The Brain-Washing, Indoctrinating, Socialism-izing Speech--Better Not Read This!

DO NOT READ the following speech (verbatim from the White House website) unless you actually WANT your children to think it's important to work hard, pay attention in class, set goals, and prepare themselves for a successful adult life. And who could possibly want THAT??????

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/

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On Moral Relativism and Any Use of a Human Being

One of the classic problems of ethics is the question of whether moral relativism is a desirable ethical stance or a problematic one. Most people have probably heard the terms used as a derogatory--as a descriptor of a failure to set or adhere to rigorous moral standards; however, the idea ought not be dismissed out of hand, because the alternative is the adherence to the idea that there is one universal ethical code that must be applied to everyone's behavior in all circumstances. That idea is untenable on its face, and we acknowledge it every day in the fact that we make exceptions for a wide variety of circumstances: age (we don't hold a five-year-old to the same standard of behavior that we hold a 25-year-old to), mental capacity (we have different consequences for the mentally ill than we do for the mentally sound), emotional state (we would think it cruel of a teacher not to extend a deadline for a student whose parent had just died), and the specific situational conditions extant at the time of the action (killing someone in self-defense is not considered immoral and is not treated as a crime).

Things get a little trickier when it comes to judging cultural differences; nevertheless, it seems obvious that we do not judge as "wrong" all things that are different from what we do. Native Americans are permitted, for instance, to possess eagle feathers and to use peyote in cultural rituals; neither of those is legal among other American cultural groups. Even the fact that morality changes over time would indicate that considering "moral relativism" to be a pejorative term misrepresents the reality of human experience. History, in fact, can be seen as one long progression toward more tolerance, and behaviors that were once considered ruinously immoral are now commonplace. Jennifer James, anthropologist, stated in a lecture at which I was present at the International Baccalaureate North American Regional meeting in 2006 that "... you could shoot people of Chinese descent. They had no rights at all. They made contracts so that if they were killed, their bones would be sent back to Canton. Shipping lading notices list tons of bones." A hundred years later, our moral filter has been significantly reshaped, and such behavior now would be considered as wrong as it once was considered right.

On the other hand, it seems equally logical to assert that there must be some limits to accepting behavior as moral. People could not co-exist if we tried to enact a global moral system in which relativism served as the over-riding and guiding principle so that people were expected to accept every act as moral in all circumstances. Obviously murder cannot be justified as "good" behavior on the grounds that morality is relative. The same is true of many other behaviors that cause physical or emotional harm--theft, assault, verbal abuse, deceit, hypocrisy, and on and on.

There are, it would seem, some universally right and wrong behaviors, and there are some behaviors which a truly moral person respects as moral, whether that person would be willing to engage in them or not. Morality is, to some degree, relative. Given that we do acknowledge, both in our institutions and in our everyday dealings with each other, that relativism is a necessary element of enacting moral decisions, and also that moral relativism run amok to the point that we consider all behaviors in all situations to be equally acceptable would result in a complete inability to regulate behavior, then we are left to struggle with a Goldilocks dilemma: between the extremes of too tolerant and not tolerant enough, how much tolerance is just right? There is no single answer to this question; it must be adjudged anew in every situation. We're bound to get it wrong on a regular basis, as Mr. Obama apparently has in his selection of Rick Warren to give the benediction at tomorrow's historic inaugural ceremony.

The 43rd inauguration will be historic. No one argues anything else. Whether a given individual voted for Obama or not, whether he or she sees his upcoming presidency, as I do, as an occasion for hope and a release from a long darkness, or whether he or she sees the Obama presidency as an occasion for skepticism and dread, everyone recognizes that the inauguration of a black man as President of the United States represents an historical milestone that marks in a concrete way the distance we've traveled on a moral plane since the founding of the country. Certainly Mr. Obama is aware of the historical and moral significance of the event, and certainly he understands that because the country--and the world--are looking at the day as an emblem of hope and as the literal beginning of a better way to live, people will see every choice he makes as symbolic of what President-Elect Obama himself believes to be that better way to live. The fact that every choice of participant for tomorrow's ceremony embodies historical symbolism, in other words, simply cannot be overlooked or downplayed. Each person who has a role tomorrow has a place in history. By including Rick Warren in a prominent role, Mr. Obama has raised Rick Warren to historic prominence, and he has identified him as a person who should be seen as embodying that better way to live.

Since the Reverend Warren is an anti-gay-marriage activist who has created a furor by comparing gay marriage to pedophilia, incest, and bigamy, this vision is troubling.

Some people disagree with my assessment of the situation, however, and justify Mr. Obama's choice on the grounds that it represents Obama's spirit of inclusiveness. I have come across numerous claims, including from Obama himself, that Obama's pick of Rick Warren has nothing to do with his anti-gay proselytizing; rather, supporters argue, it is a sign that Obama means to keep his word about his intention to unify the country in that the selection of a far-right conservative Evangelist is a mark of tolerance and inclusion. I see two problems with that argument: 1) it ignores entirely the indelible symbolism of the occasion, including the fact that the inclusion of a religious figure reflects directly on the personal religious commitment of the President-Elect, and 2) it suggests that there is no problem of tolerance, and so relies, for its justification, on the assumption that tolerance should extend to tolerating those who engage in hate speech as a means of influencing tens of thousands of people.

