Education is a four-legged chair

I taught teachers for twenty-five years. If you want to know what I actually think about schools in this state, here it is.

Education is a four-legged chair. Equitable challenges and opportunities. Quality teaching. Shared leadership. Trust in teachers. Take away any one leg and the whole thing tips, no matter how sturdy the other three are.

Most of what I watch happen at the Legislature is an attempt to fix one leg at a time. Have you ever tried that with an actual chair?

Class size is a good example. Reducing it sounds right, and on its own it changes very little. Put fewer children in a room with a teacher who has no more support, no more professional latitude, and no more reason to believe that anyone trusts her judgment, and you have changed the arithmetic and nothing else.

The same is true of what we spend on reading. We pour extraordinary sums into prescribed, scripted programs that tell experienced teachers what to say and when to say it. Those programs still are not delivering what we were promised. Meanwhile the person who knows the most about that particular child, who sees her every day and understands exactly where she is stuck, is handed a script and told to follow it.

Our problems are connected to one another. They need a matrix approach, not a Tinkertoy approach where each piece gets fixed in isolation and we act surprised when the structure still wobbles.

The reasonable solutions are already out there. Teachers have been naming them for years. We have not been listening to everyone who has a stake in this, and until we do, we will keep buying new legs for a chair that needs all four.