An alert reader shared with me an email she received with the subject line "Demand Better Compensation for Teachers." Turns out, it's just further proof of how cynical the reformsters at StudentsFirst are these days.
The email was generated by the site Greatergood.com, a website of the kickstarter crowdsourcing variety, aimed specifically at projects for, well, the greater good. Anybody can hop on there and set up a project and try to raise money, so somebody at StudentsFirst apparently said, "Hey, why not."
The "project," which is for some reason in the breast cancer section of the site, uses this copy:
During a speech, President Obama said, "Education is an investment that we need to win the future."
He's right. In order to invest in our kids' futures, we need to invest in teachers now.
The most important school-based factor in a child's education is
teacher quality, and America's teachers are grossly underpaid.
StudentsFirst is working to elevate the teaching profession by
advocating teachers be rewarded for excellence. Those who show they can
move kids along academically should be compensated accordingly.
Our great teachers are the ones who help shape our kids' lives, the
ones who give them tools to succeed. Teachers help pave the way for
children to become scientists, engineers, world leaders. Their impact on
a child's life can't be underestimated.
Yes, as witnessed from California courts to the statehouse of Pennsylvania, this is how we're playing it these days. StudentsFirst is dedicated to getting recognition for teachers, and to do that, they are campaigning tireless to get rid of tenure, seniority, unions, and any kind of job protections.
Only by turning teaching into a job that no grown-up would want to take on as a career, only by destroying teaching as a profession, can StudentsFirst get teachers the rewards they deserve. StudentsFirst will keep advocating for excellence, by which they mean "high scores on standardized tests." And if teachers in certain school settings, teaching poor students in crumbling schools with no resources-- well, if those teachers have students with low test scores, it must be the teachers' fault, and they're not excellent.
What's impressively cynical about it is that it's the kind of rhetoric you can only use effectively if you know that you're full of baloney. You can't sell this stuff if you really believe in it, because it only holds up to reality for about five seconds. And as of right now, over 20,000 people have signed on, with heartwarming messages like "It is of grave importance that we value and compensate our teachers" with no idea that they are just props in a cynical ploy by people who place no value on teaching at all.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
The Kindergarten Cell
This little article has stirred up a small tempestita on facebook and the twitter. "Rethinking the Colorful Kindergarten Classroom" by Jan Hoffman, and the argument that has sprung up with it is one more signpost on our road to education hell.
Hoffman is simply passing on some research that says all the colors and pictures and decorations etc etc etc are a distraction for tiny minds, and perhaps our students are best served by a more spartan environment. "Grrr-reat!" say her detractors. "While we're at it, let's strip the walls bare, board up any windows and paint it all grey."
"Not so fast," say other teacher voices. "That's all easy to say if you've never tried to teach an over-stimulated five-year-old." And that's before we get to special needs or ADHD students.
Me? I haven't picked a side in this fight because I am too busy being horrified that we're having the argument in the first place. Seriously. Take a step back with me, please, and look at what's going on.
We are having an argument about the best environment for five year old academics. Our metric is test scores for five year olds. Test. Scores. For. Five. Year. Olds.
Ultimately this is an argument about the best way to cook and eat the family dog. It's an argument about the best club to use on your children. It's an argument about the best way to steer a car blindfolded.
It's an argument about the best way to do something that shouldn't be done in the first place.
This is how we're going to measure success in a Kindergarten classroom? Not happy children enjoying play and socializing with friends? Not joyous human beings learning how to be themselves and enjoy a broader bigger world? But test scores? Test scores???
Standardized tests have no place in Kindergarten. Academic instruction has no place in Kindergarten. We are arguing about whether to put small children in a pretty cell or a plain cell, when we should be fighting to keep them out of a cell in the first place.
Hoffman is simply passing on some research that says all the colors and pictures and decorations etc etc etc are a distraction for tiny minds, and perhaps our students are best served by a more spartan environment. "Grrr-reat!" say her detractors. "While we're at it, let's strip the walls bare, board up any windows and paint it all grey."