Warren's defenders claim that Warren has not engaged in hate speech, that he doesn't hate gay people, but rather only wishes to preserve the "traditional" definition of marriage. I disagree. Though it does seem to be true that Warren has not said in so many words that homosexuals are all pedophiles (at least I haven't been able to find any record of any such remarks) it is nevertheless true that Warren did explicitly equate gay marriage with incestuous marriage, pedophilic marriage, and bigamy. In an online Time Magazine article yesterday, Amy Sullivan describes Warren's anti-gay attitudes thus:

After the election, Warren sowed more confusion about his support for Prop. 8.
First he compared homosexuality to incest, pedophilia and polygamy, and then he
tried to walk back from those comments by insisting that the real reason he
backed the initiative was to protect the free-speech rights of pastors to decry
homosexuality. It was an argument made by some other Prop. 8 proponents during
the campaign, but it is a phony one.

You can listen to the original interview with Belief.net in which Warren made his remarks about his objections to gay marriage here. Warren also says that there is a 5,000 year tradition of marriage being between one man and one woman and that that tradition exists in every religion. To my mind, his factual inaccuracy further undermines his credibility.

I am not sure where the line is between attitudes and behavior we should tolerate and those we should not, but bigotry is, for me, unquestionably on the wrong side of that line.

Let's say, for a moment, that I am wrong, and that in refusing to tolerate bigotry, I am myself in fact guilty of unjustified intolerance. This is, in fact, the other prominent pro-Warren argument. I cannot argue against that accusation: Rick Warren can be fairly accused of being intolerant of homosexuals; Barack Obama can be fairly accused of supporting that intolerant attitude by being tolerant of Rick Warren, and those who oppose Mr. Obama's tolerance of Mr. Warren's intolerance can certainly and fairly be accused of being intolerant of both Mr. Obama's tolerance and of Mr. Warren's intolerance, the resulting Gordian knot of tolerance and intolerance might not be loosed even by Alexander the Great.

Tolerance, of course, will be required if we are to make progress as a nation and as a species. Obama himself said, in a highly-regarded speech in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008:

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to
continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just,
more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run
for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we
cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless
we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we
hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from
the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better
future for of children and our grandchildren.

In choosing Rick Warren, Mr. Obama has, so far as I am concerned, violated the promise of those words. I suspect that he would disagree with me; he would say that means of creating a more just, equal, free and caring America will be the forging of bonds with those who disagree with us. While I can appreciate Mr. Obama's commitment to tolerance, to reaching out to all sorts of people with whom he, and other social liberals, disagree--even those with whom they disagree passionately, and while I even agree with him that talking with the "enemy" is a vastly superior means of making progress than fighting with him is, I do not believe that the inauguration was the appropriate moment at which to do it.

From my perspective, to speak at the most historic Presidential Inauguration since the first is an honor; to choose a person to speak is to honor that person. It's one thing to be willing to sit down and talk with the Reverend Warren, to determine not to alienate him completely, and to work, over time, to find common ground in the hope that we might one day close the gap between the widely separated moral world views that divide the fundamentalists and the social liberals in this country and which makes the passage of socially liberal policy contentious, and it is another thing altogether to elevate the Reverend Warren to a role that suggests that this is the man who represents the new President's moral and spiritual beliefs.

That is the fear that people who are really distressed by the choice of Rick Warren have. Those who accuse the nay-sayers of being intolerant and who decry the calls to have Rick Warren removed from the agenda as hypocrites miss the point. Those who have been mobilized to try to keep the Reverend Warren from talking have, I believe, been outraged by the wholly unexpected implication that Mr. Obama's fairly passive refusal to support Proposition 8 overtly masked a deeper prejudice that the choice of Rick Warren unmasked. Such a fear arises from the assumption that Mr. Obama's choices are personal, not political. That on such a day, the people he includes are people he values and trusts and admires. The argument that Mr. Obama's choice is a sign of his intention to include everyone under the umbrella of his administration rests on a different assumption, the assumption that Mr. Obama sees every day and every moment as a political opportunity, to be used to further his agenda. If that is the case, then the choice of Rick Warren makes sense.

I disagree with Mr. Obama's decision to include Rick Warren in the Inauguration regardless of which of those assumptions is true. In fact, I believe the latter possibility to be a good bit more probable than the former, but while the intention might have been good, I think it was an error of judgment--a failure either to understand the symbolic import of what he was doing, or, as Sullivan suggests in the Time article, a failure to understand the scope of the pain Warren has caused by his anti-gay activities. Nor do I think the error was effectively undone by what was evidently a belated decision to include Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly-gay Bishop of the Episcopal Church (or of any church, that I know about) in the festivities by having him give the invocation at a Pre-Inaugural event on Sunday. I think the choice to include Bishop Robinson does help to mitigate the mistake; it seems to suggest that Mr. Obama is aware that he made a tactical error in giving such a divisive figure so much credibility, and it seems to suggest that that error was made not because Mr. Obama himself shares Mr. Warren's anti-gay attitudes (although Mr. Obama's open opposition to gay marriage reflects much less social liberalism than I would prefer to see him demonstrate), but the fact that it was evidently an after-thought and the fact that Mr. Robinson has not paid an equal honor to that paid to Mr. Warren means that the scales are still somewhat out of balance. I would prefer Mr. Obama to display more active support for gay rights, but I would also much prefer that he were not so politically motivated and committed that he would be willing to use Mr. Warren and Mr. Robinson as means to a political end. There are occasions on which politics are necessarily the force shaping decisions; there are occasions on which genuine belief ought to rule the day. Inauguration Day ought to be the latter.

