That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [66]
As Johnston put it: “What we got is a bill that requires multiple measures of student growth, that allows teachers multiple opportunities to improve, and doesn’t ever force-fire anyone but always leaves that decision to principals and superintendents.”
Johnston said that when he thinks about the change that he and others are trying to effect in education, he thinks back to attending President Obama’s inauguration in Washington. What impressed him most was seeing a platoon of wheelchairs parting the crowd on the Mall after the president took the oath. Sitting in them were the surviving Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American aviators in the United States armed forces, who flew many successful missions in World War II.
“What I realized was that they lived in a moment when people didn’t believe it was possible—they didn’t believe that a black man had the courage or intelligence or stamina to fly one of America’s most expensive warplanes,” Johnson recalled. “So they said, ‘Put me up in the air and let me show you,’ and they became one of the only air squadrons in World War II who never lost a bomber.” And of course they could and did become successful pilots. “And when they did, the world changed—because the argument about whether or not we were all created equal was once and for all over, and nothing else could have happened but that Truman would eventually integrate the air force, or that Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act, or that sixty years later we would inaugurate the first black president.
“Education needs its own Tuskegee moment. One reason we have not been able to galvanize the whole community for educational reform,” Johnston concluded, “is that some people still don’t believe that every one of our kids can compete with the smartest kids from Singapore and China. It’s our responsibility to get up in the air and prove them wrong. Then the whole world changes.”
No Teacher Is an Island
As we noted earlier, if we want to make every teacher more effective, the rest of us need to be more supportive. This is not an argument for going easy on teachers. It is an argument for not going easy on everyone else. We must not do to teachers and principals what we did to the soldiers and officers in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11: put the whole effort on their backs while the rest of us do nothing except applaud or criticize from the sidelines. Here is how everyone has to contribute.
Communities: If we want teachers to raise their effectiveness, communities not only have to create an effective reform process that all the key players want to own; they also have to find ways to reward teachers through nonmonetary means. Teaching is a hard job. Unions or no unions, we’d bet that most teachers work more hours for no pay than any other professionals. No one goes into teaching for the money, and thousands of teachers every year dig into their own pockets to buy classroom materials. If teachers are so important—and great teachers are—how about recognizing and celebrating the best of them regularly in your community with something more than a $50 gift certificate from the PTA?
How? Here’s an example. On November 1, 2010, the D.C. Public Education Fund, the nonprofit fund-raising arm of the Washington, D.C., public school system, organized “A Standing Ovation for D.C. Teachers” to honor the 662 instructors judged “highly effective” under the city’s new IMPACT evaluation system, to which teachers had agreed. The tribute was produced by George Stevens Jr., producer of the annual