Sunday, November 18, 2012

Saltman--- The Gift of Corporatizing

              Saltman begins his chapter by describing the phenomenon of the simplification of the teaching profession.  A career with long hours, low pay, and challenging work, teachers have been on the defensive during the neoliberal attack of American education.  By simplifying the profession, neoliberals have made it seem as if anyone could become a teacher an in order to increase competition in the market America must deregulate the "monopoly control that university teacher preparation programs have" (103).  This, in fact, questions the true value a teacher has on their school and devalues those who have taken the time to master their craft.  Moreover, Saltman reaffirms the neoliberal fetish with high stakes testing, with neoliberal's believing standardized tests can replace certified techers (103).  More importantly, deregulation of teacher certification transforms the education system into a money market, with students and teachers being commodities.  This makes the hired teacher almost nothing more than a pair of sneakers you were to buy at the market.  When the sneakers become worn or start to cause pain you dispose of them.  Applied to teaching, if a teacher fails to raise test scores or improve students' reading level you discard of the the teacher and bring in the next clone in hopes of improving something.  This system is much like the competitive business world we all strive to be in.  Competition, theoretically, is said to create a market full of 'winners' by killing the weak through social Darwinism.  The neoliberal's legislation of deregulation is trying to do just that, weeding out the low performing teachers and replacing them with the next.  The new system allows an aspiring teacher to bypass important classes that explain different learning techniques and ways to present difficult material.  Teachers no longer have to go through rigorous course loads and student teacher in order to take over a classroom.  This is because the neoliberals believe the standardize test are working and one should not have to obtain a teaching degree in order to teach to the test.  However, as we have learned throughout the course, putting a price tag or value on a teacher is difficult.  Learning has much less to do with the teachers and more to do with students environment.  Deregulation is, in fact, another plague growing in the American education system, attack those teachers who are passionate about the profession and devaluing their own education. 

Saltman also makes the reader question the agenda of the venture philanthropist or the foundations funding and encouraging high stakes tests and alternative avenues for teacher certification.  In Leistyna, 'No Corporation Left Behind', she identifies the alarming financial side of the high stakes testing market, which Saltman calls the 'venture philanthropists agenda'.  Foundations, like the Gates Foundation, all have stake in companies that help students prepare for standardized tests and private companies that "teach" teachers how to teach.  With a special interest in keeping these private companies afloat, especially in hard economic times, venture philanthropist encourage the deregulation of education and hope to keep it flourishing.  This is something the Obama administration has done little to discourage.  The true meaning of the word philanthropy suggests a good spirited approach to giving.  However, with closer examination, these capitalists are doing nothing more then lining their own pocket by devaluing the importance of a certified teacher.       

7 comments:

  1. I completely agree with pat when he say that the devaluing the teacher profession by using standardize testing is only devaluing the process of education. The idea that testing should replace the value of a certified teacher is only another attempt to control the market. The explanation given for testing is that it will allow us to weed out the flaws with the education process and put more accountably on the teachers to make sure that the student is performing. But when you have bias tests that don’t show what a student knows and only show how much knowledge the student can regurgitate, it’s hard to say that our system is performing. When students aren’t performing the first to be blamed are the teachers. This is something that needs to be changed. How well a teacher can relay a student knowledge for a test only devalues all the work that they put in to get them to the point of being a teacher. Another idea is that testing only limits what a teacher can do in the classroom, and yet all the blame goes on the teachers when the students aren’t performing. I think we need to reevaluate what we think a teacher’s job is. It should be something that is highly respected and not limited to testing, and not something that should be abused by a controlled market.

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  2. Pat does a great job describing the devaluing process of teachers in our modern education system. Saltman's article focuses on how "venture philanthropists seek to change teacher education and higher education in general"(99). As we have discussed in class turning our education system into a free market economy is problematic. Children are not products and we as citizens are not consumers of these products. A problem that I have with current education reform is how sold reformers are on our current system. They all believe that we should merely improve high stakes tests and increase accountability. Yet they fail to question the system itself. Individual freedom is something we as a democracy claim to stand for but our current education system strips our teachers and students of their creativity.
    Professor Palmer told me a piece of advice that I will never forget "follow the money trail". If major "venture philanthropists" are giving giant amounts of money to education reform we are forced to question their motives. Without critical thinking we are naive and fall trap to the design of our neoliberalist society.

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  4. I agree with both Pat and Austin. Austin's point about children being commodities is driven straight to the point. The only thing that I would add is that our teachers, like children, are seen as commodities as well. Teachers are in the same boat as students. Teachers in our system are tossed like useless tools without considering the amount of work that they have done. One difference is that teachers have power to bring enough change. That little power that they have should not be used incorrectly and it is exactly what teachers are doing. In Saltman’s article, saltman mentions that liberals believe in the emphasis of teacher professionalism while the neo-liberals want the deregulation of teacher education. Saltman specifically says, “the advocates of the professionalism approach would for the most part like to see the status and pay of the teacher rise in accord with other professions” (101). Teachers are obviously paid much less than other professions in life but being paid less is something that should not matter in a career where helping the kids is more important. We need to instead focus on the main problems of our system, which are our kids. In saltman’s article, both the liberals and neo-liberals are focused on an aspect of education that is not related to fixing the problem in our schools. Teachers are an important aspect of our system but focusing on their pay and their professionalism (compared to lawyers and doctors) is something that we cannot be doing at the moment. We are focusing on the wrong attributes and thus are seen just avoiding the main issues. I have thus come question whether we actually want to fix our schools or just procrastinating on the subject. Our society has become more money driven then ever, which has thus led to many of our educational policies being created to conserve money. If we are to really fix this education system, we need to forget what is not important and focus on the attributes that are necessary for a good system.

