Education in Era of the McTeacher
by Theresa Runstedtler and David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach.” – Alabama state Senator Shadrack McGill (R)
Speaking at a prayer breakfast last month, state Senator Shadrack McGill (R) argued that increasing school teachers’ salaries would not only destroy the quality of public education in Alabama but it would be tantamount to blasphemy. (Of course, this position did not prevent him from advocating for a 67-percent pay increase for Alabama legislators.)
To go in and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK? And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn’t matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity. If you don’t keep that in balance, you’re going to attract people who are not called, who don’t need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance.
Even though McGill’s theological grounding of the issue of teacher pay is laughable at best, his assertion exposes an underlying tension in current debates over education reform. Ironically, those who demonize teachers frequently deploy this tired mantra of selfless public service to rationalize low teacher salaries, even as they expect the same teachers to operate in an increasingly corporatized, “results-based” environment – without corporate-sized wages.
In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too, and all on the backs of those who spend their days working in the classroom, often with paltry resources, little support, and the constant threat of punitive measures and public derision. And this pressure to push the rubric of privatization into public education is not just coming from the Right. The “progressive” movement for education reform has also jumped on the corporate bandwagon.
Indeed, the logic of consumerism now dominates the “enterprise” of American education from kindergarten to college. We have entered a phase defined by a client relationship, with teachers becoming akin to academic concierges or service representatives, rather than intellectual leaders and mentors. Schoolteachers and professors must provide information, guidance, and whatever else their student-customers’ desire. More and more we are told that we are in the business of content delivery and job training, rather than social analysis and critique. In “Putting the Customer First in College,” Louis Soares, the Director of the Postsecondary Education program at the Center for American Progress, even argues for the establishment of an “Office of Consumer Protection in Higher Education”:
Students make customer choices based on available information, interests, abilities and life circumstances that will mostly determine whether they succeed in obtaining an education with a meaningful credential. The problem is our higher education marketplace today does not account for this customer focus that is so important to success. In large measure, this is because education policies that guide this marketplace are largely crafted by the dominant voices in higher education—colleges and universities with the resources to sway elected officials. Students as customers have no voice in this policy conversation. (emphasis added)
Writing about the phenomenon of helicopter parents, Afshan Jafar links the rise of hovering moms and dads to the heightened consumerism in U.S. education. “This trend is clearly the manifestation of a consumerist mentality: I'm paying for this, so even though I am a sophomore, I should be able to take the course that is open to juniors and seniors,” writes the assistant professor of Sociology at Connecticut College. “Or: I'm paying for this, so this better be good (and "good" really means a good grade here). This consumerist mentality explains the sense of entitlement that we perceive in some of our students and their parents.” While often attributed to the increasing costs of higher education and the recent string of consumer-fraud class actions brought by students, this “retail” ethic runs much deeper. It reflects a substantive paradigm shift in the language, practice, and structure of American education.
With this emphasis on benchmarks, quantifiable results, and customer reviews, it is no surprise that attacks on teachers, whether at the university or public school level, have escalated in the past few years. Whether measured by standardized tests or student evaluations, teachers are now expected to produce immediately recognizable “results,” even as the funds dedicated to the classroom (as opposed to testing companies and college administrations) continue to shrink.
Female instructors, especially women of color, are bearing the brunt of this paradigmatic shift in education. They have become the most visible scapegoats in the drama of educational reform. Pascale Mauclair, a teacher at P.S. 11 in Woodside (Queens), knows this all too well. After the New York Post published a database tracking the performance of “12,170 math and English teachers in fourth through eighth grade” (Teacher Data Reports), Mauclair became an unfair target of public ridicule and scorn. In an ill-informed and inflammatory report that included Mauclair’s yearbook photo, the Post’s Georgett Roberts branded her “the city’s worst teacher.” Since then, some parents have demanded that their children be removed from her classroom, while others have called for her termination. Besieged by reporters at her home, Mauclair even had to call the police twice to have them removed from her property.