"Not so fast," say other teacher voices. "That's all easy to say if you've never tried to teach an over-stimulated five-year-old." And that's before we get to special needs or ADHD students.
Me? I haven't picked a side in this fight because I am too busy being horrified that we're having the argument in the first place. Seriously. Take a step back with me, please, and look at what's going on.
We are having an argument about the best environment for five year old academics. Our metric is test scores for five year olds. Test. Scores. For. Five. Year. Olds.
Ultimately this is an argument about the best way to cook and eat the family dog. It's an argument about the best club to use on your children. It's an argument about the best way to steer a car blindfolded.
It's an argument about the best way to do something that shouldn't be done in the first place.
This is how we're going to measure success in a Kindergarten classroom? Not happy children enjoying play and socializing with friends? Not joyous human beings learning how to be themselves and enjoy a broader bigger world? But test scores? Test scores???
Standardized tests have no place in Kindergarten. Academic instruction has no place in Kindergarten. We are arguing about whether to put small children in a pretty cell or a plain cell, when we should be fighting to keep them out of a cell in the first place.
The Teaching Force Is Largely Newbs
In their article "The Greening of the American Teacher," Mercer Hall and Gina Sipley focus in one finding of a CPRE report on shifts in the American teaching workforce. That report is worth a look all by itself, but we'll save that for another day, because Hall and Sipley have some interesting insights to share.
The American teacher is now most probably a newb. There are several possible reasons for that trend-- Hall and Sipley blame, in part, the erosion of tenure. And in fact they've dug up some interesting research that shows some hugely interesting findings about private/charter school teachers:
1) They report more job satisfaction than public school teachers
2) They are more likely to quit than public school teachers
3) One of the top reasons given for the departure is lack of job security
The effects of this greening are many.
One is increased instability of teaching staff. We know that almost half of all beginning teachers will leave within their first five years. That means a largely newb staff may face high turnover. And despite the reformster insistence that youthful enthusiasm is the key to teaching excellence, most researchers and human beings who live on this planet reach the opposite conclusion-- that it takes 5-15 years for a teacher to really master the job.
Of course, some of the side effects are attractive to reformsters, especially the lower costs for staff. But as Hall and Sipley note, "the current skewing of the teacher force toward a homogenized team of amateurs, however, undermines the undisputed benefits of skill and maturity."
The American teacher is now most probably a newb. There are several possible reasons for that trend-- Hall and Sipley blame, in part, the erosion of tenure. And in fact they've dug up some interesting research that shows some hugely interesting findings about private/charter school teachers:
1) They report more job satisfaction than public school teachers
2) They are more likely to quit than public school teachers
3) One of the top reasons given for the departure is lack of job security
The effects of this greening are many.
One is increased instability of teaching staff. We know that almost half of all beginning teachers will leave within their first five years. That means a largely newb staff may face high turnover. And despite the reformster insistence that youthful enthusiasm is the key to teaching excellence, most researchers and human beings who live on this planet reach the opposite conclusion-- that it takes 5-15 years for a teacher to really master the job.
Of course, some of the side effects are attractive to reformsters, especially the lower costs for staff. But as Hall and Sipley note, "the current skewing of the teacher force toward a homogenized team of amateurs, however, undermines the undisputed benefits of skill and maturity."
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Arne Tells Teachers To Go To Hell (Again)
Arne has popped up with a statement in reaction to the Vergara tenure-FILO-smashing verdict. You will be shocked to discover that Arne sides with the billionaire backers of this attack on the teaching profession. Let me break it down and translate for you:
For students in California and every other state, equal opportunities for learning must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher.
Arne is going to go ahead and pretend that he believes the bullshit premise of these attacks on tenure-- that somehow tenure and FILO are keeping great teachers from getting to students and not, say, offering some job protection that might make teaching appealing as a lifelong career. Also, ignorance is strength.
The students who brought this lawsuit are, unfortunately, just nine out of millions of young people in America who are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students.
Arne will also go ahead and pretend that these nine sock puppets actually had something to do with the lawsuit created and bankrolled by billionaire David Welch.
