellen Brown).