This is the first decision that the President-Elect Obama has made with which I strongly disagree. It is not a decision with powerful immediate consequences; I have to agree with my husband who says that he'd rather have Mr. Obama get this wrong and get Guantanamo right. This is not a decision which makes me wish I had not voted for Mr. Obama, nor is it a decision which undermines the fact that I am profoundly grateful to be looking at at least four years of a President whose intelligence, vision, philosophical sensitivity, and sheer depth of personality are dramatically superior to those of the outgoing one. I listen to Mr. Obama talk, as he did in last Friday's "Weekly Address," about the significance of the Inauguration as a peaceful transfer of power such as happens in only a few places in the world and throughout history, and I am still thrilled by the real prospect that the next few years will be utterly unlike the eight past.

Note: Others have written on this subject before me, with a focus more on criticizing the choice than on considering its ramifications, which I have tried to do here. If you are interested in pursuing the subject further, I can recommend the following sources:

The Human Rights Campaign Letter to Barack Obama

Time Magazine: "The Two Faces of Rick Warren"

NPR Audio File: "Rick Warren's Inaugural Participation Stirs Heated Debate"

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Dear Mr. Education Secretary-Nominate, Mr. Duncan:

I am writing to offer you my congratulations on having been chosen to serve Mr. Obama and the American people as the Secretary of Education. I am pleased that Mr. Obama has selected for such an important position someone who is not a politician, someone who is, instead, a genuine educator, and, moreover, an educator who has already shown that he can implement strategies that change the climate of schools and ensure that more children and teachers succeed. I am dismayed, however, by the fact that so many of my colleagues (and I am a teacher of 25 years’ experience myself), people whose talents and judgments I respect, have received the news of your appointment with something more like despair than the hope for the future that I would like your appointment to represent. The discouragement I have observed among my colleagues is directly due to the fact that some of your more radical and controversial policies suggest that you might be just one more anti-teacher establishmentarian.

If you are going to be successful in any degree in solving the myriad and colossal problems that weigh upon American public education today, you need teachers on your side. Education without teachers is a ridiculous oxymoronic fantasy, though the policies of the outgoing administration have clearly been aimed at achieving just that. You need teachers to believe in you and your judgment. Your advance press suggests that you have been able to work with your teaching constituency in Chicago to implement some of those red-flag policies with their support, rather than over their objections; I would like to see you do the same on the national stage, and I would like to suggest that you would serve yourself and the country’s educational institutions well if you begin immediately by introducing yourself to your now-much-bigger constituency by publicizing your philosophy, not just your policy. I would like to suggest that you begin with the issue that has been, amongst my acquaintance, the hot-button policy, the one which, based on my observations of the teachers of my acquaintance has already begun to wither your credibility before you even have a chance to get yourself established: paying students for good grades.

There is plenty of precedent to suggest that such an idea is not only ideologically unsound, but is also logistically untenable—even harmful. For instance: my school, a mostly-urban public high school of nearly 2000 students, which teeters every year on the edge of losing accreditation, and which regularly fails to meet Annual Yearly Progress for No Child Left Behind, largely due to attendance problems, recently looked into a grant program that offers to pay students and teachers for passing grades on Advanced Placement (AP) exams. The program, from the National Math and Science Initiative, rests on the belief that teachers and students will try harder if there is money at stake, more students will sign up for AP classes and AP exams—or will be allowed to sign up for AP classes—and more students will put in the real effort required in order to pass those exams. On the surface, it sounds like an idea with some potential for exerting a positive influence on the academic profile of a school like ours: we have an open-enrollment policy for AP, so there are no barriers that might make such a program favor students who already achieve at high levels over others who do not; our AP exam scores tend to be disappointingly low, and one of the (many) reasons for that is the struggle we have every year with trying to get students to accept the reality of the amount of work required for success in such a demanding course, so offering an incentive of a cash reward at the end might help with the motivational piece, and participation in the program requires extensive vertical-team training, so that teachers beginning in grade 6 are working effectively to help prepare more students for the rigors of the AP course. Upon closer examination, however, the program as it has been conceived by those who developed it (a group of businesses, as I understand it), while it might ultimately result in a few more passing scores in some AP subjects, would at the same time create tremendous inequities and would almost certainly result in divisiveness among students and faculty that would make it vastly more difficult to achieve our other myriad educational goals.

As it turns out, the program is only available for AP courses in English, Math, and Science. In our school, that is five courses of one section each, so five of our approximately 130 teachers would get an opportunity to earn extra pay, with no opportunity for others to opt in. That might be justifiable if that were simply a feature of the role, so that any teacher who teaches an advanced course with high stakes testing got extra pay as a matter of course, but this would not be the case. We offer AP courses in five other subjects, for one thing, and those teachers would not be eligible for any extra pay. In addition, we have an International Baccalaureate (IB)Diploma Programme, and none of those students or teachers would be eligible for the bonus pay—even though many of our IB students take the AP exams in English, math and science and pass them. Finally, despite the insistence of the grant program itself on the importance of vertical team preparation for AP exams, the reward money would go directly and only to the teacher of the course from which the exam would be taken, so the work done by those teachers in that subject in the preparatory grades would go unacknowledged and unrewarded.