Today’s court decision is a mandate to fix these problems. Together, we must work to increase public confidence in public education. This decision presents an opportunity for a progressive state with a tradition of innovation to build a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect and rewarding careers they deserve.
Did Arne have to read this somewhere? Because I'm not sure how he could get through it without puking. Yes, the destruction of job protections will totally show teachers that they are supported and valued. But we're salivating now, because we can create a new framework, one that doesn't involve teaching as a career, or teachers' unions as a political force, or teachers as people who have a voice, or even stick around schools long enough to become a problem.
My hope is that today’s decision moves from the courtroom toward a collaborative process in California that is fair, thoughtful, practical and swift.
Oh, hell. I know my stock in trade here is supposed to be wit and snark and all, but-- bullshit, Arne. That's just plain unvarnished bullshit. You can't possibly hope any of those things at this moment with a straight face.
Every state, every school district needs to have that kind of conversation. At the federal level, we are committed to encouraging and supporting that dialogue in partnership with states. At the same time, we all need to continue to address other inequities in education–including school funding, access to quality early childhood programs and school discipline.
You know who can't have those kinds of conversations? Teachers who have no job protections. Teachers who have no job protections can only mostly have the kinds of conversations that involve statements like "Yassuh, whatever you say, suh" and "I'm sick of your lip. You're fired."
But then, when you said school districts and states and federal overlords needed to have conversations, you probably meant "conversations without teachers in the room."
God, just when I think the Obama administration has found every conceivable way to signal that they consider teachers vermin to be stepped on and crushed, they find one more way to drive that point home. At this point, I think the GOP would have to run a convicted ax murderer in order for me to vote Democrat in a national election. This is a whole new level of pissing on us while telling us it's raining. This is a whole new level of disregard for the teaching profession-- no, no, that's wrong, because this is not disregard. This is assault. This is deliberate, lying with a straight face, cheering for the dismantling of teaching as a profession.
For students in California and every other state, equal opportunities for learning must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher.
Arne is going to go ahead and pretend that he believes the bullshit premise of these attacks on tenure-- that somehow tenure and FILO are keeping great teachers from getting to students and not, say, offering some job protection that might make teaching appealing as a lifelong career. Also, ignorance is strength.
The students who brought this lawsuit are, unfortunately, just nine out of millions of young people in America who are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students.
Arne will also go ahead and pretend that these nine sock puppets actually had something to do with the lawsuit created and bankrolled by billionaire David Welch.
Today’s court decision is a mandate to fix these problems. Together, we must work to increase public confidence in public education. This decision presents an opportunity for a progressive state with a tradition of innovation to build a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect and rewarding careers they deserve.
Did Arne have to read this somewhere? Because I'm not sure how he could get through it without puking. Yes, the destruction of job protections will totally show teachers that they are supported and valued. But we're salivating now, because we can create a new framework, one that doesn't involve teaching as a career, or teachers' unions as a political force, or teachers as people who have a voice, or even stick around schools long enough to become a problem.
My hope is that today’s decision moves from the courtroom toward a collaborative process in California that is fair, thoughtful, practical and swift.
Oh, hell. I know my stock in trade here is supposed to be wit and snark and all, but-- bullshit, Arne. That's just plain unvarnished bullshit. You can't possibly hope any of those things at this moment with a straight face.
Every state, every school district needs to have that kind of conversation. At the federal level, we are committed to encouraging and supporting that dialogue in partnership with states. At the same time, we all need to continue to address other inequities in education–including school funding, access to quality early childhood programs and school discipline.
You know who can't have those kinds of conversations? Teachers who have no job protections. Teachers who have no job protections can only mostly have the kinds of conversations that involve statements like "Yassuh, whatever you say, suh" and "I'm sick of your lip. You're fired."
But then, when you said school districts and states and federal overlords needed to have conversations, you probably meant "conversations without teachers in the room."
God, just when I think the Obama administration has found every conceivable way to signal that they consider teachers vermin to be stepped on and crushed, they find one more way to drive that point home. At this point, I think the GOP would have to run a convicted ax murderer in order for me to vote Democrat in a national election. This is a whole new level of pissing on us while telling us it's raining. This is a whole new level of disregard for the teaching profession-- no, no, that's wrong, because this is not disregard. This is assault. This is deliberate, lying with a straight face, cheering for the dismantling of teaching as a profession.
Well, Damn
The interwebs are currently blowing up with reaction to the Vergara verdict in California which, and there's no way to soft-pedal this, rips the guts out of tenure and seniority for teachers. If this stands, we will all be at-will employees soon enough.
My default setting is to assume that people mean well, or at least mean to do what they believe is right. I find it kind of rage-inducing to encounter people who willfully lie and destroy, who feel justified in simply declaring themselves heroes for blowing up an orphanage. I don't know what could possibly be going on in their brain, and I have to assume that they know they're full of baloney but they don't care. They are going to punch you in the nose and lie about it because they can and it makes them feel-- I don't know- powerful?
So when She Who Will Not Be Named or Students(never)First or DFER start tweeting about how this is a victory for students and equity, my blood pressure goes up because-- really? Really??
If they are so concerned about equity in California schools, where was the lawsuit to force the state to redistribute tax dollars so that poor schools have the resources they need? Oh yeah-- that would mean that rich folks would have to foot the bill to educate Those People, and that's the last thing we want.
What we want is to break the teaching profession, so we'll say we're protecting excellent teachers.
We want to impose the will of billionaires on the state, so we'll use some teenagers as set dressing. "Victory for students" my ass.
We want to create a lower-tier school system for the poor, so we'll call it equity.
We want to cut the poor off without a cent (because, Those People), so we'll call this social justice.
I mean, bloody hell, guys? Do we all have "stupid" written on our foreheads? Can you not even do me the respect of telling me convincing lies?
It's like talking to that kid in the third row who just punched another student in the face and is now sitting there smiling, laughing and saying "I never touched him" with that fish-eating grin that says, "Go on. I'm lying straight to you, and you're not going to do anything about it because my dad's on the school board and-- oh yeah-- you don't have tenure."
My default setting is to assume that people mean well, or at least mean to do what they believe is right. I find it kind of rage-inducing to encounter people who willfully lie and destroy, who feel justified in simply declaring themselves heroes for blowing up an orphanage. I don't know what could possibly be going on in their brain, and I have to assume that they know they're full of baloney but they don't care. They are going to punch you in the nose and lie about it because they can and it makes them feel-- I don't know- powerful?
So when She Who Will Not Be Named or Students(never)First or DFER start tweeting about how this is a victory for students and equity, my blood pressure goes up because-- really? Really??
If they are so concerned about equity in California schools, where was the lawsuit to force the state to redistribute tax dollars so that poor schools have the resources they need? Oh yeah-- that would mean that rich folks would have to foot the bill to educate Those People, and that's the last thing we want.
What we want is to break the teaching profession, so we'll say we're protecting excellent teachers.
We want to impose the will of billionaires on the state, so we'll use some teenagers as set dressing. "Victory for students" my ass.
We want to create a lower-tier school system for the poor, so we'll call it equity.
We want to cut the poor off without a cent (because, Those People), so we'll call this social justice.
I mean, bloody hell, guys? Do we all have "stupid" written on our foreheads? Can you not even do me the respect of telling me convincing lies?
It's like talking to that kid in the third row who just punched another student in the face and is now sitting there smiling, laughing and saying "I never touched him" with that fish-eating grin that says, "Go on. I'm lying straight to you, and you're not going to do anything about it because my dad's on the school board and-- oh yeah-- you don't have tenure."
What Do We Do About Bad Teachers?
I believe bad teachers exist. I believe that on any given day, in many schools in this country, there's a person standing in a classroom doing a lousy job. I just spent a chunk of bandwidth explaining that I don't believe Find and Fire is the correct policy response to bad teaching. So what do I propose instead?
