My opinion has since turned around quite some on Gates after his retirement from the commercial world, turning his focus on philanthropy. Although Gates Foundation is still very much a work in progress, I've been impressed by the passion and effort that go with it, even if the impact of success is still oft elusive.
Another plus is Gates' candidness on his foundation's impact to improving the schooling system.
I'm not an educator. I'm a parent with young kids, hence my vested interest in the subject matter. I'm schooled at various stages in four continents, including Asia, Europe, Australia and US; as such, I have my own opinion as a student myself in this domain. Granted that I never pay as much attention to the area of education until I have kids of my own, all the nitty-gritty little details over the years have come back to me.
To compare those various systems that I was exposed to, with what's in US now, I can't help but feeling exasperated by how dysfunctional the US system is.
Before I even get to that, I must say, I never have any preconceived notion on labor unions. I understand how they work; I understand their need of existence, particularly in the turn of the last century when the little people need to band together in order to stem exploitation and to improve their collective bargaining ability. That's especially true for traditionally grueling work like coal mining. I get that.
But what strikes me as particularly dysfunctional in the whole debate of standardized testing students, or measuring/evaluating teacher performance, or the No Child Left Behind Act, is how backward the teacher's union (and other labor unions who chime in to this subject) has handled the whole debate.
I must admit, I can get pretty worked up - angry, even - when I hear all those statements from teacher's union countering the need to measure students performance, that teachers' profession is really different, that you can't simply measure students performance or dream about linking teacher's performance with what students have learnt. Whenever I hear anyone say to me "oh, this is different," like the way analysts tried to justify the ridiculous IPO price for outfits like Webvan that turned out to be big flame-out. The underlying argument for not wanting to measure their performance - Webvan or teachers - is really the same. Although past performance is never a sure thing to measure future success, history does provide a good guidance of what works and what doesn't, and a decent indication to weed out alot of bottom feeders.
To me, all those debates and discussions really come down to this: What is the function of a teacher? Teachers are there to do a job, and that job is to educate the young minds of students. Teachers are not there just to babysit kids and let kids stay in school for 6-8 hours a day doing nothing. That inexplicable link between students performance and teachers performance cannot be explained away, saying it does not matter. Yes, it does matter, hugely.
Granted that there are many exterior and intrinsic factors that impact on students performance too in which teachers cannot control. Parents involvement and expectations on students matter 95% of the time. One cannot expect a student to learn all that s/he can within the 6-8 hours while in school, then stop the learning outside of school. It's indeed unrealistic. That, however, does not remove the need to evaluate teachers' performance. Do we stop measuring the teacher's performance simply because students' family is not helping? The answer is obviously no.
As it is, for all that I hear, that's exactly what teachers' unions are advocating. Their argument is that, since there are other factors that go in to a student's performance, you cannot blame the teacher for not doing his/her job when the student performs poorly in tests. So, the students should not be tested (so that no one would know that the student hasn't learnt anything at all); instead, students should either be moved swiftly up or out of the schooling system. Out of sight; out of mind, and it becomes someone else's problem. And if the students' performance is not measured, neither should the teachers. In short, teachers and school administrations can do whatever they want. All they need (and care about), is their mandatory pay raises, benefits, sick and vacation days.
I have been lucky enough not having to subject myself to failing school systems like those dropout factories mentioned by Gates or the documentary Waiting For Superman. I've had more than enough second hand accounts of such failing schools to get the picture. Whenever I think of such ailment, it's maddening and sickening to me at the same time.
How could teachers' union protect its weakest members who oftentimes have no right to be a teacher at all? How dare the unions risk students' and kids' future by protecting and preserving its self-interests, all in the name of helping the kids. It has nothing to do with the kids, and everything to do with the adults (bad teachers). The position of the unions is that, they don't want to measure teachers' performance because they don't want to distinguish bad teachers from good ones. They don't want the good ones to be rewarded, because it would mean the bad ones would invariably have to be dropped, and then the union membership (and coffer) will drop.
Gates has it absolutely right. No one in their right mind can support the argument that, multiplication in Massachusetts is different from multiplication in Alabahama or New York and others. But that's exactly what's happening now. As public schools fail to educate kids on basic skills like math and reading/writing, they would rather dumb down the standards instead, hence all the push-back of standardized tests for kids (mandate of No Child Left Behind), teachers' evaluation, or even resorting to cheating to juice up the test scores.
Thing is, there are many good teachers, or at least reasonably decent ones. And the advocacy of Gates for standard core curriculum makes alot of sense to me. One way or the other, students and teachers need to be tested on what they have learnt and how well they have taught. I would not accept any argument lesser than that.
What about those students whose family can be so uncooperative that teachers can't do anything about it? Truth be told, there will always cases like that. In some areas like inner city, a large majority of student body falls in that category. How do you help the teachers to help the kids? Teachers can't deal with that alone. School admin and state have to step in.
To be sure, for all those comparison of student test scores between US and Asia and other countries, it probably has ingrained this impression to most Americans or westerners that there's nothing ailing public schools in Asia. That's far from truth. Take the case of Hong Kong, for example. Public schools are categorized into Band 1 (best) to Band 5 (our inner city equivalence of the terribles and our dropout factories in US). It's a nightmare to teach in Band 5 schools. There are even studies about it. Most teachers in Band 5 don't and can't do much teaching. It's discouraging, it's frustrating, sometimes it's even life-threatening (eg. knifes in schools). But mostly, all we hear is the exemplary straight-A students from Asia who are out to take our jobs and the future of our kids. That only shows half of the picture.
It's laudable to have someone as high profile as Gates to push the subject of and the need to improve our public schools, looking at it from all angles (basic research, the financing, alternative schooling avenues like charter schools and parochial schools, the core and variations in curriculum etc). The kind of public debate from politicians, with such near-sighted focus on school vouchers (thereby pretty much giving up hope of ever repairing public schools). Then again, no one wants their kids to be the guinea pigs for any experimental projects, as the Waiting For Superman documentary has rightly pointed out.
I can only hope, that Gates and others who have ambition to do good in this area do not get so discouraged that they would give up on it in the end. The idea of just throwing money (and more money) to the current system, without any change and real reform, is not going to work. It's going to only line the pockets of bad teachers, and kids in bad schools are going to be the ones holding the bags. We can't be complacent to just let it happen. As a society, we simply can't afford to have future generations all falling through cracks like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment