As if the universe heard my angst…

of the last several days, this article appeared in Inside Higher Ed (or if not the universe, at least my pal Libby who alerted me to the article!) Now, I know, most people don’t get excited by articles with “Assessment” in the title. But listen to this:

The problem is not that we don’t value good teaching, as our critics still often charge, but that we often share our culture’s romanticized picture of teaching as a virtuoso performance by soloists, as seen in films like Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, and Freedom Writers. According to this individualist conception of teaching — call it the Great-Teacher Fetish, the counterpart of the Best-Student Fetish — good education simply equals good teaching. This equation is pervasive in current discussions of school reform, where it is taken as a given that the main factor in improving schooling is recruiting more good teachers.

In fact, this way of thinking is a recipe for bad education. According to Richard F. Elmore’s research on primary and secondary education, in failing schools the governing philosophy is often, Find the most talented teachers and liberate them “from the bonds of bureaucracy,” which are often seen as infringements on academic freedom. (In the movies, the great teacher always works her classroom magic against the background of an inept, venal, or corrupt school bureaucracy.) Elmore reports that the pattern of teachers “working in isolated classrooms” is common in unsuccessful schools, where everything depends on the teachers’ individual talents “with little guidance or support from the organizations that surround them.” Conversely, as Elmore argues, successful schools tend to stress cooperation among teachers over individual teaching brilliance, though cooperation itself enhances individual teaching.