Given all those conditions, the most easily predictable negative outcomes of implementing this program would be:

1. The justifiable resentment of most of the faculty toward the few teachers who would benefit financially from this program. I taught 21 IB English students last year; 20 of them passed the IB exam. That would have been $2000—nearly the equivalent of my National Board Stipend. (This was unusual; most years I have a 100% pass rate; my record is 113/117 since the inception of the program--$11,300 worth of bonuses that I would not get under the pay-for-grades system, while colleagues with much lower pass rates would get bonuses.) Assuming that this program did succeed eventually in inspiring more students to take on AP, a teacher could have anywhere between 50 and 100 students pass the AP exam—on the extreme end, that would be a $10,000 bonus, just about 1/3 of a starting teacher’s salary in our county. Everybody can do that math, and those teachers who would have to sit back and watch while others took advantage of an opportunity that simply was not available to everyone would inevitably, and quite reasonably, resent it. It’s one thing to offer an opportunity—like National Board Certification—that carries a substantive financial reward that every teacher can undertake if he or she chooses, and which is attainable by anyone willing to do what it takes to develop and demonstrate the necessary skills. (In Virginia, where I teach, there has been a $5000 bonus upon earning the certificate and an additional $2500 per year for the ten-year life of the certificate; whether that survives next year’s $400 million education budget cut remains to be seen.) It is something else altogether to offer even more substantive rewards to a select few who, by virtue of their chosen subject, are privileged over those who happen to teach another subject, such as American History, or US Government, or Spanish, or Music or Computer Programming. One might, I suppose, try to make the argument that anyone could have chosen to be an English teacher or a Biology teacher or a Calculus teacher, but I don’t think anyone would be willing to defend as a serious stance the idea that what we need in the United States is an educational system in which, by offering higher financial reward for teaching select subjects, we systematically encourage everyone to become English, math, or science teachers.

2. An even more understandable resentment on the part of those teachers of students in grades 6-11 who would be required, by the terms of the program, to invest time on weekends and during the summer to implement significant changes to their teaching in order to better prepare their students for those classes in which the students and those five lucky teachers would reap the benefits of all that preparation. It does not require significant powers of prognostication to predict that getting and keeping the cooperation of those teachers who are to do the work without the reward would pose a significant challenge; thus, we can expect that the introduction of reward money for those teachers at the end of the sequence would create divisiveness where unity is needed.

3. The immediate demise of our IB program. Since our IB students are the very students who are most likely to pass our AP exams, they would be the first to benefit from the reward money, and they would be those capable of earning the greatest quantity of it. For a wide variety of reasons, which I will detail elsewhere (but which include teacher training, curricular integrity, program oversight, and assessment feedback), I am fully convinced that the education a student gets by completing the two-year IB Diploma Programme is vastly more rigorous, vastly more complex, and vastly superior to that that he or she can get from taking a battery of independently conceived, non-programmatic, AP classes. Paying students in our building to take AP exams would actually lower the quality of those students’ overall education, and this outcome is virtually certain if the money comes into play.

4. Immediate complaints from students and parents about inequities. The potential logistical problems arising from a system of reward for performance for only a few select courses are mind-boggling; I will list only a few: how do we ensure that every student has equal access to courses that offer pay-for-performance? Creating a master schedule is tricky enough as it is; many students are forced to choose between, say, AP English literature and taking a special program at the county’s technical center, because the two conflict. If we are forcing students to make that choice in an environment where potential cash is available for the AP classes, the potential for anger over having to make that choice increases dramatically. What do we do when there are 37 students requesting AP Calculus and our budget simply does not allow for two sections under 20 students each? Which students are told “no”? Does the teacher have to try to teach college-level Calculus to 37 students at once? The larger class size reduces the probability of success for everyone—especially in a building such as ours where the students tend to have significant gaps in preparation, support from home, learning strategies, and time-management skills, and so require significant individual attention from the teacher. What happens if the demand for the courses with financial rewards rises so dramatically (whether the students are sufficiently prepared or not) that the school cannot provide enough qualified teachers to teach the curriculum? Do we place teachers who lack sufficient content knowledge? Do we refuse places to large numbers of students? One of the most common fallacies about the teaching of college level courses is that anybody can do it; in fact, those courses require content knowledge far beyond the level required for high school level courses. What structures will we put in place to ensure that we have the qualified faculty we need? Entrée into the program for more teachers would presumably be a good thing, in that it could help mitigate the resentment of being shut out of the opportunity, but where those who are assigned the courses cannot produce the result for which the reward is paid, another whole range of problems will arise—including, potentially, lawsuits from parents’ whose students did not earn the money while students in other sections, with more qualified teachers, did. And so on.

I spent some time hunting around the Internet, trying to find a detailed description of your pay-for-performance programs, and while the references to those programs are legion, description, assessment, justification and analysis are completely missing. In the absence of those, America’s teachers are left to make assumptions about your motives and your practices, and, if my friends’ reactions are any indication, teachers are making those assumptions based on their past experience with ill-formed, badly-implemented programs imposed upon the teaching profession by outsiders who actually know virtually nothing about what they hubristicly propose to solve. This may not be a reasonable reaction, but it is understandable, given the recent historical pattern of blaming teachers for the ills of education. You can head off these fears and begin to build your coalition if you will make yourself a very visible presence. You could begin with an article in the nation’s major newspapers laying out your philosophical justification for pay-for-performance—tackle the problem at the sorest spot and convince the teachers you need as allies that your policies are not just another depressing indicator that you are yet another one of those administrators who thinks “these teachers” are the source of the problem and that solving the problem involves measures that reduce the effect of teachers on students down to the minimum possible degree. I would love to know your solutions to these problems. I would love to read an article in which you detail your Pay-for-Performance program and answer such questions as:

• Under what circumstances do you see Pay-for-Performance as a necessary strategy?
• What grades earn what amounts of money, and what structures do you put in place in order to ensure that the grades issued are fair and equitable?
• Are there cash rewards for all students in all subjects? For all teachers? Or only a select few?
• What support do you provide for teachers by way of setting expectations and holding to them, so that grades do not become absurdly inflated—either by way of increasing rewards or by way of avoiding parental wrath when students do not earn the cash reward?
• Once Pay-for-Performance is implemented, is it permanent for those students, so that they continue to get cash rewards through to the end of their public schooling?
• Where does the money come from? What other programs must be cut in order to fund this program?
• Do you advocate this program as a potential nation-wide change to public education?
• How fast do you anticipate implementing this program on a large scale?

