Personally, I would say there's a lot of blame to go around but around 0% of that should fall on the median teacher. In a lot of places, teachers' jobs are in practice to keep up with implementing the endless flood of initiatives and programmes and innovations meant to make things better, often written by people who have no clue. The median teacher will discover quite soon that any criticism of the latest guidelines coming down from above is not welcome.
It's a bit like hiring a programmer to build a fairly standard mobile app, but deciding that it has to be done in a blockchain-based microservice framework with some AI thrown in, written in a research language designed for someone's MSc thesis. Tell the programmer not to questions these decisions OR ELSE, then blame them when the project fails, and you have roughly the situation in some states' education sectors.
In the UK, a case recently made the headlines where a head teacher ended their own life after Ofsted (the government's office for education) downgraded their school's rating. Schools are in the game of guessing what they think Ofsted will like as much as some students are in the game of guessing what they think their teacher will like to read in their essay to get an A, and it certainly seems like schools demonstrating enthusiasm in implementing the latest Ofsted initiatives is part of the whole circus. The median teacher is on the receiving end of both the government's initiatives and their head teacher's ideas on how to implement them; if they use whole-language instruction because that's what Big Brother has made this week's doctrine then I'd allocate the blame 100% to the people with actual structural power in this situation.
(There is a whole book on this, Teach Like Nobody's Watching by Mark Enser, trying to encourage teachers to go outside the box of "what will look good on the next Ofsted inspection" where they are given the leeway to do this by their head teachers.)
Although phonics has many studies behind it showing that it works better than whole-language, to the extent that I strongly support teaching phonics, you'll note that part of the original topic title is "NY is Forcing Schools to ...". That's how orders come down to teachers in the real world, so it seems unfair to blame teachers too much for the results.
> It's a bit like hiring a programmer to build a fairly standard mobile app, but deciding that it has to be done in a blockchain-based microservice framework with some AI thrown in, written in a research language designed for someone's MSc thesis. Tell the programmer not to questions these decisions OR ELSE, then blame them when the project fails, and you have roughly the situation in some states' education sectors.
I would actually make a more grounded analogy.
Let's pretend for a moment there exists some very large, well-studied and scientifically-valid body of research which says object-oriented programming is unequivocally bad. Programmers who follow object-oriented development practices are invariably less productive and create more security vulnerabilities. While these findings have been well-known to computer science researchers for decades, they have been unilaterally ignored by the technology industry, which continues to use languages such as Java and C++. Software engineers with experience in object-oriented development are paid higher salaries. Object-oriented programming continues to be taught at colleges and universities.
Eventually, the research about OO hits the mainstream press. Experts calculate OO is responsible for a zillion additional ransomware attacks per year, leading to numerous deaths at hospitals around the world.
Would you hold individual programmers responsible for using object-oriented programming?
You can replace OO with whatever holy war topic you prefer. Memory safety. Strict typing. React. Electron. POSIX. Serverless. Scrum. In at least one case, it's probably true.
It's a bit like hiring a programmer to build a fairly standard mobile app, but deciding that it has to be done in a blockchain-based microservice framework with some AI thrown in, written in a research language designed for someone's MSc thesis. Tell the programmer not to questions these decisions OR ELSE, then blame them when the project fails, and you have roughly the situation in some states' education sectors.
In the UK, a case recently made the headlines where a head teacher ended their own life after Ofsted (the government's office for education) downgraded their school's rating. Schools are in the game of guessing what they think Ofsted will like as much as some students are in the game of guessing what they think their teacher will like to read in their essay to get an A, and it certainly seems like schools demonstrating enthusiasm in implementing the latest Ofsted initiatives is part of the whole circus. The median teacher is on the receiving end of both the government's initiatives and their head teacher's ideas on how to implement them; if they use whole-language instruction because that's what Big Brother has made this week's doctrine then I'd allocate the blame 100% to the people with actual structural power in this situation.
(There is a whole book on this, Teach Like Nobody's Watching by Mark Enser, trying to encourage teachers to go outside the box of "what will look good on the next Ofsted inspection" where they are given the leeway to do this by their head teachers.)
Although phonics has many studies behind it showing that it works better than whole-language, to the extent that I strongly support teaching phonics, you'll note that part of the original topic title is "NY is Forcing Schools to ...". That's how orders come down to teachers in the real world, so it seems unfair to blame teachers too much for the results.