Imbalance

While warming up this morning on the elliptical at the gym, I was watching the dueling  televisions hanging in front of me. Sanjay Gupta was reporting on the vanishing water supply in the Middle East with images of dried up lakes, wells, and shriveled up people digging in the sand for any bit of moisture they could find. Then the television to the left, at the same time, was advertising a new type of hose showing a man hosing down his boat in his back yard and another person washing a car. The juxtaposition was stunning. People in desperation while others waste. And as my mind often does, I started looking for parallels in education where haves and have nots coexist side by side.

In some states, good public schools are easy to find simply by buying a house in the right zip code. Within a school, some classrooms are places where kids are challenged, loved, and valued and in others the teacher is simply doing time. No matter how often unions and district offices say publicly that every classroom teacher is good, they know it is a lie. The students know it is a lie. The parents know it is a lie. The teachers know it is a lie.

A long time colleague of mine asked our principal years ago, "What incentive is there for a good teacher to remain good in this system?" There, of course, was no real answer that made my colleague happy about the time he invested beyond the doing the basics.

We have to stop pretending that there isn't an inequity in classrooms. We all watch the competing messages coming from different classrooms.  Parents who have the time to navigate the system know which educational landscapes are suffering from drought. While Michelle Rhee's original plan to evaluate teachers was too reliant on a publisher's test, we do have to find a real way to open up our classrooms to the light of day.

Most teachers I know want to do their best. They want the kids in their classrooms to learn and love learning. As teachers we have to open up and admit that teacher training did little to prepare us for the reality of the classroom and we have to stop relying on procedures and pedagogies that we remembered as kids and shift to a new way of doing things. We have to wake up and realize the water is going away. Our factory model is failing and will only fail more in the knowledge economy.

We have to have classrooms where teachers share the knowledge, ideas, and resources freely with each other and push our profession to not settle for the intellectual drought of today. Textbooks, testing, and ticking off standards taught is simply not enough! Our profession needs to realize that we can change education if we stop waiting around for some bureaucrat to tell us what to do. Committees cannot respond to the needs of children in a world where things are changing so rapidly. 

And where some teachers choose to stay in an intellectual drought, unions and other teachers need to stop protecting them. They need to get out of education and stop the educational malpractice. 

If we are to help our students become creative, imaginative innovators, then we have to start by embracing those same qualities as teachers. We have to insist that our time be spent collaborating on classroom instruction that encourages these lofty goals at the same time we make sure all students are becoming literate and fluent in 21st Century pedagogies.

Stop waiting for someone else to lead the way. There is no reason to be stuck in an intellectual desert waiting for aid to arrive. Gather a team and move! Our kids are only kids once. They deserve our best efforts to help them succeed. Stop being sheep!