Teachers have often complained that they can't do their best because of sub-standard working conditions. A number of recent studies have shown just how bad those conditions are and how much needs to be done to turn our schools into tolerable work places. But teachers are not the only workers in school. The largest group of workers are the students.
This idea - that students are the workers - is central to the improvement of education and schooling. Basically, all education is self-education. In order to learn, a student must work at it by listening, reading, writing, drawing, speaking, questioning, imagining, building, etc. We learn by doing, not merely through passive presence in a classroom sitting in front of a teacher. Students must be engaged in their work. If they're not actively working at learning, we'll hear the teacher exclaim, "I taught them, but they didn't learn it!" Of course, what teachers do makes a difference in whether students learn, but the best of lessons will fail if the kids aren't engaged.
If teachers can't get their work done under poor conditions, how can we except students to succeed at theirs under equally adverse conditions? There will be agreement that neither teachers nor students will do well without books, desks, paper, a pleasant classroom, etc. But rarely do we go beyond these basics to see whether some of the other conditions teachers are asking for themselves shouldn't also be extended to their students.
For example, for more than a decade, teachers have been supporting "teacher centers." Many teachers need help and they know it, but they rarely ask the principal for help because the principal is responsible for evaluating them. These evaluations can lead to all kinds of disciplinary action, including dismissal. The problem is that the principal stands in a dual role to the teacher - helper and mentor on the other hand, boss and judge on the other. So teachers have pushed for teacher centers, places where they could ask for help from their fellow teachers knowing that such a request would not be turned into evidence of incompetence.
But doesn't this apply to students as well? Peter Elbow, in Embracing Contraries, points to the fact that students have the same problem with teachers that teachers have with their principals. "There is a crucial contradiction in the role of almost every institutional teacher that prevents our being genuine allies of the students: we are both credit-giver and teacher. As credit-giver we are the hurdle the student has to get over; as teacher we are the person who helps the student get over the hurdles."
Students who need help may want to ask the teacher for it, but may also fear that by asking for help they will expose their ignorance about something the teacher thinks they ought to know. But if teachers should have a place to ask for help free from the fear that the very act of asking could be used against them, shouldn't students have a peer group to turn to for their school problems? For both teachers and students, having a non-threatening group to turn to for help would be an important improvement in working conditions.
That's not the only similarity in the conditions necessary for both teachers and students to do their work. I once wrote about a study by Richard Murnane and David K. Cohen about school districts where merit pay had been in effect for some time and was working well. Cohen and Murnane discovered that these districts had much in common. They were all "desirable." Basic pay was high. The most important concern in determining who would get merit pay was that teachers viewed the selections as fair. The size of the merit bonus was relatively small so that those who didn't think it was such a big deal. Also, the districts never awarded merit pay solely on the basis of good teaching. There were always some other criteria, such as community service or attendance at PT A meetings and athletic functions. The professional ego of teachers who did not get merit pay was thus protected. They could say, "I'm just as good a teacher, but I don't want to get involved in all these other things."
The clear implication of the Cohen-Murnane study is that teacher acceptance was there because a way had been found to avoid comparing and valuing teachers on one and only one standard of good teaching, which would have resulted in professional humiliation for some. Teachers know that there are many different valuable contributions that they can make and that neither their contributions nor their success can be measured on a single scale.
But don't students also need the same protection from humiliation and the same sense that there are diverse areas in which they can make contributions and demonstrate success if they're to feel good about their workplace and want to keep working?
Howard Gardner, Harvard professor and author of Frames of Mind, says that people have many different "intelligences" and that schools fail to appreciate or help develop any but the manipulation of words and numbers. Yale professor Robert Sternberg, author of The Triarchic Mind, argues that there are three aspects of intelligence - the analytic, the practical and the synthetic (creative). Schools, he says, develop, recognize and test only the analytic. But, in real life, the other two aspects of intelligence or some combination of all three is equally important.
One result of the practice of rating kids on only one important set of abilities is that we fail to use their strengths to overcome their weaknesses, for example, using their practical "smarts" to improve their word and number skills. The larger result is that many students get discouraged and stop trying, which means they stop learning. Under most school "working conditions," we aren't developing other important abilities that children have, value and need to function in the world as adults.
Most recent efforts to improve schools have focused on a good curriculum, well-prepared teachers and better textbooks. All these are needed, but the most important issue is how to get the students to do the work they must do if they are to learn. If students are workers, we need to think much more about improving their work conditions.