These are all essentially logistical problems, of course, and if those were the only objections, one can imagine that it would be possible, situation by situation, to wrestle through them and create functional systems of cash reward that reduced the anger and resentment to a workable level. These are not, however, the main worries that cause my friends and colleagues to point to your pay-for-performance program as an indicator that you are one more anti-teacher administrator looking for ways to increase student achievement despite bad teaching. The vastly more important problem arises from not knowing what the educational philosophy is that underpins your idea of paying students for good grades. The idea that students should trained to believe that they don’t have to learn unless they get paid for it is anathema to every teacher who came to education—and there are many—out of a deeply-held belief in the ideal of education as the means by which we make ourselves free.

The justification, in the current state of our culture, for paying adults for a job and not paying students to go to school is that we don’t consider student engagement in school as a job. The benefit that accrues to the student from his or her education is that the student gains the skills and knowledge that he or she needs in order to have power over his or her life. It is education that provides an individual with the ability to choose well, and it is freedom of choice that makes a life worthwhile, in the context of the American vision, as set out by Thomas Jefferson. It is education that provides a person with the ability to shape a life as close as possible to his own terms because it is through education that one learns to think, to judge, to assess reality, to predict plausible and likely outcomes, and to recoup when a decision goes wrong.

Education is, furthermore, the place wherein we instill many of the values that we must have in order for a society to survive: generosity, caring, pride in work and accomplishment, self-direction, self-motivation, and a commitment to doing what needs to be done, whether one wants to do it or not. There is nothing more valuable to a life or to a society than an education; to suggest that children should see it in terms of cash, to suggest that teachers do nothing more than sell a product on which a price can be put is not only deeply offensive, but also deeply disturbing. A world in which we see education as nothing more than a means to an immediate financial end, the gains of which will be instantly converted to Mp3 players, cell phones, and expensive tennis shoes is a world greatly weakened by the loss of intrinsic value. A society in which children are taught that the only reason to put forth effort is for personal short-term gain is a society which has lost an important element of its humanity.

This is the fear that we need you to address in detail and as soon as possible. I make this request in part because I believe the issue itself is important, and I believe that your effort to sell the program that appears to be the most controversial of your policies amongst those who have neither personal nor professional experience of you will make a difference in the amount and kind of support you get for this and other educational programs. More importantly, though, your willingness to engage in public debate, to explain your philosophy to the nation’s teachers, would create an environment in which you could to win their support because you earned their respect as a thinker and problem-solver. We are used to policy-makers in Washington, D.C. who presume they know better than we do. We are used to policy-makers who see no need for explaining the thinking behind their decisions, because they consider teachers unworthy of time or respect. We are used to authoritarian policy-making that insults our intelligence and our professionalism, that disregards our expertise, and that dismisses our experience. I ask you to begin by speaking up about your more controversial policies because doing so will demonstrate that you do not subscribe to the idea that justification is not required for politicians’ ideas because those ideas are somehow above scrutiny. I ask you to talk to us, because in talking you will change the way educational policy is made in this country.

Sincerely yours, & etc.

Dear Mr. President-Elect Week 2: On Teacher Preparation

In response to your request for recommendations and feedback regarding your stated plans for programs to be enacted during your presidency, I offer you the second in my series of reflections on your education platform. This week, I have undertaken to examine in detail the implications of your proposals related to the problem of teacher preparation. Though teacher preparation is undeniably a critical factor in ensuring quality education, and though almost certainly improvements could be made to teacher education, the proposals offered by the Obama-Biden platform, as published on your transition website, have very little chance of effecting substantive improvement either specifically to teacher education or public education in general. Your published platform offers these promises for reforming teacher preparation:

Prepare Teachers: Obama and Biden will require all schools of education to be accredited. Obama and Biden will also create a voluntary national performance assessment so we can be sure that every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively. Obama and Biden will also create Teacher Residency Programs that will supply 30,000 exceptionally well-prepared recruits to high-need schools.

I will address the accreditation and Residency Program recommendations on another occasion. For this week, I would like to consider in detail the assumptions underlying your idea that a voluntary national performance assessment will increase teacher readiness and ensure that every new educator can start teaching effectively from day one of his or her career. Seen in its worst light, this recommendation implies that a significant number of teachers are not being properly prepared for teaching, that schools of education are certifying as prepared teachers who are not, in fact, prepared, and that the problem is widespread enough that there is a need for a mechanism which will set a higher standard of readiness, allow the government to monitor actual achievement, and give government the authority to ensure that the judgment of readiness is not left in the hands of those professional educators who have, evidently, left to their own devices, been operating unreliable teacher education programs. I don’t, in fact, believe that such a level of distrust in teacher education is warranted; however, even assuming that it were, or taking the recommendation in its best possible light, as an effort to standardize all teacher preparation at a minimum high level of readiness, implementation of a national examination to determine teacher efficacy is fraught with problems that render it useless.

Taking in turn four flawed assumptions implied by the recommendation:

Assumption 1: The preparation of teachers to begin teaching effectively day one of their career can and should be accomplished solely within the confines of the programs provided by schools of education.

