By: John Dollar

John Dollar — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 19:23:33 +0000

I was amazed by the credulity with which Neal Morton covered the emerging practice of “team teaching” in some Arizona school districts in the November 3rd piece entitled “In one giant classroom, four teachers manage 135 kids – and love it.” Hardly a shred of skepticism was employed in the nearly 2,000 words Mr. Morton spent on the subject. The title alone read like something straight out of The Onion, and would make most of the public school teachers I work alongside laugh out loud. Perhaps if Mr. Morton had asked teachers or school administrators outside of the nation’s worst employment environment for educators*, he would have uncovered a wider range of opinions on the practice of increasing student-teacher ratios under the guise of improving teaching and learning.
The “initial research” referenced in the article that “suggests the gamble could pay off” is conducted by the same ASU Teachers College team that developed the teacher reduction model in question. That work is the product of a partnership with the non-profit group NIET, which was founded by Lowell Milken—a man permanently barred from working in the securities industry** as part of a settlement with the SEC after being charged with multiple counts of racketeering and fraud as a junk bond salesman. From 2003 to 2015, Mr. Milken co-owned Knowledge Universe Education Holdings Inc., one of the world’s largest networks of private schools. Forgive my hesitation in accepting an exciting new idea from one of the chief profiteers of privatization in one of the nation’s most endangered state-level public school systems.
Of course beleaguered administrators are excited about a system in which “substitute teachers are rare, since teachers can plan their schedules to accommodate their teammates’ absences.” Schools nation wide have struggled with staffing shortages for years, as has been well documented. But a system that is preferable to having no teacher at all is not necessarily deserving of glowing praise. Morton highlights, with apparent enthusiasm, the story of one middle school student who prior to ending up in a team teaching model “attended a middle school with no teams and not enough teachers. Two weeks into eighth grade, his science teacher quit — and was replaced by a series of subs. ‘I got away with everything,’ recalled the 14-year-old.” Obviously that young man is better off team taught than being left in a complete educational vacuum, but we shouldn’t mistake an emergency measure as an exciting innovation to be duplicated across the country.
Those of us who want to see the best possible outcomes for kids need to be on high alert for anything sold to us a better way to teach. The science of teaching and learning has not changed just because certain districts in certain states face acute staff shortages. The recent spate of excellent reporting by Emily Hanford*** and others has shown us fresh evidence of the consequences of inadequately examined “innovation” in our field. If an American educational dystopia comes to pass in my lifetime, I fear it will look very much like the classrooms described here: hundreds of students whose parents can’t afford to buy them passage out of defunded, crumbling public school systems herded together into gymnasiums and clicking through endless digital lessons (likely provided by some future company of Mr. Milken’s) with the support of a shrinking staff of actual teachers.
While some of the ideas raised in the article are worth further exploration, such as the destructive isolation that new teachers face when they step into their first classrooms, the idea of solving those problems by conveniently reducing the total number of teachers employed during a time of staffing shortages, and the audacity to call it innovation, is a farce that I can hardly believe made it past the editorial team of an outlet that purports to serve the greater goal of American education.

Sincerely,
John Dollar
English Teacher
Wisconsin

*https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/arizona-ranked-worst-state-in-america-for-teachers-study-says
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Milken?scrlybrkr=eeaeb48a#Business_career
***https://www.apmreports.org/story/2022/04/23/reading-recovery-negative-impact-on-children

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By: John Dollar