Teachers Caught In a Tightening Vise

When people ask me what I do I tell them I am a teacher. I don't say writer or professor or supervisor, though all of those are true. I say teacher because I feel that is the most important undertaking of my days. It is as a teacher that I feel the crunch of decreased money and the misguided pressures of assessment and security. Specifically, more and more of my time is taken up with "outcomes-based" teaching. Outcomes are not bad in theory, but the real stuff of education (exploration of big ideas, mulling over ways to express one's self, finding a path into a future that grows out of one's enthusiasm and sense of purpose) is difficult to measure and gets lost in outcomes that are discreet enough to "measure," to be captured as "data." We don't measure creative problem solving or learning work together to imagine a future more humane than the present we live in. The other pressure is the heavy weight of security. Schools have to be safe in order for learning to happen, so we have a greater presence of armed police. Yes, security is important, but it is the culture addicted to guns that exacerbates the likelihood of shootings. Both of these pressures make some people a lot of money, money that comes out of budgets for teaching and goes into administrators and enforcement, squeezing an already tight profession even further. Time for push-back and re-evaluation of what's worth the limited money we have to spend on students.