A School Reformer’s Worst Nightmare

Each of us has had nightmares in our lifetimes. Here is my fantasy about a school reformer’s worst nightmare.

I am in a classroom. The doors are locked. The windows have wooden blinds and they are pulled shut. There are close to 50 adults sitting in bolted-down desks arranged in nine rows facing a teacher’s desk and whiteboard. I am sitting at a graffiti-ridden desk at the end of the third row. The teacher looks like Ms Bowler my eighth grade English teacher who had required each of us to recite “Abou Ben Adhem” publicly; she is berating us now for not listening to the report that each adult is giving. She wants us to fold our hands on our scarred desks and give each “student” our fullest attention or, she says, we will not be able to leave the room….ever.

She begins by calling upon the first adult sitting in the first row next to the door who had reported yesterday–yes, in this nightmare we have been locked in this classroom for two days. After the first report, she will call upon the second person in the same row, and then the third. Ordinarily, I would have been able to figure out how long it would take before Ms Bowler would call upon me to walk to the front of the room except the teacher had said that the report could be as long as each of us wanted it to be. Yesterday, only three “students” gave their reports; it took 24 hours for them to finish. We were not allowed to go to the bathrooms or eat meals.

And what were these reports about? Ms. Bowler required us to report on school reforms that would solve the problems of U.S. education in a competitive global economy. When we were all finished, she would unlock the door and we could leave the room. The class was made up of every stripe of school reformer from progressives who wanted to drop standardized testing and adopt project-based learning to centrists who believed that schools could be improved from the inside to market-based entrepreneurs who adored charter school to school-haters and high-tech enthusiasts.

The first reformer reported on online schooling, giving the class example after example of lessons from online courses offered at top universities, state-sponsored cyber-academies, and for-profit companies. She told us about such courses as “Artificial Intelligence for Dummies,” “Shakespeare’s Worst Plays,” “The History of Quantum Physics from Archimedes to Richard Feynman,” and “Skin Care for Boys and Girls.” That presentation on an interactive white board took 10 hours.

The second reformer took six hours. He told the class about his new algorithm for evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ test scores. The equation had 62 variables in it (appearing on a transparency he had made for the old overhead projector in the room). The reformer, gaining enthusiasm with every variable he introduced, proceeded to lecture on each variable in the algorithm ending with a gush of words about how implementing this evaluation plan through 180 daily observations of teachers would determine which teachers were highly effective, which were OK, which were mediocre, and which ones should be fired.

The third reformer got up and passed out a 40-page stapled copy of 152 slides for a PowerPoint presentation that she was going to give on what the research has shown thus far on how standardized testing had ruined public schools. She then proceeded to read each bullet-point on each slide as we followed her word-for-word on the printed copy. Each slide was a study of how tests had narrowed the curriculum and forced teachers into test prep lessons. Slides detailed the research design, the methodology, the findings, and the outcomes for both students and teachers. That non-stop, hurried presentation took eight hours.

That was yesterday. Now, Ms. Bowler told us we would re-start the presentations on online instruction, teacher evaluation, and ending standardized tests since we had lagged in our attention yesterday. How long it would be before it was my turn, I did not know. Could Ms. Bowler, after hearing the three presentations a second time, castigate all of us for insufficient attention and have the reformers repeat it the following day? I did not know. But I feared–a cold sweat bathed me–how many more days I would have to sit at my desk with folded hands listening to reformer after reformer lecture on how best to solve the U.S.’s national problem of failing schools. There was no exit.

That is my take on what a reformer’s nightmare might be like.