Teachers Feel Physicians' Pain
This appeared in today's Corpus Christi Caller-Times...
My morning
routine goes something like this: first, start the coffeemaker and feed the
cat. Next, go outside and fetch the
newspaper. Third, pour the coffee and
slide back into bed to read the Caller-Times, starting with the obituaries and
ending with the opinion columnists.
I save the
editorial pages for last because they are so entertaining and provocative. Ann McFeatters and Tom Whitehurst make me
laugh. Leonard Pitts makes me
think. Charles Krauthammer usually makes
me mad, but I took special note of his column this past Saturday.
“Doctors’ reasons for quitting” was the headline. He wrote of the growing number of physicians
who are leaving the profession, fed up with government interference in the
practice of medicine.
Krauthammer
detailed the complaint of classmates in his medical school class 40th-year
reunion report as “not financial, but vocational—an incessant interference with
their work, a deep erosion of their autonomy, a transformation from ‘physician’
to ‘provider’.”
Further, he
reported that one alumnus wrote, “My colleagues who have already left practice
all say they still love patient care, being a doctor. They just couldn’t stand everything else…a
never-ending attack on the profession from the government, insurance companies,
and lawyers, progressively intrusive and usually unproductive rules and
regulations.”
In
particular, Krauthammer lamented the mandate for electronic health records
(EHR) and the extent to which the technological and financial burden of
implementing the mandate had negatively impacted the practice of medicine and,
possibly, the quality of patient care.
I could not
help but to think of the similarities among the physicians’ experience and that
of teachers, not just here and throughout Texas, but across the nation. I re-read the column and found it easy to
substitute “teacher” for “physician” and
“STAAR test” for “EHR,” and to compare the financial impact of
implementing new federal mandates in health care to the billions (yes, that is
with a “b”) of dollars spent on standardized testing over the past two
decades. Pearson, the British company
who reaped the financial benefits of standardized testing in Texas, just lost
their lucrative contract following many years of feasting on the fatted calf of
TAKS and STAAR testing in Texas. Ouch!
A few weeks
ago, a gentleman who admitted to being in his golden years wrote a letter to
this newspaper recalling the “good old days” when he had to pass tests to
graduate from high school, how standards had been lowered from when he was a
student, and so on. He may have been
suffering from a bout of “nostesia,”
which combines our warm, nostalgic memories of school when we were children
with the selective amnesia about what really
happened. Fact is, only recently in
Texas have the stakes been so high for students and teachers alike when it
comes to one government-mandated test making or breaking a student’s academic
chances…or an educator’s career.
The school
year is almost over for most districts.
I know many teachers and administrators who are calling it quits—for
good—this week. “Happy retirement,” I
say. For some, it is time. For many, though,
it is far too early, and our students will be the losers in the end.
Dr. D. Scott Elliff,
Retired Corpus Christi ISD
Superintendent
May 30, 2015
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