Student Relationships v. Data

On March 12^th, New York times Op-Ed writer David Brooks wrote an article ‘No Picnic for Me either’ where he breaks down President Obama’s vision for American education and what Brooks thinks will happen with his plan. Essentially, Brooks breaks President Obama’s plan into two parts: good teachers need to be rewarded and our classrooms need to practice rigorous education. This sounds awesome. However, in practice, I do not know how this will work.

Brooks writes that Obama wants to track data by teacher level to see how students are or are not performing with one teacher’s instructional methods. This is supposed to weed out the “bad” teachers. Brooks writes that “most important, it would increase merit pay for good teachers (the ones who develop emotional bonds with students) and dismiss bad teachers (the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed).” This is a hard thing to determine in my opinion.

There are teachers in my building who have very different management styles and methods for how they to talk to students. One could argue that as long as someone has the data showing that the students are learning then who cares whether you use sarcasm in a classroom or a belittle student, kids are learning. If the focus is going to be on data than that teacher can’t really be punished for meeting that academic standard. If, on the other hand, education reform decides to focus on the whole child, then perhaps the focus shouldn’t be on academic performance, but on progress.

Baltimore City should really think about which of these two reforms it wants to focus on. In my opinion, if you can create a solid support network for a student with understanding adults then the academic rigor will follow. But as long as teachers are going to have to equate their “success” with data rather than relationships they have with students, then data is what teachers will focus on. Hopefully, the time will come when every teacher will have good relationships with students and use data tracking, but until then, building relationships with students is where I think Baltimore City should focus most of its efforts in trying to reform our school system. The more love for our kids, the better.