Such a goal is fruitless, as much of what needs to be learned in order to be a truly effective teacher can only be learned on the job, and your stated intention in another plank of the platform to provide mentoring to beginning teachers acknowledges this. My statement, as much as yours, of course, depends on the definition of “teaching effectively” as envisioned by each of us. I have no idea what your concept of effective teaching from day one entails, other than that you suggest it is something testable in a concrete way. I could, of course, speculate at length about what you consider to be the set of skills and knowledge requisite for effective teaching, but whatever I guessed would be only that, a guess, and as such not very useful for analysis. A detailed understanding of your concept of effective teaching is not really necessary, however, because whatever your beliefs on the subject, your proposed solution stands very little chance of helping solve the problem, for the simple reason that the assessment of teacher readiness is already part of the function of teacher education programs. Assuming that the skills you intend your national assessment to assess are those quantifiable skills related to content area knowledge, knowledge of pedagogical theory and practice, knowledge of state law governing education, and the demonstration of the possession of a battery of teaching strategies that can be employed in a variety of learning situations, then these skills are already thoroughly assessed by colleges of education through a variety of measures: exams, papers, research projects, student teaching evaluations, portfolios, and so on. Unless you do intend to posit that those programs regularly certify, willy-nilly, teachers who have failed those assessments, or unless you posit, instead, that the schools of education are incapable of accurately identifying and assessing those skills, we have nothing to gain by adding an additional layer of assessment before certifying teachers to teach.

If the problem is the former, then it is possible that a test administered by an external agency would, in fact, uncover fraudulent or incompetent certification practices on the part of teacher preparation programs. I find it extremely difficult to believe, however, that the practice of knowingly certifying unqualified teachers is widespread enough to warrant, in and of itself, national systematic testing intended to counteract it; nor do I believe that many or most teacher education programs are ineffectual. If, however, we do, in fact, believe that a significant number of our teacher education programs suffer from entrenched and systematic ethical violations or rampant incompetence, then the solution is not the implementation of an external assessment, but rather a direct action involving those schools to weed out incompetence and fraud, and to rebuild those programs from the inside. In such a case, leaving inadequate programs intact and counting on a test to catch the unready teachers and weed them out would be unconscionable, if only for the massive waste of time, energy, and resources that would occur if we allowed ensuing classes of students to graduate from mediocre or bad programs, knowing that the test will eventually prove them to be unprepared and thus consign them either back to school or on to another profession.

Frankly, I believe the proposition is absurd. I believe that, just as in our public schools the vast majority of teachers are doing their level best to deliver quality education, in the vast majority of our teacher preparation programs the professors are struggling mightily to ensure that every student learns content, masters skills, and dedicates him or herself to doing a good job. A barrier test will not resolve or eliminate the problems that keep teacher preparation programs from being able to accomplish those goals.

If the problem is not rampant fraud, but rather a matter of the difficulty of determining the degree to which any given teacher candidate has mastered the skills needed to be an effective teacher, then the likelihood of a national test-making agency’s being able to accomplish, working outside of the educational system, what colleges of education have failed to accomplish in the centuries of their existence, seems very small.

If, on the other hand, the set of skills you envision are NOT those skills already being purveyed and assessed by teacher preparation programs, if, instead, the skills you are talking about are those more nebulous abilities to manage classrooms, to establish working relationships with students, and to motivate, then those skills are not likely to be measurable in any quantifiable assessment such as the sort of thing that might be implemented as a national test, which leads me to the next assumption that underlies this proposed solution to our problems of public education:

Assumption 2: We can define and quantify the concept of “effective” teaching sufficiently well that “effectiveness” can be assessed by a concrete assessment.

While there is certainly an identifiable set of skills and knowledge necessary for a teacher to be effective and which should be mastered prior to entering the classroom, truly effective teaching requires a whole complex of abilities derived from experience that cannot be developed by the time a teacher starts teaching—at least not within the existing time frame for teacher preparation. As an English teacher, for instance, I must certainly be able to write well, to interpret literature with insight, and to use language precisely. I must know a considerable amount of content in terms of literary theory, grammatical terminology and function, baseline familiarity with plot, theme, and historical significance of a range of works of literature from a variety of cultures and time periods, and so on. I must also have knowledge of pedagogy for teaching writing and the reading of literature: use of writing workshops, current theory on writing process, strategies for revision, application of narrative theory, critical thinking development, pre-reading strategies, structure of analysis, and so on. I must also have some knowledge of strategies for managing a classroom—effective seating arrangements, strategies for dealing with difficult and non-compliant students, strategies for diffusing confrontation, strategies for communicating with parents and so on. Another set of skills and knowledge involves understanding of legal obligations regarding Special Education students, students with particular health problems, sexual harassment, and child abuse. These skills can be assessed via any of a variety of instruments.

One difficulty, however, for anyone trying to create such an instrument to use as a national assessment of teaching readiness, is determining how much knowledge of this type anyone needs in order to be “effective” from the beginning of his or her career. Another is trying to determine exactly which set of facts, theories, skills and so on are needed. Do I need to know all of Shakespeare’s plays? Or just those I am likely to have to teach? Do I need to know The Canterbury Tales? The Odyssey? The poetry of Derek Walcott, a Caribbean writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1992? The collected works of Richard Powers, the 2006 National Book Award winner? If I know the six steps of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, is that sufficient, or do I need a working knowledge of a critical thinking framework, such as that provided by the Foundation for Critical Thinking, so that I can implement critical thinking strategies as an active part of instruction and assessment? Can I teach effectively right from the start if I am familiar with Cooperative Learning but not with Howard Gardiner’s Multiple Intelligences? In part, the answers to these questions will depend upon what my teaching assignment for that first day actually turns out to be: if I get assigned to teach British Literature, then Shakespeare is more important than Powers, and if I get assigned to a 9^th grade genre study course, then knowledge of the Freytag model of plot structure is likely to be more important than knowledge of the sympathetic, supernatural, and actant functions of setting.

