I am addressing this open letter to education reformers, most of whom will never see or read it. Mostly my fellow public educators will read it, and if it brings them some comfort, it will be worth it. I hope some reformers might read it and actually listen instead of getting defensive, but my hopes for that are slim because no virtually no one who is not a teacher listens to teachers.
Education reformers are a varied and sometimes seemingly diametrically opposed bunch. Reformers come from both sides of the political spectrum: Barak Obama and Donald Trump have both tried to reform education in surprisingly similar ways. So have Betsy DeVos and Arne Duncan. Bill Gates has used many public school systems as his laboratories to experiment with reforms. Journalists have cheered reforms on while simultaneously disparaging teachers as the “problem.”
Reforms come in many shapes and sizes. Some involve giving students alternatives to public schools, the three major alternatives being charter schools, vouchers to private schools, and home schooling, but I want to focus mainly on what has been done specifically to public schools and how those changes have effected me as a public school teacher. I teach in Florida, one of the states at the forefront of all reforms, which makes my story more striking, not less.
I was a junior in high school in Upstate New York when A Nation at Risk was published, calling on America to fix its public schools. I am now old enough to retire from teaching high school, and the ripple effects of that report are still reverberating into my life here at the end of my career. The report warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in teaching and in schools.
I am going to make a case right now, one I think would be hard to dispute, that I am not the mediocre teacher that education reform wanted to improve or get rid of. I went in to teaching because of my passion for literacy. I love reading and writing and listening and speaking and wanted, and still want, to pass that passion on to my students. You can see my love for my subject in my life out of school. I write constantly. I draw comics strips. I write plays, novels, short stories, and blog posts. I am involved in theater. I read constantly, and read across many genres. I am a lifelong student of religion, philosophy, science, history, and the science and philosophy of teaching and learning.
As a teacher, I try hard to get my students to think, not just follow instructions to get a grade. I am a performer when I need to be and try to make my class a safe space that is engaging and full of laughter and fun, but also full of discussion and reflection. My career started rough, with a rebellious group of ninth graders who tried to run me out of the school. But I stayed, and ten years later I was the district teacher of the year because of my creativity and innovation and the level of engagement that was evident in my classroom.
I tried, every year, to come up with at least one really good original teaching idea that would take my students from where they were to where I wanted them to be. Eventually I had enough ideas to fill two whole books for teachers, and those books were published by Scholastic Professional Books.
I have always been studiously neutral politically in the classroom. But all teaching is, of course, political. I didn’t mention my politics. But I have tried to respect all my students for who they were. I have tried to create a space for civil discussion and disagreement – a place that models the highest ideals of life in a democracy. Unlike the adults I see online and on TV, there is no name calling, and logical fallacies are discouraged.
I am not a perfect teacher. I don’t necessarily reach every student despite my best efforts, but that is true of almost all of us. Students come to school with a lot of baggage that affects how they do for us. But I have done my best to make my teaching relevant to their lives by using universal inquiry themes like happiness, success, power, and the purpose of education. I have done my best to try to get reluctant students to see that school does have something to offer them. A student wrote in his final journal this year, “It is obvious that you pour your heart and soul and into your teaching.”
I don’t say all this to brag, but to make the point, again, that I don’t believe I was part of the problem your reforms were trying to fix. I was not “Ditto Man” from the 1985 movie Teachers, sitting behind my desk reading the newspaper while my students filled out worksheets.
When I started my career, teaching was as creative as anything I did as a writer or artist. Teaching was pure joy, even if students, being students, were occasionally less than perfectly behaved. Once I got past the first year or two, I knew I had found my vocation, my calling. The writer Frederick Buechner defined vocation as “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” That is exactly what teaching was for me. And still is, despite everything.
After a false start, my career began in earnest in 1993. By the late nineties we had our first set of standards and our first high stakes standardized tests. They seemed like a bump in the road. I kept teaching as usual. I just notated my lessons differently. My test results seemed pretty good. But then came the rest of the reforms, and they have just kept on coming. The curriculum maps and the scripted curriculum program that told me I was no longer an artist and had nothing to bring to the classroom as a person or as a teacher. My creative ideas for designing a year or even a lesson now counted for nothing. I was supposed to be a curriculum dispenser.
Here’s where we are today, thanks to education reform. My classroom has always been designed to make students into lifelong readers, but now all books are suspect and I could be charged with a felony for having the wrong book in my room. My classroom has always been a place of open debate, but now what we can discuss and how we get to discuss it are also under attack.
I have had a series of incredibly supportive principals who have shielded me from the worst excesses of education reform. But nonetheless, I have been grinding my gears against a rising tide of micromanagement from my state and district for nearly 20 years. I am tired. I keep feeling that everytime I figure out how to deal with another new restriction on my teaching, a new one comes along. It feels as if the walls are closing in on my ability to teach as I feel called to teach. It has effected my health. I’ve had throat constriction, a heart attack scare, and sleeplessness. I grind my teeth at night so much I have bitten through mouth guards. I have had major bouts of depression and needed to seek counseling.
In his book Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope, Johann Hari makes the case that depression is really loss of human connections, and the very first lost connection he discusses is disconnection from meaningful work. Reading his chapters on this subject, I realized I was depressed because the work I love and pour my heart and soul into was being rendered meaningless by people who have tried to data-fy and standardize it. Reformers. In Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, he identifies three main things that motivate people intrinsically: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Education reform has stomped on autonomy, which has made mastery impossible, and has sucked all the purpose out of our profession. Sorry, higher test scores are not my life’s calling. Oh, and your extrinsic motivators aren’t so hot either. I’ve been “distinguished” in my evaluation for several years, only to receive about 11 dollars minus taxes as a bonus. That’s not a motivator. That’s a slap in the face.
I ask you, reformers and those who support them, is this what you had in mind? People act baffled at our teacher shortage. But I know why we have one. Aside from the way teachers are badmouthed by press and by certain groups that call us “groomers” and “pedophiles”, there is the basic fact that everything that makes teaching meaningful to teachers has been systematically stripped away from the profession in the name of “improving” the profession. Teachers are leaving in droves. Teachers colleges are closing for lack of students wanting to sign on to the profession.
If I am so unhappy, why do I keep coming back, you may ask? Well, I once wrote a poem where I compared teaching to an abusive relationship where I keep staying… for the kids. And it’s true. I do. The conundrum for a teacher like me is that I Iove what I do so much, and I have managed to keep doing it despite the rising tide of inhuman standardization.
I am about to enter year 32, but the new restrictions on books and the new hoops we are supposed to jump through almost made quit this week. Only a pep talk from a good administrator kept me for one more year. I should have another 10 left in me. But I worry the stress might kill me.
In a country where we value freedom so much, why do we create school systems that are run like totalitarian states? If we value freedom so much, why are the very people who are supposed to be teaching our children how to think, told they are not free to think?
So, reformers of all stripes, I’d love to hear from you. Teachers are leaving in droves. Your very best teachers hate their jobs. A teacher like me has had to deal with depression and health problems to stay on the job. Is this what you intended? No? Well – what are you going to do to fix it?
But, dear reformers, if you went about standardizing everything in sight in the hopes of destroying public education and driving teachers out of the profession (for whatever reason), I am appalled by you. Whatever your motivation may have been, you have made school seem prison-like and horrible for generations of children at this point, and you have left teachers like me, who want nothing but to do a great job, demoralized, exhausted, and ready to quit.
I hope you are proud of yourselves.
David Lee Finkle