The Heart of the Problem
I'm going to spend the least amount of time on the hugest part of the problem, which is identifying the Bad Teachers. I've actually laid out my teacher evaluation plan elsewhere; if you want to start me off on a consulting career, give me a call. In the meantime, I'm going to talk about some of the reasons that it's hard to do useful evaluations, because wrestling with those difficulties helps us figure out what we need to do about our Problem Educators.
What Do You Want Them To Do
Here's what teaching feels like some days. You show up on a work site, and then a supervisor hands you a hammer and points you at a pile of lumber. "Build something," he says. "I'll be back in a few weeks to tell you how you're doing."
One of the more subtle things that reformsters have quietly done is to simplify education. Common Core redefines education as simple vocational training, and various VAMs redefining teaching as test prep. If we thought a teacher's job was just to get kids to get a good score on the Big Test, it would be easy to measure job performance. But that would be a stupid definition of a teacher's job, and so student test scores are a stupid measure of teach effectiveness.
Before you can judge teachers, you have to decide what you want them to do. That turns out to be rally complicated and difficult and wildly varied from parent to taxpayer to administrators to bureaucrats. It even varies within families-- what I want you to accomplish with my oldest child may be way different from what I want you to accomplish with my youngest.
Because this is so hugely difficult, we mostly just don't do it. We collective wave our hands in the general directions of students and say, "I don't know. Go do teachy things." If you want to evaluate people on job performance, you have to decide what job you want them to perform.
Teachers Are Humans
My point is NOT that humans are frail and flawed. My point is that humans are dynamic, growing, changing persons. You cannot take a snapshot of a person at one moment and say, "Well, that's who they are all the time forever."
I mean-- that's the whole premise of schools. If we handled students with the same Find and Fire method reformsters like for teachers, we would sit down in October and say, "Well, Chris and Pat don't appear to know very much, so let's just fire them." That would be crazy! (Well, unless you're a charter school. Then it would be standard policy.)
No, we say that if Chris and Pat are problematic, we will find ways to teach them.
People change. If you have taught for more than a decade, you have probably worked with some or all of the following teachers:
-- The teacher who was great for most of a career, except for a couple of years when they hit a rough patch and took a while to bounce back
-- The teacher who was pretty mediocre at first, but eventually caught on and became quite good
-- The teacher who started out pretty strong, but just kind of lost interest after a few years
-- The teacher who stayed a few years too long
-- The teacher who was awful from day one and couldn't be helped
-- The teacher who was awful from day one, but really wanted to get good, and so did
The smaller your sample (a single 30-minute observation, a 10-minute video clip), the less true your evaluation. Teacher performance varies over time. Teachers can get better or worse. Teachers are humans. Humans change.
Teaching Is About Relationships
Teaching is about the relationship between the teacher and the student. Not every relationship will be the same, and some of them will not be good.
At various times in my career, I have been exactly the right teacher at the right time for particular students. At other times, I have been exactly wrong for a particular student. Don't get me wrong-- I can teach anybody up to a certain point. I'm a professional, and that's my job. But I have no doubt that there are students out in the world telling their "Worst Teacher I Ever Had" stories about me.
So. What Do We Do?
We don't give up on finding and addressing weak areas. I said finding bad teaching is hard. I didn't say it was impossible. So let's pretend we did it, and discovered a pocket of bad teaching in Room 147. Now what?
First, we try to fix it.
I know reformsters want to just fire folks left and right. That's wasteful, and just means we'll have to start from scratch with a new trainee anyway. Let's see if we can salvage the investment of time and money we've already made in this teacher. After all-- some bad teaching is done by good teachers.
Coaching. Support. Team teaching. An experienced teacher works with Room 147 every single day. We know how to do all this, and we even know that it works. We just don't like it because it costs money, and districts are really fond of teacher remediation programs that don't cost a cent. Well, you get what you pay for. And if you fire and replace, you're going to have to pay for a mentor teacher again anyway. Maybe you'll hire somebody who is super-duper awesome all on their own from day one. But probably not.
