“Hey, Ernie! Yes, you in the back row of the faculty meeting where you have been sitting it seems like forever. Do you remember telling us ‘I’ve seen educational changes come and go. All I have to do is sit here and do nothing. I can teach the way I always have taught. It is all a tempest in a teapot and in the end nothing will have changed.’ Were you right? Have any of the reform mandates of the past thirty years done anything to change your teaching?”
In the 1980s and 90s Dr. Madeline Hunter was nationally active helping classroom teachers better understand the connections between learning theories and instructional design. For many teachers, her insights into how teaching using motivation, retention and reinforcement theories, to name just a few, significantly improved the ability of all children to learn and to repeat exceptional learning year after year. For other teachers, Dr. Hunter upset the applecart. Hardcore veteran teachers like Ernie had been using the same teaching techniques that their teachers had used in the 40s, 50s and 60s in their own teaching for years, if not decades,. Dr. Hunter recognized that educational reform was a process that some teachers would engage in gladly, others would learn over time, and some, not many, would be “Ernies.” Ernie was her name for the veteran teacher who was change oppositional. Ernie believed that his tried and true teaching, generally based upon lecture and rote learning, had worked over the ages and would work for him as long as he was in a classroom.
Needless to say, Ernie has seen an eyeful in the last thirty years. Just the intellectual reforms based upon learning and teaching theories have been amazing. Hunter’s Instructional Design. Outcome-Based Education. Understanding by Design. Framework for Teaching. Assessment FOR Learning. Whole Child Education. And, the list goes on. Interestingly, none of these reforms every threatened Ernie’s unwavering opposition to change. Why should they. Ernie observed that no teachers in the 80s and 90s were removed from their teaching positions due to their non-changeability.
Ernie probably sat up a little straighter in 2001 when No Child Left Behind was enacted as a federal plan for reforming public education. It was not the voice of President Bush expounding the urgency for the United States to repair its declining international status in educational assessments. It was not the infusion of federal dollars into Title programs that opened new teaching positions and purchased a flood of new teaching materials. And, it was not state governors extolling their legislatures to adopt NCLB regulations so that state budgets could be buffered with educational dollars. What caught Ernie’s attention was the doomsday clock of Adequate Yearly Progress. No matter the level of reading and math achievement of the students in Ernie’s school in 2001, by the spring of 2014 100% of all students were required to be proficient in state assessments or teachers would be fired and schools were going to close. It was the law.
For the first time in Ernie’s long memory, federal and state leadership said “What you are doing right now is not good enough. Do whatever it takes to meet the mandates of NCLB. If you can’t get the job done, we will fire you and find someone who can.” A mandate with the promise of enforcement was entirely new to Ernie, but as often as he was told “NCLB is the law and it is for real,” he still wondered what would happen if a great number of schools failed to make AYP. Would the Governor really fire all the teachers and take control of all those schools? So, Ernie waited and continued to teach as he always had taught and the academic achievements of his students continued to fall into the bottom of the “bell curve.” By 2007, 28% of all schools were failing to make AYP. The next year 38% of school failed to make AYP and USDE Secretary Duncan warned Congress that by 2011 82% of all schools would fail to make AYP if the rules of NCLB were not changed.
“Ah,” said Ernie. “Told you so.” State after state petitioned the USDE for relief from the AYP mandates of NCLB. “Ain’t nobody going to close schools or fire teachers now,” said Ernie, who had not changed his teaching practices one iota. He knew from his seat in the back of the faculty meetings that “change comes and change goes and, if you are smart, just sit back and do nothing. It will all blow over.”
But. Wait. NCLB did not entirely go away and the quid pro quo of the waivers caught Ernie’s attention. Academic standards were still in, but not the Common Core. School Report Cards replaced AYP and schools would be graded according to student performance in reading and math, attendance and graduation, and the quantitative gap in the academic achievements of mainstream white children and children of color and children with learning disadvantages. And, all teachers would be given a Teacher Effectiveness Index score based upon their use of effective teaching strategies and annual student achievement in reading in math. To top it off, all of this data would be publicly accessible on a statewide data base – the School Effectiveness Dashboard. Anyone in Ernie’s school district could dive into the data to find out how well Ernie’s students performed on the state assessments and how his school principal rated Ernie’s application of the Framework for Teaching.
“Really,” said Ernie. “I have been in my classroom since the 80s and after all the huffing and puffing I am still in my classroom. Let’s wait a little longer and see.”
Ernie was right once again. The state legislature botched the contracting for a statewide data system, renamed and adopted the Common Core academic standards saying “it would be nice if you taught these”, and dropped the evaluative features of the School Report Card system. The Report Card became an annual snapshot with no accountability features.
It may be that Ernie will retire this year. He has been in the classroom long enough to receive a full pension. Actually, it may be that Ernie has been retired for years but did not choose to leave his classroom. After all, his annual salary is greater than his annual pension and regardless of what he did in the classroom he still collected his paycheck. Next fall, we’ll look to the back row of the first faculty meeting of the year. Ernie may still be there. And, if not our Ernie, there still will be other Ernie’s slouched down low in their chair gazing out over a constantly reformed schoolscape that never really changes.