Teacher, Teacher, I Declare...

After I posted Preying on Human Misery on May 3, which was critical of the way the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation often  unwittingly supports the labeling of acting-out kids as having brain disorders, one of the people associated with the organization wrote me an angry e-mail.  It took note of the question I had posed, "Why would any parent want their child to be labeled with a brian disorder?"   I was told in no uncertain terms that no parent would ever want this, just as no parent wants their child to be labeled with a life threatening illness. 

In my e-mail reply, I said: "Of course many parents resist the drugs, thank goodness, but other parents we see everyday in our clinics demand both the diagnosis of bipolar disorder and the drugs, and when told their children do not need drugs, they go elsewhere.  Are you aware of this?  It’s also happening all over the country.  Your statement that there are no parents who want their children to be diagnosed with a brain disorder is demonstrably incorrect.  And I am not even including the parents who coach their children to act certain ways in order to get what are known as 'crazy checks' from the government." 

Parents who insist that their children are diseased in this manner, often with the backing of a mental health professional, tend to want to blame all of their family's problems on everything and anything but themselves. 

We are seeing another example in schools, in which today's parents may blame "bad teachers" for all of the academic and disciplinary failings of their children.  Stories abound about how teachers, when they send home notes describing problematic behavior in one of their students, are met with irate parents who defend their child, verbally attack the teacher, and are willing to complain about the teacher's "outrageous prejudice" against their darling child to the school principal or even to the district superintendent.  Several commentators have pointed out that, in the good old days, such a child would be punished at school and then later again at home.  The parents believed the teacher's side of the story, and never became so damn defensive.

Frighteningly,  the theme of never holding parents to account for their children's behavior has been picked up by politicians of both political parties, as they attempt to "fix" our "broken down" educational system.  In the case of politicians, however, there may be a second motive behind just catering to the prejudices of the electorate.  One must wonder if the "blame the teacher" movement is designed to destroy public schools.  This issue was covered nicely in a recent op-ed column by Bill Maxwell (http://scrippsnews.com/content/maxwell-dont-turn-teachers-scapegoats):

"No Child Left Behind, for all intents and purposes, is a blueprint for blaming teachers and making the privatization of our public schools more palatable by offering charter schools as the panacea.  Now President Barack Obama has succumbed to the Blame the Teacher Syndrome with his Race to the Top program. A mainstay of the program is improving public education by rewarding or punishing teachers when their schools do or do not close the so-called achievement gap...'Whenever data is generated by any credible source, the correlation between poverty and educational achievement is so strong it is impossible for any unbiased individual to ignore,' writes Jack Random of dissidentvoice.org, an online newsletter. 'When schools are ranked according to quality, those on the top of the list are invariably wealthy and predominantly white while those at the bottom are invariably poor with high proportions of minorities.'"

The politicians' idea is that teachers might actually lose their jobs if their classes' performance on standardized tests does not improve - as if teachers are magically in control of just how motivated to learn the students assigned to them are.  Aside from the lack of wisdom of using standardized tests (which lead to "teaching to the test," a lack of emphasis on teaching critical thinking skills, as well as outright cheating in order to compete), this idea clearly turns teachers into scapegoats.   While there are no doubt incompetent teachers, I highly doubt that they are concentrated in the poorest performing schools.  For that to be true, it would have to have been planned that way. 

Well, come to think of it, maybe it has been planned that way to some degree. The most inexperienced teachers are often sent to work in the most difficult districts, especially in an economic environment in which thousands of teachers have been laid off nationwide - usually with the most senior teachers having, well, seniority. The experienced teachers not only get to keep their jobs, they often have had a chance to land the best school assignments. 

When you combine that process with the way schools are funded using local property taxes, so the schools in the poorest districts have often had the fewest resources, you can see why some minorities get paranoid that the government is conspiring to "keep them in their place."

I propose that we test the proposition that teachers are to blame for the poor performance of their students on standardized tests.  After one year, we should have the schools with the lowest and highest test averages trade faculties.  That way, after a second year, we can see if the supposedly "better" teachers did much better with what are probably the most difficult students, and if the test scores of the students of the supposedly "bad" teachers declined significantly.  Anyone wanna bet on the outcome?