Not everybody will be salvageable, and we will have to let those go. But for the rest-- isn't this just another version of our mission to educate and help young people become their best, most capable selves?
There are a handful of people who will be excellent teachers from day one (in thirty-five years, I've met exactly one), and a handful of people who will somehow get a job even though they will never get good at doing it (again, exactly one in thirty-five years). Most will fall somewhere in the middle and will either rise up or drop down depending on the random factors that fall across their path-- the particular teachers they fall in with, the classes they draw, the help they do or don't get in their first years teaching.
We don't have to leave the careers of those people in the middle up to chance. With support and mentoring and gentle pushing, we can make decent career teachers out of them, and isn't that a hell of a lot more use to the world than one more unemployed supposedly not-very-good teacher?
The Heart of the Problem
I'm going to spend the least amount of time on the hugest part of the problem, which is identifying the Bad Teachers. I've actually laid out my teacher evaluation plan elsewhere; if you want to start me off on a consulting career, give me a call. In the meantime, I'm going to talk about some of the reasons that it's hard to do useful evaluations, because wrestling with those difficulties helps us figure out what we need to do about our Problem Educators.
What Do You Want Them To Do
Here's what teaching feels like some days. You show up on a work site, and then a supervisor hands you a hammer and points you at a pile of lumber. "Build something," he says. "I'll be back in a few weeks to tell you how you're doing."
One of the more subtle things that reformsters have quietly done is to simplify education. Common Core redefines education as simple vocational training, and various VAMs redefining teaching as test prep. If we thought a teacher's job was just to get kids to get a good score on the Big Test, it would be easy to measure job performance. But that would be a stupid definition of a teacher's job, and so student test scores are a stupid measure of teach effectiveness.
Before you can judge teachers, you have to decide what you want them to do. That turns out to be rally complicated and difficult and wildly varied from parent to taxpayer to administrators to bureaucrats. It even varies within families-- what I want you to accomplish with my oldest child may be way different from what I want you to accomplish with my youngest.
Because this is so hugely difficult, we mostly just don't do it. We collective wave our hands in the general directions of students and say, "I don't know. Go do teachy things." If you want to evaluate people on job performance, you have to decide what job you want them to perform.
Teachers Are Humans
My point is NOT that humans are frail and flawed. My point is that humans are dynamic, growing, changing persons. You cannot take a snapshot of a person at one moment and say, "Well, that's who they are all the time forever."
I mean-- that's the whole premise of schools. If we handled students with the same Find and Fire method reformsters like for teachers, we would sit down in October and say, "Well, Chris and Pat don't appear to know very much, so let's just fire them." That would be crazy! (Well, unless you're a charter school. Then it would be standard policy.)
No, we say that if Chris and Pat are problematic, we will find ways to teach them.
People change. If you have taught for more than a decade, you have probably worked with some or all of the following teachers:
-- The teacher who was great for most of a career, except for a couple of years when they hit a rough patch and took a while to bounce back
-- The teacher who was pretty mediocre at first, but eventually caught on and became quite good
-- The teacher who started out pretty strong, but just kind of lost interest after a few years
-- The teacher who stayed a few years too long
-- The teacher who was awful from day one and couldn't be helped
-- The teacher who was awful from day one, but really wanted to get good, and so did
The smaller your sample (a single 30-minute observation, a 10-minute video clip), the less true your evaluation. Teacher performance varies over time. Teachers can get better or worse. Teachers are humans. Humans change.
Teaching Is About Relationships
Teaching is about the relationship between the teacher and the student. Not every relationship will be the same, and some of them will not be good.
At various times in my career, I have been exactly the right teacher at the right time for particular students. At other times, I have been exactly wrong for a particular student. Don't get me wrong-- I can teach anybody up to a certain point. I'm a professional, and that's my job. But I have no doubt that there are students out in the world telling their "Worst Teacher I Ever Had" stories about me.
So. What Do We Do?
We don't give up on finding and addressing weak areas. I said finding bad teaching is hard. I didn't say it was impossible. So let's pretend we did it, and discovered a pocket of bad teaching in Room 147. Now what?
