Feminism, teacher quality, and lazy journalism

[sabotabby]

This article had me fuming this morning. Headline: "Is feminism reducing the quality of America's teaching force?"

From the article:

Thanks to feminism, American schools are no longer benefitting from an invisible wage subsidy that allowed them to attract bright, over-qualified college-educated teachers at low wages and poor working conditions.

That's the controversial conclusion reached in a recent report by Marc Tucker at the nonpartisan National Center on Education and the Economy. Tucker blasts the United States for largely ignoring teacher quality in favor of a focus on grade-by-grade standardized K-12 testing. He points out that those priorities are out of sync with the strategies of developed countries that appear to be churning out students who are better educated than ours.

You will notice in those two paragraphs, if you are relatively left-wing, a certain contradiction here. Improving wages and conditions for working people is a good thing, and standardized testing is foolish. Generally speaking, feminists and people who believe in quality education over bubbling standardized tests are in agreement about what needs to be done to improve the public education system.

Fortunately, I looked at the actual study, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than what's being reported here. At least half of the study is an argument, not to return to the days when women had few professional options and teaching was low-status and low-pay, but rather to increase the status and pay of American teachers to better match successful strategies in other countries and to attract a higher quality of teachers. It's strongly implied that the "invisible subsidy" was unsustainable, but has formed our expectations around teacher status and compensation.

He also has a lot more to say about economic inequality than the single paragraph at the bottom of the Yahoo! article.

It's an interesting study, actually, and a coherent argument against No Child Left Behind and similar strategies of testing students every year and then using those results to fire and replace teachers in underperforming schools. He doesn't mention Canada until right at the end—and I think he's being too generous about educational reform here—but he's not entirely wrong:

We have not mentioned Canada much until now, because this is where it fits. The
government of Ontario did not predicate their reform program on replacing its current
teacher workforce with a new workforce. They did not think they needed to. They asked
themselves how they could get much better results from the workforce already in place.
The answer they came up with was to make peace with the teachers unions that had been
demonized by the previous administration and with the teachers that had been so badly 44
demoralized and they invited them to join them in thinking through a reform program that
would improve student performance. They insisted on high standards but they listened
hard to what the teachers had to say about the support they needed to raise student
achievement to those standards. They decided that the highest leverage strategy available
to them was to build the capacity and professional skill and commitment of their in-place
teaching force. They focused on what it would take to build capacity at every level of the
system to deliver, and wherever possible, supplied it. They made a point of trusting
teachers and the teachers returned their trust.

Hardly the anti-feminist, anti-labour screed reported in the article. While I think the study doesn't go far enough, I can't say I have huge ideological differences with the idea of focusing on quality of education over high-stakes testing, increasing the quality of teacher education, increasing teacher compensation, and equalizing school funding to help poor students. I checked it out expecting to be enraged and actually found myself nodding along to many of the recommendations.

But I guess it's more fun to posit that it's feminism is bad for the children, and America.

Comments

[cdaae.livejournal.com]

Fricking depressing that the Yahoo article was written by a woman, too.

[sabotabby]

The headline might not have been? The headline is the worst part.

[cdaae.livejournal.com]

True; but the first line points the finger at feminism as the main cause.

Sigh.

[marrythebed.livejournal.com]

Ugh. A friend of a friend on FB commented on some article on third-world sex trades that "feminism" had inadvertently caused many of these men to pay to rape young girls and women thanks to the decrease in arranged marriages.

Gee, between that and the failing school systems, "feminism" is going to destroy the universe! We must put a stop to it immediately!

[sabotabby]

Right. How what huh?

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Out here in BC the provincial government looks to be brewing up a fight with the teachers' union. I have a son going into Grade 12 so I hope it does not come to a strike, but if there is one it will be over wages (which haven't budged in years, and will not this time around) and working conditions )mostly class sizes). Gordon Campbell bought labour peace for several years with a lot of money, to cover the Olympics - now they're over, and he's gone, and it's time for politics as usual here; the ruling party picks a fight with a public service union to divert attention from what's really going on - in the past it's been nurses, ferry workers, etc. and now the wheel's come around to teachers again.

[sabotabby]

I have heard this. It sounds like the teachers are planning to walk; let's hope it's a short victory that doesn't disrupt the kids' education too much.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Yes, they took a strike vote - only 60% of teachers voted, but those who voted favored a strike by 90%.

As pointed out below, Christy Clark (current premier) was once the Minister of Education, and picked a fight with the teachers then. I\m hopeful that both sides will be even slightly reasonable about this, but there are rumours of a fall election so both sides may want to work this to get popular support.

[queerasmoi.livejournal.com]

And Christy Clark wasn't all that great of a prize as Minister of Education either.

But on the plus side, since Clark is more aligned with federal Liberals than Conservatives, she has a knack for stealing good ideas from the NDP. Which means she may actually favour labour peace over a war on teachers.

[queerasmoi.livejournal.com]

So the real gist of it is - before women stood up for their rights and working conditions, we could get away with underfunding our education system and still have quality teachers. Thanks to feminism, attracting quality teachers means we actually have to pay teachers what they deserve for what can be such an exhausting and thankless job. But thanks to tax cuts, military spending and subsidies to large corporations, public school systems are not able to spend the necessary funds to pay USA's best teachers not to flee to private schools.

Also, did you ever see this one in the Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/budget-mixup-provides-nations-schools-with-enough,20350/

[sabotabby]

I did see that. And cried a little because why can't this be for real? It's a cliché to talk about the military having to hold bake sales to pay for fighter jets, but when I see how dingy and broken my school is—and it's a good school, despite the poverty of the surrounding community, with hardworking kids and teachers—I get enraged.

[cupric-acetate.livejournal.com]

Reading lay-media reports on research is so beyond frustrating I can't do it anymore in my field. It's pretty sad when a lot of the articles end up picking one not-very relevant point, trying to create a bullshit narrative, or heaping on a distorting helping of ideology instead of just simplifying research so that someone who isn't an expert can understand it.

[sabotabby]

Yeah. I wish I had more time to debunk them, even if it's just in my blog.

The sad thing is that it isn't even difficult to distill this one. Education isn't science, and stripped of its own silly jargon, it isn't hard to convey the research to laypeople.