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  5. As Pat outlined above, Saltman explains how new teacher education programs are transforming teacher education into a free-market with “lessened barriers to entry and lessened state control over standards” (103). This falls in line with the imaginary teacher shortage and the blame the teacher mentality as an explanation for a flawed education system. By de-professionalizing teachers, they become devalued and disposable. This mentality sets the stage for an atmosphere that sees TFA, a program allowing recent graduates a brief two year stint in the teaching profession, as a long term solution to deeply rooted structural flaws in the education system. If such a program were proposed in a more esteemed profession, such as in medicine or law, the idea would seem preposterous. Moreover, the devaluing of teacher input allows venture philanthropy groups the power to direct and determine education policy. As Otterman discusses, these new teacher education programs treat “teaching as a trade instead of an art” and neglect to discuss intellectual theory that encourages critical examination of teaching and learning. In the article, a charter school teacher is quoted saying, “‘I can study Vygotsky later””. This mentality stems from the myth that failing schools are caused by bad teachers and the solution is to hastily “prepare” as many people as possible and allow them to compete for the best test scores in an open market. This alleged solution is particularly harmful because it not only reduces the quality of teachers, it also takes attention away from the larger problems facing schools. By masquerading as the solution to public education’s flaws, these programs fail to promote critical public conversation about what types of knowledge we want students to gain in school. This is embodied by Mr. Atkin’s quote that Halley referenced about homework and testing. Such a mentality lacks any critique of normative conceptions of teaching and education and instead reinforces the idea that the problem is simply bad teaching.

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  6. Saltman discusses the idea of simplifying the “teachers” profession, making the claim that anyone can teach. In addition, as Pat mentions, many large foundations such as the Gates foundation funds campaigns that claim they know how teachers should teach. All of these methods can be simplified down to “teaching to the test”, which begins to represent teachers as robots. Teaching teachers a standardized measure of teaching sets the expectation that everyone learns the same way. Part of my research for my paper demonstrates how many children can not take standardized tests the same way due to certain special needs. If anyone is going to know the way in which the students in a particular classroom learn, it is going to be the teacher. By dumbing a teacher down to something worth no more than a pair of sneakers, as Pat mentions, you are taking away the knowledge and expertise that teachers hold. Outsiders are telling teachers, the one who actually know how to relate to and educate children, what is best for those kids. I believe that this not only devalues the teacher, as Saltman discusses, but it also devalues the child. It takes away their history, background, and individuality by stating that children can be taught in the same exact way. This then brings in the question of what are we actually teaching these children. If they are only learning how to take a test, then their knowledge can be summed up to knowing exactly which bubble to circle. Children and teachers and devalued, and private companies and foundations, not the children needing the education, are rewarded.

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  7. One of the most interesting aspects of this article was the critical eye it turned toward not only the neoliberal calls for teacher reform (which we have discussed at great length) but also towards the liberal proposed solution. Many of us most likely have understood liberal and conservative/neoliberal ideology to be at odds with each other and their ideal policies lead to opposing outcomes. However, Saltman shows that these two schools of thought about teacher reform may result in similarly undesirable and inequitable outcomes. To be perfectly honest (although I hadn’t given the idea too much thought) I was generally sympathetic to the Linda Darling-Hammond and the “push for professionalization of teacher education” through similar transformations as the legal and medical professions have undergone. If public opinion views lawyers and doctors as highly valuable, shouldn’t those responsible for inspiring and developing the intellectual nature of the next generation be viewed in (at least) the same high regard? However Saltman pointed out several plainly obvious logical problems with this approach: teacher achievement must still be based on high-stakes testing which we have seen is highly problematic. Also, the high-paid medical and legal professions operate in with in the wealthy private sector and the teaching profession is a public sector field which is more strapped for funding. Equally troubling, control of the legal and medical professions are “transmitted and inherited through symbolic means.” (101) They are class-based and elitist and given our structured and largely immobile socioeconomic class system, extending such professionalism to the teaching profession would only serve to perpetuate notions of power, limit who has access to social capital, and maintain or exacerbate the achievement gap. Furthermore, the combination of high-stakes testing and and professionalized model in schools would only increase the value of jobs in “high-performing” schools and devalue “low-performing” schools. As Saltman indicates on page 110, it would serve the interests of schools to strictly cater to “high-performing” students and neglect “low-performing” students who stand to gain more from education. This process is directly antithetical to the proclaimed goal of closing the achievement gap. Thus, we see the major flaws in the professional-approach to the teacher reform.

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