Budget Cuts, Merit Pay, NCLB: The Tipping Point?

By Alan HaskvitzcloseAuthor: Alan Haskvitz Name: Alan Haskvitz
Site: http://reacheverychild.com
About: Alan Haskvitz is a member of the National Teachers Hall of Fame and has been recognized many times as one of the nation's most successful and innovative teachers. Accounts of his students' accomplishments have been featured in books, periodicals, and on national radio and television. He is a classroom teacher with experience at every grade level and every major subject.See Authors Posts (11)
 

http://www.reacheverychild.com

Malcom Gladwell, in his best selling book, Tipping Point, reflects on the Power of Context. Essentially. that is how human behavior is influenced by the social environment. If Gladwell’s work is accurate, the recent cutting of state budgets, NCLB, insistence on standardized testing, and the  possibility of merit pay may create a tipping point in many schools that could well spell a sea-change in education that could influence school climate for decades.

It was easy enough for elected officials to do, just cut education to help balance the budget. Raising taxes was often off the table as an edgy populace possibly protected their wallets without understanding the long term ramifications. It is like throwing out the bailing bucket on a sinking rowboat to save weight. Yes, it saves, but were the long term ramifications clearly thought through? Would a small tax on everyone not be better than laying off thousands? It is clear that the word taxes does not have many backers. What is not clear is the impact on schools in the long term.

Sadly, what I feel has happened is that the No Child Left Behind standardized testing insistence and the fact that many states are going to have to lay-off teachers and even shorten the school year shall result in a tipping point for education. That is the point at which a teacher, faced with up to 40 or more students in the classroom, simply can not continue to pursue the ideas and lessons that he or she knows results in improved learning opportunities. Differentiated curriculum, IEPs, and other important factors in education must be adhered to, but the question is how effective these requirements can be meet giving the possibility of fewer school days, more students, less money, by an educator who must face the stress of doing more with less.

Cutting education funding is essentially curtailing the future productivity of the nation, but what is equally worrisome is that this tipping point could well change the way teachers in the classroom handle their chores. In every classroom in the nation nearly daily a teacher meets his or her tipping point. That episode or experience that can either give them inspiration or crush their spirit. For example, after 35 years of successful teaching my tipping point came after a call from our librarian. She told me that the  terrarium that was purchased by one of my classes 20 years previously had been vandalized. It had sat in a corner of the library without incident until workers expanding the commuter center placed it in an unsupervised corner. When I went up the library I wasn’t really upset. A few new plants and it would be ready to go. What I did not suspect was that the small piece of paper that was laminated to the stand and contained the names of those students who paid for it had been trashed. It should not have been anything for me to be concerned with. Indeed, those students who gave the money probably didn’t even remember buying it.  But for some reason I couldn’t shake the negativity of the act.

For a teacher, such a tipping point can be such a small thing and that is not helped by the negative attacks by politicians and those who feel that the public school system should not reflect the public, but their own values. Shoving up to 40 students into a classroom and expecting achievement to rise and for every student to learn is a fantasy. Adding to this dilemma are organizations,such as the Fordham Foundation, that promotes the belief that testing is the god by which education must be judged.  There are even those suggesting that teachers be given merit pay for raising test scores.  It is not difficult to image an educator thinking, “I am not going to teach writing in my math class because I am only going to be rewarded if my student’s math scores improve.” Nightly homework from every teacher,  teachers unwilling to share new ideas, and poor students being  treated like lepers  could result in such a silly plan. Such an ill conceived plan could well produce teachers who actively recruit students for their class and where financial rewards can well tip the scales of education from meaningful learning into test preparation ad nauseum.

Teachers live in a world where sharing is essential to survival and to making the profession effective. This is one of the intrinsic rewards of teaching. Mentoring, talking about better ways to deal with curriculum, plans for the new year, even helping in making parental contacts are part of the giving culture of teaching that has made it the Queen of all Sciences. Merit pay could well breakdown that wonderful nature and turn the school’s culture into the Enron, AIG, Wall Street type of society where cash/scores are the bottom line and the means justifies the end. Pass the erasers.

No doubt I may be changing the direction of the Power of Context in Gladwell’s book, but the possibility of a tipping point for education being near can not be overlooked.  An aging teaching population, a rise in the number of students who need help in second languages and the legal demands for providing for students who need special services combined with the cutting away of funding, more standardized testings, and merit based pay all take up weight on society’s titter-totter. Add that the NCLB requirements and you have teachers who are being lock-stepped into curriculum decisions, forced to work with even larger class sizes, and not being allowed to use their gifts and experience as educators and you have the ingredients for a fundamental change in teaching and teachers.

Sometimes teachers just want to teach. They want to close their classroom door and create their magic. That time may have passed as society’s call for a national curriculum and the demands for accountability create a new context for judging good teaching. What we need now are teachers who      work outside the classroom as hard as they do within to preserve the social and cultural environment that they feel benefits their students. We need innovators. We need to make ourselves heard. And, we need to understand the subtle nature of the Tipping Point and to make sure that our side of the titter-totter is at worst balanced, and preferably held high so that every teacher can better view a more child friendly future even if it means working against the forces of gravity at times.