The difficulties of determining which of these skills are necessary for which teachers are legion; a fact which is not suggested by the simplistic statement on the platform.

Assumption 3: A national one-size-fits-all assessment can be designed that will effectively identify those teachers who are ready to be effective from day one and those who are not.

I have shown that the idea that we can develop a single test to ascertain readiness to teach in the whole range of possible teaching assignments is a flawed proposition right from the start; thus, any national assessment would actually have to be a range of assessments, each one designed for a specific working situation—elementary school, high school math, middle school science, and so on. New versions of each test would have to be developed and tested every year, so that test security is not compromised. Implementing a national assessment for teaching readiness would not, therefore, be a matter of a one-time developmental process, but rather the creation of an industry that would be able to develop, field test, administer, and score the assessments on an ongoing basis. The proposed project would actually require something on the scale of an entire new division of the Educational Testing Service.

Those problems of identification and scale are only exacerbated when we try to add to the calculation the less quantifiable skills I mentioned above. Truly effective teaching requires an ability to assert one’s authority without being repressive. Truly effective teaching requires an ability to make accurate assessments about the legitimacy of student complaints, so that one can determine whether one’s requirements are, indeed, unreasonable in some way, or whether, contrariwise, the students’ objections are a sign that the demands being made on them are appropriate, and generating complaints because the students have been pushed out of their comfort zone and into the arena of real learning, which is always difficult and which most students will naturally resist because it’s hard. Truly effective teaching requires a pretty thorough understanding of human psychology, so that the teacher can read her students’ behavior and determine whether the student’s failure to perform is due to a home situation, a learning disability, a lack of understanding about what is required, ineffective preparation from previous classes, or one of any number of other possible causes, so that some determination can be made as to whether a given student will respond better to pushing or to coaxing, to cooperation or to competition, or whether the student needs help from a school psychologist, social worker, or other professional to resolve significant extra-curricular problems before learning can begin to take place.

Truly effective teaching requires that the teacher be alert, insightful, hard-working, endlessly patient, imaginative, patient enough to repeat herself over and over, self-confident enough to be able to put student learning ahead of her own desire to be liked, and the ability to admit when she is wrong so that she can start over again with a new strategy. Students know instantly when a teacher tries to scam them into believing that the teacher knows something she doesn’t actually know, or when the teacher asks her students to do something that she can’t or won’t do herself. A teacher who has shown herself a fraud has no influence on students, regardless of whether she can articulate a cerebral knowledge of facts, figures, theories, and strategies. These personal skills develop over time and only in the context in which they are needed.

This reality is reflected in the existing exemplary model for assessing mastery of the wide range of skills needed for teaching: National Board Certification. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) has already developed sophisticated and broad standards for teacher excellence, and they have implemented a complex assessment procedure to determine which teachers have met those standards. The assessment of effectiveness takes the best part of a year, and involves a range of assessment instruments, including written analyses with supporting documentation of claims, video taped lessons with accompanying analysis, and timed written content examinations. Research has substantiated the correlation between teachers who earn National Board Certification and student achievement; thus, the National Board assessments already function as a successful means of identifying those teachers who are most likely to be effective in the classroom. The NBPTS has implicitly acknowledged that teachers require significant time to learn to function effectively in the classroom before they can possibly establish themselves as master teachers, and teachers are not permitted to undertake these exams until they have taught for three years.

We might extrapolate, then, that if we want to use a sophisticated system similar to the National Board Certification process in order to ensure a high level of teacher effectiveness before the teacher enters the classroom, we must add a three-year full-time apprenticeship to the teacher preparation program. Since the stated objective in the platform is that all teachers are effective from the beginning of their career, then it follows that we would not charge these teachers with full responsibility for a classroom until the end of the three-year apprenticeship, which means that we must pay for a master teacher to bear the full responsibility of the education of the students in the apprentice classrooms. Requiring teachers-in-preparation to extend their education an additional three years, postponing the attainment of full professional status and authority, and possibly even postponing marriage and family until full independence is achieved, would necessitate a correspondent increase in salary. If we are going to demand of teachers the same level of professional preparation and qualification as we demand of doctors, for instance, we must pay them the same as well.

If we are unprepared to do that, and if we cannot expect teachers in preparation to achieve mastery of their craft prior to beginning their teaching career, and I do not see how such an expectation is even remotely reasonable, then we must acknowledge that “effective” teaching happens at a level somewhere below “mastery.” This of course means that we can absolve ourselves of the problems of trying to develop a national assessment that will have the capacity to determine whether prospective teachers have developed these skills to the level that will allow us to call them “masters” from the beginning of their careers, but it also means that we must define “effectiveness,” so far as this recovery strategy is concerned, to mean something less than truly effective, and settle for subject area and pedagogical competency, all of which takes us back to the original point that an additional assessment can provide nothing but the appearance of an effort to raise standards; it cannot in and of itself actually ensure substantive improvement in teacher readiness.

Assumption 4: Since the proposed assessment is voluntary, but the goal is to ensure that “every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively,” the assumption is that all teacher candidates will voluntarily participate in the assessment.

Widespread participation in a voluntary assessment might be presumed to occur only if successful completion of the assessment carries with it substantive reward, or if the assessment becomes so powerful that failure to take it, or failure to pass it, becomes a barrier to getting hired. In the former case, we have again the model of National Board Certification as a guide to predicting the likelihood of that happening. In my state, for example, the monetary incentive for achieving National Board Certification is substantial: $30,000 over the ten-year life of the certificate. Despite this, only a relatively small percentage of teachers has so far volunteered to undertake the certification process. As of the 2007-08 school year, for example, 412 Virginia teachers have earned National Board Certification. There are approximately 90,000 full-time teachers in Virginia, so only about half a percent of teachers have earned National Board Certification. Since approximately half of those attempting NBC earn it, we can estimate that approximately 1% of teachers in Virginia have attempted National Board Certification (NBC). The percentage would be higher if we consider those actually eligible, by virtue of having taught for at least three years; nevertheless, it is clear that the cadre of willing participants is small. This is in part due to the cost, which is significant, $2565, and which often must be paid by the candidate.

