The February 11 edition of the PBS newsmagazine
Need to Know was a special edition devoted to the issues surrounding American public education. Alison Stewart led this discussion roundtable: "Dr. Pedro Noguera is a professor of education at New York University and also spent five years teaching in public schools in California and Rhode Island. Zakiyah Ansari is a mother of eight children and parent leader at the Coalition for Educational Justice in New York City. And Dr. Susan Szachowicz is the principal of Brockton High School and helped spearhead the literacy initiative that turned it from a failing school into a national model."
Responding to Stewart's question about school "turnarounds" (in which admin and students are replaced), Szachowicz responded: "...the concept of turnaround is one of the most deceptive words that you can use because it implies like people from outside leaping into the school to turn everything around, and in fact turnaround was dramatic in terms of the success of the students, but it's been about ten years, eight to ten years of hard work...If you don't change how someone does something, of course you're not going to get different results, so we did not fire all the teachers, we did work with our team that we had, and we've had some pretty dramatic results."
Noguera noted that the states that made the biggest gains in public education, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, are heavily unionized, in contrast with lower-ranked states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. He acknowledged that some areas do have problems with unions and urged teachers' unions to make it easier to remove ineffective teachers but denounced the "broad slap against teachers" as "unproductive".
Ansari, whose children attend/have attended New York City public schools, also spoke in defense of teachers because of "how hard they work" and how they enter the profession for "their love of kids" rather than money. Referencing President Obama's mention of South Korean teachers being nation-builders in the State of the Union this year, Noguera explained that South Korea doesn't "judge teachers by test scores" but rather invests in teaching.
Last October, a
study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that only 17% of sources were nonwhite, a rate only half that of the US population. So it's a good thing that PBS invited such a diverse group for an important discussion.
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