Education reform has made a lot good copy this year, but the narrative continues to be driven by politicians with the highest visibility and philanthropists with the largest bank accounts.  Seldom has the media so willingly yielded its independent voice and become no more than an amplifier for powerful and prosperous voices.

Time Magazine’s sensational spread on “What Makes a School Great” (September 20, 2010) pumps up the current narrative of  eliminating bad teachers through analysis of student test scores and bringing the teachers’ unions to their collective knees.

The popular narrative goes like this: Student test performances are the best evidence we have of bad teaching. Teachers and teacher unions should cooperate in the firing of teachers whose students are not performing well on these tests.  Teachers who are willing to work hard make the difference in student performance. Energetic, young teachers should be hired without the time-consuming process of certification.

There’s commonsense in this narrative, but it lacks the perspective of professional educators, those who have witnessed multiple cycles of reform.  Because politicians live and die on the election cycle, reform usually ebbs and flows like the tides of the elected and the rejected. Bureaucrats and entrepreneurs lack the patience that serious educational reform requires.

For example, alternative certification proposed under No Child Left Behind was supposed to by-pass the prolonged course of certification that supplied the schools with mediocre teachers.  In the most blighted urban settings, programs such as Teach for America brought young, energetic teachers into charter schools and under-served public schools.  Studies in 2005-06 in New York and Houston showed the students of TFA trachers did not compare favorably with the students of teachers who had taken a full-preparation for teaching.   In a follow-up to this study, the alternatively certified teachers registered significant gains in their students’ scores in mathematics after two years of teaching and completed certification.  However, 80% of the Teach for America recruits had left teaching by year four. Only 30% of the traditionally prepared teachers had left teaching in the fourth year.

This is an excellent example of the short-term gains of so-called reform that lack sustainability.  The TFA teachers were leaving teaching at the time many of them were hitting their stride as teachers. The schools they had revived were left with the predicament of hiring novice teachers again after three years. As Linda Darling-Hammond has observed, this is a severe drain on the financial and human resources of these schools.

To consider a philanthropic example:  beginning in 2000 the Gates Foundation sponsored restructuring for smaller high schools.  Although these projects had mixed results, change brought disharmony in many of these high schools and the test data in Denver, Chicago and New York did not definitively show that the reforms were working.  Rather than trying to improve the model or respond to teacher concerns, the Foundation reallocated its funds toward advocacy in 2005, according Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Think-tanks such as Achieve, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute received over $57 million from the Foundation in 2005.

The smaller high school idea had great merit, but it would take teacher-buy-in and a willingness to adapt the model for individual contexts to make such radical reform work. Philanthropic foundations are more inclined to impose their will on their beneficiaries and demand a quick pay-off for their investment. School reform does not move at that pace.

The mass media has not bothered to look closely at these examples of reform or given voice to the reformers who critique the validity of the standardized tests used to gauge student and teacher progress.  Credit should go to John Church for his article “How to Recruit Better Teachers” in the current Time Magazine spread, a notable exception to the superficial gaze. Church actually bothered to take a test that was designed to identify promising teachers. “The test has been given to tens of thousands of hopefuls,” noted Church. ” But when I took it recently, I found some questions so vague that no correct answer seemed possible.”

A teacher who has students working in cooperative teams believes that:

A. a good classroom must have some noise

B. students can learn from each other

C. Students must learn to work independently

“Surely all three are true. But Haberman told me that B is the right answer because it is the one given most often by proven teachers. The logic seemed a little circular to me, and the test made me question the whole concept of alternative hiring.” (50)

Kudos to Mr. Church for actually examining a test, instead of placing implicit faith in its authority. Isn’t that what journalists are supposed to do?

I have relied on Time Magazine for its insight into international politics and its features on cultural heroes, but I am dismayed by its half-hearted attempt at analysis of school reform.  There’s a point at which journalism becomes an echo-chamber for the powers that be, and that point has been reached on the topic of education.  The media has become complicit in the popular narrative, and by recycling it for mass consumption, given credence to soundbites and half-truths.