Taking the NBC model as an indicator, we can forecast that a similarly small percentage of prospective teachers will voluntarily undergo an assessment of their skills, even with the promise of financial reward for achievement at certain levels. This would be true unless the national teacher readiness assessment acquires sufficient prestige that teachers who haven’t taken it cannot get hired. In that case, however, the assessment would be de facto a mandatory assessment, and calling it voluntary would be merely disingenuous. A proposition to implement a mandatory national teacher assessment would bring with it a whole different set of assumptions and problems, none of which it is my intention to address at this time, since such a proposal has not been made.

A claim that the implementation of a national assessment of teaching qualification can ensure that all teachers are effective from their first day on the job is at best an overly simplistic representation of the real situation. My questions for you, therefore, are:

• What skills do you expect teachers to have developed by day one that will qualify them as “effective” right from the beginning?
• What will this assessment need to comprise in order to assess the qualities that you named above? Can those skills be demonstrated in a written test? Or will the assessment need to include a variety of activities in other formats?
• If the test is not merely a written test, but rather includes a demonstration of skills in some format (video-taped lessons, portfolio of lesson plans, interview with teacher candidates, direct observation of candidates and so on), who will develop the standards of assessment, identify and train the examiners, and certify consistent application of those standards to the assessment?
• How will this assessment be scored? Who will score it? Will the judgment of readiness be left to the individual teacher preparation programs which have a stake in finding that their students are qualified? Or will there be some sort of independent body that develops, administers and scores the assessment to ensure lack of bias?
• What will be the effect of the implementation of such an examining system? If it is rigorous enough to ensure actual accomplishment, what percentage of those undertaking it are likely to fail?
• What potential is there for the test actually reducing the number of qualified teachers rather than increasing it? If that potential is realized, what other solutions will be enacted to ensure that a more qualified set of candidates undertakes teacher education so that sufficient people DO pass the test that we can keep our schools supplied with the teachers they need?
• What will the program cost, both for development and implementation of the testing and to the candidates themselves? Who will pay those costs? Is the problem the solution is designed to solve significant enough to warrant that cost?

As described above, we could probably develop a whole series of national tests that would accurately identify whether prospective teachers have developed a set of minimal competencies; however, as we have seen with schools’ efforts to prepare students for minimum competency testing in their efforts to comply with NCLB, when a minimum competency test becomes the driving force in any educational program, it becomes the focus of that program and so, in effect, it becomes the maximum standard of achievement for that program. If we impose a national standards assessment for all teachers and that assessment proves to have the kind of accountability teeth that one assumes you intend it to have, that test will also become the target toward which all teacher preparation programs aim. Since the assessment must be general enough to account for the baseline needs of a variety of educational situations, it will necessarily not reflect nuanced or sophisticated knowledge or skills, which may very well mean that we will find that although we are able to identify teachers who do and do not meet those minimum competencies, we not only do not identify those who can vastly surpass that minimum level, but we will also effectively discourage teacher preparation programs from expending energy on pushing students to develop more specialized and complex skill sets, because the stake in ensuring that their candidates passed that national test would be extremely high.

Implementation of a voluntary national teaching readiness assessment would amount to implementation of a process that mirrors the NCLB requirements for students. The thinking is the same: there is a set of identifiable skills in every arena that can be tested through a single assessment (or a series thereof), and passage of that assessment (or the series) will ensure that the person taking the test has mastered all the skills needed in order to function effectively in the next phase of one’s academic or professional career. The only difference is that you are calling your teacher assessment voluntary, while the student assessments, such as the Virginia Standards of Learning (aptly and ironically known as the SOLs), are mandatory. Even that won’t save the program from sinking under the unwieldy burden of all the same problems students and schools struggle with as a result of the de facto reduction of all schooling into the items on the test; if the assessment you envision is significant enough to force change, it will represent very high stakes for all teacher preparation programs, which will, inevitably, reshape their programs so that their students can pass the test, and the test will in turn inevitably become the driving force for teacher preparation in this country, just as state testing programs under NCLB have become the driving force of public education. No test is sufficient for such a burden.

This point of your education platform dealing with teacher preparation is particularly disappointing in that it compresses of a massively complex undertaking into a statement that glibly suggests that a simple solution awaits. The recommendation appears to be the result of insufficient thoughtful consideration of insufficient information. You and your transition team have garnered much praise for the Obama administration appointments you have made so far. One main reason for the high praise is that, unlike your predecessor, you are making for yourself a reputation of not wanting yes-men, of preferring, instead, to surround yourself with people who will offer you insights and information that you do not already have, so that you can make better informed decisions. I would like to urge you to take care to do the same in your appointments to the Department of Education. Choose, among your appointees, people who do not see the problem of education in this country in the same simplistic light as those who advised you on the development of the education platform for your campaign appear to have done. Choose people who will help you see where your assumptions and understanding are insufficient, and who can, therefore, help you to develop improvements to our educational system that will result in lasting and substantive change.

My letters to you regarding your education platform are published weekly on my blog, and can be read in their entirety there (http://my2sense2008.blogspot.com/).

Respectfully yours & etc.