Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

by John Warner

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing a significant proportion of Americans that teachers were overpaid and had too much security. In reality, particularly compared to the practices in other developed countries, our K–12 teachers are considerably overworked and underpaid. All of the conditions conspiring to make school atmospheres inhospitable to student learning also make for difficult teaching atmospheres for instructors. In some ways, it is worse for instructors. Students (for the most part) aren’t at risk of being fired. Teachers in the United States spend 38 percent more time in the classroom than those in other developed countries.9 Almost half of teachers say they experience “a lot” of daily stress. As compared with other professions, teachers are “least likely to report feeling like their ‘opinions seem to count.’ ”10 As Daniel Koretz of Harvard shows in The Testing Charade, public school teachers have been subjected to year after year of shifting external demands for accountability, each change more oppressive and draconian than the last. School reform has resulted in testing regimes that have “sometimes been taken to lengths that are both absurd and cruel.”