Katabasis

The Teachers Say

These all sound like fairly good answers, grounded in the sort of systematic reasoning that has fueled progress since the Enlightenment. However, there is a different set of anwers to the same philosophical questions that points the some of the squirrelly details bound to arise in the implementation of any such philosophy.

1. Standards could be a wonderful aide to teachers, so long as they are kept to the most essential topics and avoid creating laundry lists of every special interest agenda, and so long as they leave questions of pedagogy to teachers. There should also be a process for amending standards just as there is with the Constitution, and that process should allow teachers, those who obey the standards, to bring grievances against them rather than being revised by the same policy-makers and “experts” who wrote them originally.
2. Teachers should have to keep abreast of current research, just as any other professionals do. However, “scientific” research must be carefully defined so as not to invalidate the accumulated wisdom about teachers’ “bedside manner.” Additionally, this must not become an excuse to limit instruction to that from major publishers of textbooks, whose curriculum has repeatedly been shown to be ineffective, despite its “basis” in education research.
3. The Scientific Method sounds great, but we worry that it may not catch all the crucial factors, just as Western medicine continues to fail to adequately explain or implement preventative medicine.
4. We can know that we’re teaching the right things because students develop into healthy, confident, capable citizens who value their education after they have had a chance to see its effects. Though this requires extraordinary patience, and makes it impossible to isolate a single variable (as is the case in preventative medicine), the proof is in the pudding. It just takes a long time, and even then, the strength of the theory is more proof than the results of any single experiment.
5. An understanding of the way children develop, the process of learning, and faith in students' abilities as important, if not more than content knowledge.
6. Teachers need trust, freedom to use their professional judgment, and the respect of society to do their jobs well.

Up until this point, there is clearly a disconnect in terms of attitude and perspective, but general agreements can be reached with some negotiation. It is this last clause that is in complete defiance of everything educators know.

7. Tests do not adequately reflect a child’s individual performance (having a margin of error of about two grade levels) and must not be used to make decisions about individual children. There are not currently good enough standardized tests to assess the kind of learning educators want for students, and it is doubtful any standardized test could. Placing the power to assess teachers and administrators in the results of a single test per year completely undermines their professional jurisdiction.