As a ten year veteran of the high school social studies trench, I think it’s safe to say the following to your charges:

“You won’t get paid a lot, you won’t get a lot of respect from society, and standardized tests are here to stay. BUT, if you’re good at what you do, none of that will matter because your students will talk about you positively years after the fact.”

Even though I singing in the same chorus about everything you complained about in your post, I’ve also found that keeping the quality of my teaching very high gave me a certain amount of latitude with admin, and I leveraged that latitude to enhance my students’ in-class experiences with history.

Standardized tests will come and go, but a teacher’s classroom is still a place of tremendous flexibility.

That said, right now there are no jobs for our recently graduated teachers unless they have a teachable in math or science or they’re willing to relocate to somewhere in and around the Arctic Circle.

For my undergrad, I had about 30 credits dictated by the university in distribution requirements, another 30 decided by my major, and then 60 to do whatever I wanted with (where one course = 3 credits, more or less). I ended up taking a lot of random courses (accounting, formal logic, Turkish) which didn’t have much to do with my major, but were enormously useful. Especially the accounting, understanding the basic principles makes so many things make sense.

So you can imagine my shock when I found that the school where I got my MA dictates basically 100% of their undergrads courses- each major has a sheet that tells them what they will take each semester for four years. They have a little extra room in there if they want to do a minor, but basically they have no choice about their eduction. The school where I’m doing my PhD is a little better. They dictate about 80% of the courses. This is good for the history department, because every undergrad has to take history 101 and 102, but I can’t imagine it’s good for the students.

I don’t know. I always thought students were supposed to be primarily responsible for their own educations. It does seem like we’re putting too much on the teachers and the schools at every level and not enough on the students.

I had similar concerns as thefrogprincess and then I was hired at one (only job going in a 40 mile radius). It is located in a district where teachers have 35+ students in their classes (only the senior level AP classes have 20-29 students) and where money is grossly mismanaged. At my school, we cap our classes at 25 (as per the charter). This is huge, but still not what makes the biggest difference in my school. The best part of teaching where I do is we run a ‘site based decision model’ which essentially means we all get an equal say on everything (we have two administrators who, like me, have one vote each). We do have some long meetings looking at our budget, line item by line item, but I have to say, taking a 5% pay cut this year felt a lot better when I was informed and had a vote. Every decision we make begins with the question ‘what is best for kids?’ and from there we delve into the various issues we have to face. It was best for kids that we take a 5% pay cut rather than cut out part of our curriculum and/or add 5 kids to each of our classes (it is also best for teachers…which worked out nicely).

Teachers are treated like professionals in my building and therefore I do not have to teach to a test nor do I have to tailor my curriculum to what some out of touch administrator thinks I should be teaching. I change things up regularly and am able to teach skills (like analyzing primary sources and making arguments with them).

Charter schools are public schools and as such are first come first serve. You are right however that our students’ parents are more aware and proactive- which already gives them a step up.

I don’t know what exactly the answer is- however if educrats let teachers do their job, not only would they have a far more empowered group, they’d see massive improvements in kids achievement. More stupid tests aren’t the freakin’ answer.

I wish there were more schools like mine…I love my job.

As for the larger point, I’m somewhere in the middle on this issue. I support the initiatives to be hard on teachers. Bad teachers are out there (I had several) and a year in a bad/ineffective teacher’s class is a year wasted and given that so much of education is cumulative, that year wasted is compounded. Moreover, bad teachers are often clumped together at the worst schools with the students who need the most help and have the least access to outside resources. So on that end, I support Michelle Rhee’s ruthless approach to this. I also had outstanding teachers and the difference is immense.

On the other hand, there are two aspects that seem to be prominent in education reform these days that I dislike. I think the emphasis on testing in reading and math does everyone a disservice. It hampers the teachers who are trying to teach creatively and develop critical thinking. It dumbs down the curriculum. It wastes class time if you’re in a school district, as I was, where the year-end tests happen almost a full two months before the end of the school year. And it makes irrelevant several subjects that I believe are critical to education: languages, art, music, history, PE (although I do recognize the problems with PE), and even the sciences (which likely suffer due to an intense focus on math testing). As hard as I am on teachers who are wasting children’s time, I don’t think testing is the way to determine this. Not only don’t I think these two subjects are the end-all be-all of education, but bad teachers in rich districts are going to fly under the radar b/c their students had access to all the resources in the world, while good teachers in bad districts are going to be out the door because hungry and/or poor students struggle with reading.

My second problem is with charter schools. Although there are several who do good work and I support parents trying to get their children into charter schools if the public school they’re districted to is wretched, charter schools simply cannot replace public schools and I think any attempt to reform schools must be focused on fixing public schools rather than sending a select few children to charter schools. I’m not wildly optimistic that’s going to happen, just as I’m not wildly optimistic that teachers are going to get the significant salary raises that I think are necessary to attract the best and brightest into the profession. But hey, I can dream.

But the more I looked at it the more I saw that the curricular corn maze that dazes and confuses a lot of our students is really a product of faculty choices. Our students aren’t required to, but essentially the system induces almost all of them to, declare their majors right after they drop off their rented outfits for their senior proms. Each department/discipline learns early on what its cut of the incoming herd is, and that they’ll be with us for four/five years. In that context, it’s practically impossible for faculty to NOT conclude that virtually everything we *can* teach they *should* take. This creates system-wide curricular gridlock, and I think an underexplored cause of the trend toward five and six year college stays is the ramping up of major requirements. If you decide after three semesters that geoscience isn’t for you after all, you’re looking at probably seven or more semesters in whatever you try next, just to satisfy the requirements in economics, or history for that matter. So for the s.a.’s (I mean the faculty), the middle part of each semester is occupied with check-lists, check-offs, graduation eligibility check-outs, and what not.

On the Social Science Ed. side of the equation, I cringe at the relentless wallpapering of our bulletin boards with notices about “Fingerprinting Opportunities” (for background checks), the need for student teachers to buy into state mandated group liability *malpractice* insurance pools before they set foot in a public school, (I mean, come on, student teacher malpractice?), “mandatory” 8 p.m. cohort meetings, and the customary blizzard of advisories from alphabet soup standards-setting, certificating, and racketeering agencies. They also may take their education courses in the Ed. school at Baa Ram U., but here, a lot of that stuff goes on in the disciplinary “content shops” like ours, where it emphatically doesn’t belong.