In response, Leo Casey of edwize.org argues that “the story of Pascale Mauclair and P.S. 11 begins with a tale of the flawed methodology and invalid measurements of the Teacher Data Reports [TDR].” Because of inequalities across the system, consumerist, “one-size-fits-all” reports like the TDR often obscure more than they reveal, opening up teachers like Mauclair to unwarranted assaults:
P.S. 11 is located at the epicenter of a number of different immigrant communities In northern Queens, and over a quarter of its students are English Language Learners. Mauclair is an ESL teacher, and over the last five years she has had small, self-contained classes of recently arrived immigrants who do not speak English. Her students arrive at different times of the school year, depending upon that date of their family’s migration; consequently, it is not unusual for her students to take the 6th grade exams when they have only been in her class for a matter of a few months. Two factors which produce particularly contorted TDR results – teaching the highest academic need students and having a small sample of students that take the standardized state exams – define her teaching situation.
That women and people of color are shouldering the burden of the widespread demonization of teachers is evident not only with the media attacks on Mauclair and Rhena Jasey (two of the biggest stories out of New York have focused on black women), but with the more general assault on teachers who work with ESL and special needs students, those who work in districts with less funding, those who serve communities of color, and especially those who do all of the above. In reducing education to the sum of “measurable” scores (tests scores, teaching evaluations), we are not only turning our children’s classrooms over to a consumer-based model of dubious benefit but also failing to address the myriad of material and structural inequalities that impact teaching and learning.
Professors are by no means immune to this form of scapegoating. The disproportionate impact of the consumerist education ethic on teachers of color and female instructors is equally evident at the college level. We have faced an intensified assault on our profession since the late 1970s, including the silencing of our voices in discussions of university governance, the stripping of our right to organize at private universities, and the move to casualize our labor. The ratio of contract to tenure-track faculty has ballooned. With exploding numbers of lecturers and adjuncts (mostly women and people of color) now doing the majority of the teaching and the simultaneous shrinking of the tenure track(still mostly white and male), the professoriate has devolved into a kind of academic caste system.
Every day we see the darker side of the increased emphasis on assessment, on the push to demonstrate success through quantifiable benchmarks. In a system that values numbers, whether it be majors or students “served” per class (revenue per credit hour), professors who teach subjects outside the mainstream, those who challenge conventional norms, and those who demand student accountability are perpetually at a disadvantage.
We also see it with the explosion of websites where students can (be)rate professors, telling the world who is and who isn’t a “good” teacher. Just as foodies can (be)rate their local restaurant on Zagat.com, students can similarly highlight the quality of the instruction (the food) and the quality of delivery (the service) on these websites. They provide a public forum where anonymous (and usually disgruntled) students feel empowered to discipline and punish their instructors. The critiques on these sites are often more vicious and personal than the teacher evaluations collected by universities. Misogynistic and racist abuse abounds.
Indeed the increasing emphasis on teaching evaluations in higher education obscures the profound impact of sexism and racism in the classroom. These ratings are not simply “neutral measures” of “good” versus “bad” teaching. Numerous studies have documented the powerful ways that race, gender, and sexuality shape the classroom setting, and yet the impact is far more poignant than any statistic can convey. Evident in comments that lament that a female instructor “looks too young” to be teaching a large survey course, in those that assess the physical appearance of female professors (their –bodies or fashion choices), or in those that chastise “angry” or “bitter” faculty of color for daring to bring up issues of race, we can see how evaluations and other metrics of consumer satisfaction often tell us nothing about the quality of education. Adding insult to injury, those of us who look for support from our elder colleagues often come up empty-handed. The same kind of sexism and racism that permeates the classroom still permeates the profession.
The shift to a consumer-based educational model – one that privileges quantifiable metrics – has dire consequences for students, teachers, and the field of education. This shift has occurred at the very same time that public perceptions of our roles have changed. Professors are seen as deliverers of content, rather than intellectuals tasked with challenging societal norms, received wisdom, and historical orthodoxy. Schoolteachers are expected to prepare students to pass standardized tests, rather than teach them how to think critically about their education and the larger world. If professors can’t see the correlation between the recent assaults on schoolteachers and the devaluation of our profession, we will suffer. If we don’t acknowledge the connection between evaluations and larger systems of racism, sexism, and consumerism, our educational mission will remain at risk. The demonization of schoolteachers is the framework through which students enter our classrooms; it is no wonder that they think professors are little more than “servers of knowledge,” tip not included. Only when we join together – classroom to classroom, teacher to teacher, irrespective of discipline, age, and perceived place in the profession – can we begin to stem the rising tide against teachers.
***
Theresa Runstedtler is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo and, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Humanities Forum for the 2011-2012 academic year. She is the author of Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line(University of California Press). Visit her blog at www.theresarunstedtler.com and follow her on twitter @klecticAcademik.
David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinemaand the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.
