Losing respect . . .

I seem to lately be focusing on the issue of respect for teachers and battles between the various groups attempting to fix us, meaning public schools.  This post is from Larry Ferlazzo a teacher sharing his Q and A ongoing column on Education Week Online about teacher respect.  Weekly, Larry is asked a question that he responds to online.  The question for this week is:

What social/political causes have contributed to the downgrading of respect for the teaching profession?

In his short response he agrees that there has been a decline in respect for teachers though  he does site the recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll I blogged about where 71% of those surveyed say that they have trust and confidence in the men and women teaching their children.  He goes on to share, how in the same poll 68% of people heard more bad stories about teachers in the news media than good ones.  He doesn’t say so, but this can’t help but be a contributing factor to the overall feeling that current teachers have about their profession.

He also uses something called Google Books Ngram Viewer to search, compare, and graph word usage in hundreds of years of books.  He admits it is not scientific research but the resulting graph is interesting, how the words blaming teachers passed the words respecting teachers about 1990.

In the column Ferlazzo invites guests to respond to the question.  One of the invited guests was Dennis Van Roekel, NEA President who shared the following in his reply agreeing with the questioner that respect for teachers is indeed declining.  

Improving public education is a shared responsibility. Too many of us have fallen prey to a fallacy that schools can overcome all problems. Our students need social programs and safety nets that make it possible for them to arrive at the schoolhouse door ready to learn. Our foreign competitors have found ways to limit inequality--why can't we?

I find this argument in much of my current reading about the “reformer” battle and am influenced by it.  I think that the reformers tend to shunt the poverty and social issue to the side in their eagerness to focus on the teacher as the pivotal point of successful reform. 

Though we do not have significant poverty in our system our Free and Reduced Lunch numbers are increasing and this does have an influence on the capacity of our schools to meet the needs of every child.  This was once again evident to me today in my conversation with one of our principals where we discussed the problems associated with students coming to our schools not ready to be students.  They aren’t prepared for participating in a classroom setting, they struggle to sustain a focus over time, they do not have the life experiences that prepare them for the school success, they don’t have  support at home, and the system struggles to provide the non-academic interventions that are needed prior to or at least concurrently with the academic support.

Van Roekel also addresses this point.

We hear all the time that American students score lower than some of our foreign competitors, but critics don't seem to want to know how and why that happens. One reason: Our child poverty rate is over 20 percent. Finland's is less than five percent. In American schools with low child poverty, our students can take on the best in the world.

Ferlazzo’s blog is one that I have shared before.  He is definitely on the other end of the continuum from those labeled as “reformers” and one you might want to follow as he regularly updates his readers on this issue.