It Looks Like a Digression, but Really, It's Not!

I finished State of Fear yesterday. Crichton sort of redeemed himself in the end. Mr. Grace-Under-Pressure never came through with anything truly intelligent about global warming, but another character (who had been “dead” for most of the book) had a legitimate point. His idea was to start a new foundation that would keep away from politics, stick to science, and really figure out what the problems were and how to solve them. Twenty years after its inception, it would be forced to close because, after 20 years, it would be too entrenched in the establishment to be any good to anyone.

I can certainly apply the same ideas to the thing I know the most about—education. In the 1980’s, a study was released called “A Nation At Risk.” It compared our standardized test scores to those of children from other industrialized nations and made it look like we were lagging way, way behind.

What it didn’t say was that the U.S. tests ALL of its children and averages the scores together. Most of the nations we were comparing ourselves to track and test only the college bound students (roughly the upper 1/3). If you compared our top 1/3 with their top 1/3, we were quite comparable. But if you’re a politician trying to get elected by telling people that schools are in crisis, their kids won’t be able to compete globally, and that you can solve the problem with a simplistic testing program, it’s great press.

By the same token, I know a number of teachers, strong union advocates mostly, who insist that there’s nothing wrong with any American schools anywhere and that pretty much every teacher out there is fabulous and underpaid and underappreciated. My experience doesn’t bear this out either.

I dropped out of my local teachers’ association in 1995. (It’s a “collective bargaining association.” “Unions” don’t fare well in Colorado.) I did it because I was involved in the firing of a fellow teacher. He was a brilliant man, and a good teacher for some students—maybe 10 kids a year. He held lofty conversations with kids who were brilliant and unconventional, but the vast majority of kids in his classes did seat time without getting much out of it. He didn’t read the papers that he slapped checks and check-plusses on. You can’t teach kids to write if you never read their writing. He was frequently very late to school and therefore as many as 20-30 minutes late to first hour. Often, he stuck a tape in a VCR and went to the teachers’ lounge to read the Wall Street Journal during classes or to the English office to talk on the phone. One year, he started the new semester by asking the kids whether they’d had any meaningful sexual experiences over the summer. Parents complained about him bitterly.

Finally, he went too far. He popped the film 1900 into the VCR, a four-hour epic that meant he would not have to teach for a full week. The class was “Logical Argument and Debate.” Later on, neither the teacher nor the students could explain the relevance of the film to the class. The movie has full-frontal nudity of both sexes, a ménage a trois in which the woman lapses into an epileptic seizure in the nude, and a number of other things that might disconcert parents. After all, I teach in a community where people freak over the language in Of Mice and Men. The movie is rated R, and school district policy requires parent permission to show R rated movies, with alternatives for kids whose parents don’t approve. This teacher didn’t get permission. I have the feeling that the choice of film was a last-minute thing.

I testified against him, mainly about the number of times I had covered his classes because he was late or witnessed his classes without a teacher in the room.

The investigator working with the lawyer from the Colorado Education Association called me on the phone and lied. She said that she was with the CEA and was taking a survey that was in no way related to any particular case, teacher, or incident. Then she asked me a lot of questions about what movies I had shown and whether I thought they were “controversial.” Before long, the conversation became all about my professional relationship with this particular teacher. (It was, overall, quite good, except when he kept the books we were sharing and I had to skip entire novels because I couldn’t get the books I needed.) The lawyer ended up using much of what we had talked about in that conversation—waiting until after I had left the stand to question other teachers about whether or not a film I had shown was inappropriate. (I had once shown Never Cry Wolf to a group of 6th graders. It’s rated PG, but has a man’s bare backside in one scene. I had sent home permission slips and given an alternate activity to the 2 girls whose mothers had requested it. None of that was mentioned in the hearing. Just the naked backside.)

I don’t have a problem with CEA providing this man with legal counsel. He pays his dues and is entitled. I do have a problem with having them lie to me and vilify me on the stand with half-truths. I had been paying them dues, too, after all. So I quit.

Clenching my teeth and choking on the lump in my throat, I rejoined when Governor Bill Owens shoved a state testing program down our throats based on the one his buddy G. W. Bush was using over in Texas. My own little voice was woefully inadequate, but I didn’t really see CEA stepping up to the plate. Let’s face it, they’re mostly about compensation, and you do need decent compensation to attract decent teachers, but what I really wanted was a collective voice for being allowed to do my job—prepare kids for their futures, not use them for political agendas.

In the end, I guess I’ve gotten that. We managed to fire that teacher, but it was a major trauma. If the parents hadn’t been threatening to make the situation into a major media event (this was pre-shootings, mind you), I wonder if our principal would have gone through all the hassles and harassment. When I went back to the classroom 2 years ago after my leave of absence, I decided that I would do the job right. Hell, if you can’t fire a teacher for being incompetent, try to get rid of me for being competent. I still bristle at some of the things my association does, but this one thing has stood me in good stead. Now that I have the backing of my principal again, things are looking up.

In short, I’d like to see a more thoughtful, multi-faceted approach to education reform. I’d like us to acknowledge that some schools are not broken and stop trying to “fix” them until they are. I’d like to see us work with schools that have serious issues that interfere with student achievement and do what needs to be done—whether that is increasing teacher accountability and/or student accountability, providing parenting classes, teaming with local businesses (hey, schools are producing their future employees, after all), whatever. Neither the government nor the teachers’ unions are really doing much to accomplish this.

So, yeah, I suppose environmental issues might be in very much the same boat. It’s this broad brush stuff—all teachers and environmentalists are ignorant weenies or even all teachers and environmentalists are saints on earth—that makes me crazy.

tags: global warming  environment  education