Teacher Regulations Worthy of George Orwell
Who will remain to teach the nation's schoolchildren when the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) succeeds in its plan to force every single pupil, teacher, school, college and university to conform to its Orwellian plan for constant surveillance and measurement of teachers via standardized tests and surveys?
The proposed regulations on Teacher Education released in December by USDE are the latest example of federal over-reach into the nation's classrooms at all levels of education. Through 75 dense and difficult pages of reading in the Federal Register, a picture emerges of a federal bureaucracy obsessed with controlling and measuring virtually every aspect of a teacher's work. Despite my own legal training, parsing the Fedspeak of the proposed regs was a turgid slog through too much jargon. Rules that are this long and so obtuse cannot be good. I found myself wondering how many teachers are actually able to read and understand what is about to happen to them. Even more, I found myself asking the unthinkable: who would even want to enter a profession that has so little freedom and so much governmental oversight?
Great teachers need the oxygen of freedom to create, to imagine, to inspire and lead their pupils on the journey of discovery that is the essence of acquiring knowledge and skills. Sure, that journey requires some structure and sequencing across ages and grade levels, and we need local, state and national agreement around the framework of what knowledge is important to learn at each age, what skills a student should be able to manifest after certain years of learning, and what diplomas, certificates and degrees represent by way of baseline learning mastery at each level. People entering the teaching profession need to know and accept the legitimate structures of curricula and programs, accreditation and assessment practices appropriate for their schools and locales. But the proposed regulations suck the oxygen out of the classroom, depleting freedom in favor of federal mandates. This is quite the opposite of what education in a democracy should be all about.
We all agree on the need for rigorous standards for learning, for teachers and students, and for schools, colleges and universities. Without a single federal bureaucrat sitting on our shoulders, we educators are the first to want our students to be wildly successful. We also know far more than Big Brother about what blocks student success. The problem is not the idea of standards that have teeth. The problem is the methodology of the federal government, and its arrogation of power to itself to address issues of teaching and learning in ways that are threatening, wasteful, inappropriate and, ultimately, ineffective -- but not before also being very harmful.
What do the proposed new regulations do? Boiling down 75 pages of dense Fedspeak into a few plain English terms, the proposed regulations would dictate to states the criteria for approval of teacher education programs, and through the states would dictate to teacher education programs the criteria for student admission, assessment and graduation from those programs. The states would have to assess all teacher education programs based on four elements every year: student learning outcomes as measured by standardized test results for the pupils taught by the teachers of the schools of education; employment data for graduates of schools of education including placement and retention in first jobs; opinion surveys of graduates and employers; and accreditation. The state assessments of each teacher education program would then translate into a rating that the school must display on its website and other materials. Teacher education programs that fail to get satisfactory ratings Teacher Regulations Worthy of George Orwell | Patricia McGuire: