"I visited a school on Friday and met with some wonderful, genuine, sincere teachers who pour their heart and soul into their classrooms and their students and our conversation was not long enough to draw out of them what is limiting them from being even more success from what they are currently. But I can tell the attitude is more of a "receive mode." They're waiting to be told what they have to do,and that's not going to bring success to an individual child. You have to have teachers who are empowered to facilitate great teaching."
— Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, in an interview 2/16/17
Hi Betsy. I'm a public school teacher. I'd like to respond to what you said in that interview.
I can tell you that teachers as a whole in this country are not waiting to be told what they have to do. We know what we have to do. There are, however, two things we are waiting for:
1. Adequate funding to be able to do what works. I know it is a truism among many in this country that "throwing money at schools doesn't solve the problem." That is a simplistic way of dismissing a very complex and important topic. I will explain in much more detail below.
2. Professional respect. Not to put too fine a point on it, what we're waiting for is for completely untrained and inexperienced people like yourself to recognize and acknowledge that you know far, far less about what good teaching is, or what it takes to educate a child, than those of us who have years of professional training and years of classroom experience. Your job is support the schools, not to try to tell those of us who know much more than you do how to do our jobs.
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Much of my teaching career has been spent teaching remedial math and reading in a public middle school. I can tell you beyond any doubt that the more time I am able to spend working individually with a child who struggles with math concepts or reading comprehension, the more that child will learn. Simple reality dictates that the more students there are in a classroom, the less time I can spend with each child individually.
Parents, including your billionaire friends, know that class size matters. That's why private schools brag about their small class sizes, and that's why people who can afford to shell out tens of thousands of dollars per year to send their children to those schools do so.
Here's something I bet you don't know, Betsy - but you definitely should learn:
Studies show that when demographics (such as income and parents' educational level) are accounted for, public schools actually do a better job of teaching students than private schools do.* And we do this despite larger class sizes, fewer enrichment classes, less of all the things that cause parents to choose private schools for their children. Here's just one example of a study that came to that conclusion after examining the performance of over 300,000 students in over 15,000 public, charter, and private schools; if you need more evidence, the article lists other research being done on the same topic.
*(A good public school education, for example, might have taught you not to speak in run-on sentences like the one that opens your quote above. Also, you might have learned enough grammar and syntax to avoid unfortunate verbal messes like "what is limiting them from being even more success from what they are currently.")
The students whose scores you and your billionaire friends point to as evidence of our “failing public schools” are the ones who don't have those demographic advantages. The ones who don't have college-educated parents, whose families don't have the money to pay for music or dance lessons or send them to summer camps. The ones whose parents work 2 or 3 jobs and never had the time to read books to their pre-school kids or to talk with them enough for the kids to develop large vocabularies before starting kindergarten.
The true fact that you and your billionaire "education reform" friends don't want to admit, Betsy, is that the reason those children struggle in school is not because they have bad teachers. It is because when children are burdened with these types of disadvantages, schools need a lot more resources to help bring them up to the educational level of their more fortunate peers.
They need smaller classes. They need tutors who can work with them one on one. They need field trips to museums, businesses, outdoor locations to help expose them to things they have never seen or known of. They need special programs that cost huge sums of money to help pinpoint their learning needs and individualize instruction to target those specific needs.In short, they need more input and more help, to get to the same point, than their more advantaged peers need.
And as painful as it may be to you to hear this, Betsy, that means schools that serve such children need MORE MONEY than schools that serve relatively less disadvantaged children, whether in private or public schools. (Please remove your fingers from your ears and stop singing la-la-la-la-la. This is important, dammit. Listen.)
And yet, throughout the country, at both the state and federal levels, your party consistently says that the solution to "failing schools" is to take money away from them. This is just stupid. There is no other word for it. The only possible theoretical foundation on which such a ridiculous policy could rest goes something like this:
Teachers are lazy, So the solution to problems in education is to make teachers work harder, And teachers are motivated by money, So therefore if their students are struggling, you should take away some of the money being paid to educate those students. Then the teachers will work hard so they can get the money back.Nobody who actually knows any teachers could possibly believe that tortured logic. In fact, nobody who knows any teachers could possibly believe even one of those bullet points.
Now you, as Secretary of Education, bring a slight variation on that theme: Instead of just saying, “Let's take the money away from failing schools,” you are saying, “Let's take the money away from failing public schools and . . . give it to private schools.” Even though, as noted above, the research shows those schools don't educate kids as well as public schools do.
But you have an answer to that objection as well: Let's let parents “choose” whether they want their child in the failing public school or some other school.
Here's the problem with that proposal, Betsy (and I do hate to keep having to harp on this theme, but perhaps if you'd attended a public school and had to justify your answers to math problems and support your claims in English class with evidence from the text, you'd be better at figuring this stuff out for yourself, without me having to explain it to you): If parents don't have comparable information about the schools among which they are choosing, then they won't be able to make an informed choice.
This was what Sen. Al Franken was getting at when he asked you if you would commit to equal levels of accountability for private and charter schools before authorizing them to compete with public schools for taxpayer funds (a question which you stonewalled at least 4 times, iirc, and never did actually answer).
Because, Betsy, if you have test scores that show a public school to be "low-performing," but you don't have comparable test scores to show how demographically-similar students in the alternative school performed on the same test, what basis is there for supposing that what the alternative school offers is better than, or even as good as, what the public school offers?
I know that the absence of this comparable information is a great boon for you and your billionaire education-reform cronies, because it allows you to pretend that the problem is due to bad teachers rather than to lack of adequate funding, and that the charter schools will be the panacea parents are looking for. You don’t actually want parents to make an informed choice; you want them to make the choice you prefer, which is either a for-profit school or a “Christian” school. Or, as you put it, school choice leads to “greater Kingdom gain.”
But, given your view of yourself as one of the Chief Lieutenants of God's Army of Righteousness here on Earth, doesn't it ever bother you that the only way you can justify the centerpiece of your educational policy is by suppressing comparative data and then implicitly lying about what that data would have shown if it had been allowed to exist? Is that really what your version of God wants you to be doing with your life?
SAD.
If you want to improve education in America, I would suggest the following: Instead of going into one school, then on the basis of that one visit making public pronouncements to the country about what teachers need, how about (I know - this is really radical!) you actually talk to some teachers? Set up a series of town halls throughout the country.
Red states, blue states.
Teacher union states, non-teacher union states.
Urban districts, suburban districts, rural districts.
"Successful" districts, "failing" districts.
Invite teachers to come and enlighten you about public education and public school teachers, since your experience and knowledge of those topics is so very limited. Ask them to tell you, for example:
What has worked in their classroom, in their school? What successes have they had, and what made those successes possible? What would they like to be doing that they aren't able to do? Why aren't they able to do it? What are the obstacles blocking them from doing that? What do they wish their principal, superintendent, school board, state legislators, governor, Congress, Secretary of Education, and President knew about students/teachers/teaching/public schools that they don't know?We're pretty good at teaching; you might be amazed at what you could learn.
Unless, of course, you don't want to learn the things you could learn from public school teachers? Because as any teacher can tell you, one of the most challenging situations a teacher can face is when the student chooses not to learn.