The Education Wars II: Eli Broad Blathers Again

about things he knows nothing about. This is from two years ago, but it is still apt:

Few professions in this country strike as deep a chord as teaching. Everyone has a warm memory that they can attribute to a teacher who made an impression on their youth. So it was no surprise that Jason Kamras and Andrew Rotherham held up the responsibility and credit for public education's future to the need to attract the right teachers with the right talents, pay them competitively, and equip them with the necessary tools to do their jobs [ America's Teaching Crisis, Issue #5]. Few people will argue with the importance of having the right people in the teaching profession. When they're successful, they're enormously successful. And when you've got a dud in the classroom, you have pretty much guaranteed that you will handicap about 30 kids for a year.

But Kamras and Rotherham miss a critical point in their argument, and that is the system in which teachers work. To use a business analogy, this would be akin to saying that regardless of the top management at a company and the systems and tools in place in that organization, the line workers are the determining factor in whether the company turns a profit. Are they important to the bottom line? Absolutely. But without the right systems--the leadership at the top and critical systems in place throughout the organization–success is, at best, left to chance. That's why shareholders demand good governance and operational systems from public corporations. When it comes to American public education, every citizen is a shareholder in how successfully schools educate our children–and we must demand more in how our schools are governed and run.

Improving the quality of teaching, as Kamras and Rotherham argue, is important. But how do you ensure that you have the right teacher in the right classroom? How do you give them the tools–like curriculum, benchmark assessments, and pacing guides–that, across the board, will move an entire grade level, school, or school district in the same direction at the same time? How do you measure their success? These are the underlying problems facing American public education. The real issue in today's public schools is the utter failure, at a systemic level, to create high-performing, well-functioning organizations, without which even the best teachers cannot do their best.

What a crock of shit.