First, we try to fix it.
I know reformsters want to just fire folks left and right. That's wasteful, and just means we'll have to start from scratch with a new trainee anyway. Let's see if we can salvage the investment of time and money we've already made in this teacher. After all-- some bad teaching is done by good teachers.
Coaching. Support. Team teaching. An experienced teacher works with Room 147 every single day. We know how to do all this, and we even know that it works. We just don't like it because it costs money, and districts are really fond of teacher remediation programs that don't cost a cent. Well, you get what you pay for. And if you fire and replace, you're going to have to pay for a mentor teacher again anyway. Maybe you'll hire somebody who is super-duper awesome all on their own from day one. But probably not.
Not everybody will be salvageable, and we will have to let those go. But for the rest-- isn't this just another version of our mission to educate and help young people become their best, most capable selves?
There are a handful of people who will be excellent teachers from day one (in thirty-five years, I've met exactly one), and a handful of people who will somehow get a job even though they will never get good at doing it (again, exactly one in thirty-five years). Most will fall somewhere in the middle and will either rise up or drop down depending on the random factors that fall across their path-- the particular teachers they fall in with, the classes they draw, the help they do or don't get in their first years teaching.
We don't have to leave the careers of those people in the middle up to chance. With support and mentoring and gentle pushing, we can make decent career teachers out of them, and isn't that a hell of a lot more use to the world than one more unemployed supposedly not-very-good teacher?
Firing the Right People
One theory of education that reformsters like to put forward is the idea that if we fire the right people, schools will get better.
We hear this refrain every time reformsters go after tenure and FILO (as they are currently doing in Pennsylvania) with the usual anecdotal evidence that [insert school district here] had to lay off [insert number here] fantastic young teachers because of that stupid FILO. First In, Last Out is bad, we are told, because it leads to firing the wrong people.
We should be firing the right people, the worst teachers. And you know, that might have some merit if we could reasonably identify the worst teachers. But that's a big If, a huge If, an If into which you could drop the Grand Canyon, the Rock of Gibraltar and my brother's 1953 Buick (which is, trust me, a huge vehicle) and that If would still have room to swing a herd of cats while running a marathon.
Reformsters are sure they've got a great secret sauce which combines diverse metrics from "How much money will you pay the College Board this year?" to VAM. It is hard to believe that we are seriously still talking about VAM despite the fact that it has been discredited by virtually everybody who understands how it works (or doesn't).
Bottom line: the reformster measures of teacher effectiveness suck. I will see your "young teachers who were laid off" and raise you "experienced great award-winning teachers who were given poor evaluations."
Over at EdWeek, Rick Hess (one of my favorite writers that I often disagree with) has been conducting a long-running and often fascinating conversation with John Thompson, and in the latest installment Thompson made the observation, "It's not hard to identify bad teaching. Hold educators accountable for what they do or don't do. Fire bad teachers for their behavior and we'll rid schools of 'ineffective' teachers."
I don't know if that's entirely true. Part of the challenge of teaching is that it involves two people (teacher, student) and so different combinations yield different results. I have been a very good teacher for some students, but I'm pretty sure I've been a terrible teacher for some others.
Nor do any of these evaluation approaches seriously look at the systemic issues; administration and building culture have the power to make an average teacher rise to greatness or sink to suckiness. And one of the problems with the reformy nonsense sweeping the nation and various states is that it creates a rules-bound climate in which teachers can't do a great job. The rising tide of resignations is essentially a whole batch of teachers saying, "In this climate, under these rules, I will be a lousy teacher, so I am firing myself."
Test-driven high stakes accountability, the kind of thing that results in eight-year-olds needing high-pressure test prep to avoid failing third grade-- this doesn't just allow bad teaching. It requires it. It demands it.
Not only that, but the current climate of education, the current status quo of test-driven cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all pseudo-teaching combined with other reformster nonsense is drying up the talent pool. In the midst of a teacher shortage, how will you replace all those supposedly bad teachers that you fired?
