I went to lunch with two cousins today; he's a recently retired elementary school principal and she's a recently retired elementary school teacher and a presently an educational consultant. I, too, just retired after 27 years of teaching high school English and 6 years as Technology Coordinator in the Chicago Public Schools.  The headline on today's Chicago Sun-Times reads:

High teacher pay no guarantee of results

This headline generated a discussion about what we three know, and that is that we became and remained educators, not for the money, but for the love of teaching, which policy makers, bureaucrats, and other non-educators (including those who remain in the classroom for a minute before becoming administrators) just don't understand. I would have gladly given up raises for smaller class size and the resources I needed to make my classroom more dynamic.

All of the unfunded mandates (NCLB) and the "turnarounds" and discussion about merit pay and tying test results to salary, like it's some kind of reward for getting our students to succeed on standardized tests, are just so much smoke and mirrors and parlor tricks. Just leave us alone and let us teach. To listen to the Dept. of Education, you'd think the school system is failing primarily because of the poor quality of teachers, protected by their unions.  The successful schools in Chicago are allowed to screen students and keep the low scoring students from attending. They are provided with resources to help them continue to be successful. They do well on the standardized test. The neglected under-resourced schools in impoverished neighborhoods that are not allowed to screen out the lower reading and math scoring students generally continue to do poorly on the standardized tests and have a myriad of other problems totally unrelated to how engaging the lessons are.

I remember being able to devote an entire period to teaching literature, grammar, and writing. Then more of more of my teaching time was taken away by mandated mini-lessons, like word of the day, the bell ringer, and often more than half of the remaining time to preparing for the standardized test. It was like the soul of my classroom was invaded by a viral political zombie. Every management policy decision seemed to be rooted more in city hall politics than sound educational practice, as our mayor extended his Chicago style politics into the school system. It felt like the public school system was dying.

And when policy makers don't recognize the relationship between the broken homes and lack of parental involvement, social ills -- including gangs, violence, and poor nutrition, impoverished neighborhoods, and the neighborhood school, but respond to schools like they exist independent of these factors, you just know they are choosing to remain blind. Isn't it must easier to scapegoat the teachers?