Column: Jennifer Vogt-Erickson, My Point of View

It’s been less than 20 years since I graduated from a 7-12 high school up north in the sticks, but it seems like part of a bygone era. That was just as the Internet began changing the way we think and learn (and what we need to learn) in extraordinary ways.

It was about 10 years before cell phones became ubiquitous among teenagers. It was seven years before the No Child Left Behind Act. I swear I recall cigarette smoke wafting from the teachers’ lounge when I was in seventh grade, something that changed when our high school became a tobacco-free zone.

It seems so foreign now. Though it must have seemed like an indignity to smoke on the back fire escape, teachers enjoyed a lot of social status in our town.

David Olson of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce had a column in the paper about a week ago about keeping the best teachers in the classroom. I agree with some of his points, but not what should be done to meet them.

For example, we have a major disparity between white students and minority student outcomes, which is related to a more pronounced (and growing) disparity between students from high-income and low-income households. It’s true that teachers are the most important in-school factor in at-risk students’ achievement, and certainly they might make the difference in whether some children are successful when their home lives are troubled, but that is like herding cows off the highway every day instead of mending fences.

What happens in the home and at the societal level, even before children are school-age, is more important in determining children’s life chances. Access to early childhood education, quality child care and adequate health care are all critical things to focus on. Promoting stable, two-parent families is also essential, but that’s an even tougher subject to tackle. On average, though, it leads to better educational outcomes for children.

People with college degrees are the most likely to raise their children this way, while child-bearing within marriage or some other committed relationship is increasingly going by the wayside for people with less education and less income. Teachers have an enormously important job, but they can’t be our main answer to social inequalities and single-parent families. It’s simply too little, too late.

Olson also talks about “highly effective teachers.” We all want effective teachers in the classroom, but how to get them is open to discussion. If we use standardized testing — I assume this is what he means by “student academic progress” — as one of the measures for laying off teachers, we will retain teachers who are the most effective at teaching to the tests. I think the Finnish model would have more success — less testing, but tougher standards for entrance into teacher training programs.

In other words, if you want the best, start with the best. The Finns elevated the prestige of being a teacher, while here in the United States, NCLB dragged teachers and administrators alike through the mud, focusing on shortcomings and denigrating the profession. On top of that, teachers have faced loss of collective-bargaining rights in many states and have become scapegoats (along with other public workers) for state budget shortfalls. These are not things that make becoming a teacher more attractive to people with bright futures and many other options in front of them.

The focus in education has shifted a lot since I graduated from high school. I had some great teachers, but they were mostly from the era when rote-memorization was emphasized. I had a solid education that way, and content knowledge is still really important for truly understanding things, but it is probably more important now to develop critical thinking skills in school. Unfortunately these skills defy easy measurement with standardized testing.

It would be nice to get to a place where we hold teachers in high esteem and entrust them to teach our kids the things they need to know how to do, not expect them to bear an undue responsibility for compensating for society’s faults while second-guessing their professionalism.

 

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.