The private sector figured out that you can't fire your way to excellence years ago. Reformsters have decided that they will not only embrace management-by-firing, but they will create an educational system where teaching excellence is neither fostered nor recognized (and I don't mean "recognized" as in "given a testimonial" but that they literally do not know it when they see it).
Coaches do not create winning teams by humiliating and cutting the worst players. They foster excellence, they help the best get better and the mediocre get good, and they create an atmosphere where excellence is valued. They certainly do not create an atmosphere where all players must worry about being punished for some random factors beyond their control.
The people we most need to get rid of are not in classrooms-- they're in boardrooms and superintendent offices and state ed department suites and the US DOE. We need to fire the people who are intent on breaking down the American public education system by destroying the profession that makes it work (and I don't mean professional politicians). We do need to fire the right people.
We hear this refrain every time reformsters go after tenure and FILO (as they are currently doing in Pennsylvania) with the usual anecdotal evidence that [insert school district here] had to lay off [insert number here] fantastic young teachers because of that stupid FILO. First In, Last Out is bad, we are told, because it leads to firing the wrong people.
We should be firing the right people, the worst teachers. And you know, that might have some merit if we could reasonably identify the worst teachers. But that's a big If, a huge If, an If into which you could drop the Grand Canyon, the Rock of Gibraltar and my brother's 1953 Buick (which is, trust me, a huge vehicle) and that If would still have room to swing a herd of cats while running a marathon.
Reformsters are sure they've got a great secret sauce which combines diverse metrics from "How much money will you pay the College Board this year?" to VAM. It is hard to believe that we are seriously still talking about VAM despite the fact that it has been discredited by virtually everybody who understands how it works (or doesn't).
Bottom line: the reformster measures of teacher effectiveness suck. I will see your "young teachers who were laid off" and raise you "experienced great award-winning teachers who were given poor evaluations."
Over at EdWeek, Rick Hess (one of my favorite writers that I often disagree with) has been conducting a long-running and often fascinating conversation with John Thompson, and in the latest installment Thompson made the observation, "It's not hard to identify bad teaching. Hold educators accountable for what they do or don't do. Fire bad teachers for their behavior and we'll rid schools of 'ineffective' teachers."
I don't know if that's entirely true. Part of the challenge of teaching is that it involves two people (teacher, student) and so different combinations yield different results. I have been a very good teacher for some students, but I'm pretty sure I've been a terrible teacher for some others.
Nor do any of these evaluation approaches seriously look at the systemic issues; administration and building culture have the power to make an average teacher rise to greatness or sink to suckiness. And one of the problems with the reformy nonsense sweeping the nation and various states is that it creates a rules-bound climate in which teachers can't do a great job. The rising tide of resignations is essentially a whole batch of teachers saying, "In this climate, under these rules, I will be a lousy teacher, so I am firing myself."
Test-driven high stakes accountability, the kind of thing that results in eight-year-olds needing high-pressure test prep to avoid failing third grade-- this doesn't just allow bad teaching. It requires it. It demands it.
Not only that, but the current climate of education, the current status quo of test-driven cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all pseudo-teaching combined with other reformster nonsense is drying up the talent pool. In the midst of a teacher shortage, how will you replace all those supposedly bad teachers that you fired?
The private sector figured out that you can't fire your way to excellence years ago. Reformsters have decided that they will not only embrace management-by-firing, but they will create an educational system where teaching excellence is neither fostered nor recognized (and I don't mean "recognized" as in "given a testimonial" but that they literally do not know it when they see it).
Coaches do not create winning teams by humiliating and cutting the worst players. They foster excellence, they help the best get better and the mediocre get good, and they create an atmosphere where excellence is valued. They certainly do not create an atmosphere where all players must worry about being punished for some random factors beyond their control.
The people we most need to get rid of are not in classrooms-- they're in boardrooms and superintendent offices and state ed department suites and the US DOE. We need to fire the people who are intent on breaking down the American public education system by destroying the profession that makes it work (and I don't mean professional politicians). We do need to fire the right people.
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