Teachers, the New Piñata

A lot of "reforms" center on teacher quality as the critical factor in fixing our education system.  While I think teacher quality is important, I have argued on this blog that teacher quality and success are two different things.   Great teachers may not have the same connection and success with an entirely different class, and thus their success will vary across years.  I have also noted that I don’t think teacher quality is the largest part of why education in America is failing.  That said, it is important, and if we don’t start sending a message that teachers are respected, we risk losing the good ones we have and not being able to replace them.

The Problem

According to nearly every reformist’s model, you would think teachers are the problem with education.  If we just had better teachers, our kids would be fine.  You listen to them and hear about “the evil teacher unions” who favor bad teachers at the expense of children, you hear about the impossibility of firing bad teachers, you hear praise for programs that put 22 year olds with no real qualifications in the classroom, you see teachers being graded publicly for the results of their students’ test scores on one day and having their employment status and pay hanging in the balance.  Does this sound like a desirable job to you?  Yet so many great teachers go in day after day with low pay and decreasing job security. 

To illustrate this differently, imagine you were a foreman on the Ford assembly line.   Imagine that your right to unionize for a safe workplace and reasonable hours was being threatened.  Imagine that far cheaper kids in vocational school were starting to replace other foremen in your plant.  Imagine that your pay was determined by how well your team built cars on one arbitrary day of the year (and imagine that one team mate just got divorced and another’s dad just died and think how productive they might be).  Imagine that your boss did not want you to focus on quality or to innovate, but wanted you to focus on only a few bare-bones basics that were beneath your standards as someone with 25 years experience making quality cars.  That’s what it must feel like to be a teacher.

In summary, teachers are:

n      Unprotected:  Increasingly, teachers unions have come under attack as protecting bad teachers at the expense of student learning.  There are surely corrupt unions and bad teachers, and both are bad things.  That said, this idea that groups that protect teachers are simply unjustifiable is unwarranted.  In Texas, for example, a very powerful conservative group would sit in the back of classrooms and see if a teacher taught anything “controversial.”  Teachers do need protection from arbitrary firing.  Further, they are employed by the government, which means they can be used as a political football.  Given that the ultimate source of power is the government, a union serves to check that power.  Worse, in an era of increased firings and a new evaluation system every year that has real consequences, teachers deserve to have informed representation.  Many great teachers that I know (union affiliated) made the point that it is not in a union’s interest to keep bad teachers: it makes it harder to win gains for all teachers when you harbor a lot of bad teachers and it demoralizes really stellar teachers who may not want to be part of such a union.

n      Losing Job Stability: Because they are paid with taxpayer dollars and almost every level of government is struggling with debt, teachers are at the front-line of those job cuts.  Further, when you look at school leaders making headlines, many have fired teachers immediately upon getting a poor rating on a new evaluation system based largely on tests (Michelle Rhee fired 4% of DC’s teacher force in July 2010, Providence, RI, Mayor Tavares fires nearly 2,000 employees in February 2011, etc.).  Worse, a new trend in closing ineffective schools has teachers fearful that they may not even have a position from year to year, even if they are a great teacher in a bad school.

n      Paid or fired based on things out of their control:  The argument for using tests to judge teachers is that they teach a student, so if a student cannot perform well on a test, it must be the teacher’s fault.  That said, there are so many complications, including the weather and how a student is feeling or how well a student takes tests (not to mention whether the test contains worthwhile knowledge in the first place).  Nevertheless, that one high-stakes day can be used to determine the bulk of a teacher’s rating, their pay, and increasingly their employment status.

n      Denied creativity:  By basing scores on tests, many teachers feel like they run a test-prep program and are increasingly forced to waste time on practice tests and test-taking techniques rather than imparting knowledge or concepts.  Some districts (NYC, San Diego) suffered through the micromanagement of Anthony Alvarado who developed an exact reading curriculum that every teacher had to follow, down to having kids identify what kind of reading they were doing when they read a sentence (it had a mixed effect on scores at certain levels, and it did introduce a system of peer coaches for teachers that would have been good if they were encouraging all-around good teaching, not enforcing a model).  Many teachers have begun to question if they should remain teaching in a system that prioritizes teaching students what to think over how to think.

n      Paid poorly for a tough job: You are likely pretty highly-educated.  You have to work a full day, then go home and grade papers and plan lessons (and any good teacher will tell you that takes longer than delivering the lesson).  You may have to reach out to parents, attend school events, and supervise an extracurricular activity.  On top of that, you have to be accountable for the success of 30 students (some of whom are going through puberty) who change every year and may not be compatible learners to your style of teaching.  Then you have to be accountable to some 60 parents, and the local school board, and your principle, and the board of education.  Then you take home a whopping $40k ($45k if you have a Masters, maybe).  The majority of early childhood educators are not even clearing the poverty line.

n      Denied respect:  A special education teacher who was recently rated as “bad” in New York City (and publicly so at that) based on his special education student’s test scores not matching other students wrote a really hard hitting Op-Ed on the experience.  He notes that by virtue of teaching kids, everything he does from how he dresses to how he teaches is immediately critiqued by his students.  Worse, programs like Teach for America send the signal that any blind ape can teach.  We’re just going to throw these college grads into the worse environments after training for six weeks at a summer camp and let them figure out how to teach for two years before they go to business school.  Sending the message that you are easily replaceable and that your profession is merely a means to an end is a great way to increase people’s job satisfaction, right?  Sadly no: a recent survey of teachers found that in the last couple of years, teacher satisfaction dropped substantially (15 percentage points fewer teachers now feel very satisfied with their job) while the number of teachers that will likely leave the profession nearly doubled to 1/3 of all teachers!

n      Suffering from the pressure: As teachers are forced to pay the price for student outcomes on high-stakes tests or as they are expected to maintain high performance even as class sizes increase or budgets get slashed, it creates a high-stress environment that sets the teacher up for failure, an inability to give personal attention, and very little sleep. As the aforementioned Special-Ed teacher noted, his teaching became secondary to implementing the rather arbitrary requirements of his administrator (who controls his employment).  It isn’t an environment that supports good teaching.  It is an environment that punishes falling short of perfection.

The Implications

These are not all the problems, but even these few have some really devastating implications:

n      High turnover: As more teachers become too stressed, are fired because of a bad testing day, lose faith in the system, or are replaced by Teach for America members that largely leave after 2 years, more money is wasted finding and teaching new teachers.

n      Lost benefits of experience:  A teacher does not continue to become amazing after two to three years of teaching, but if experienced teachers feel unrecognized and leave and the new crops of teachers last (or are expected to teach) only two years, they leave right as they are getting their sea legs.  It is widely known that teachers gain the most in teaching quality in their first two or three years.  That means you have a perpetual crop of teachers stumbling to find their way that leave right as they get good and students are much less likely to benefit from a teacher who is excellent.

n      Lower-level thinking:  If your child’s teacher is teaching to a test (or as is often the case how to take a test), how much is your child learning?  Is it important that your son or daughter select the least bad summary of the topic in a poorly written essay?  That they can calculate the angles of a triangle in 45 seconds?  Some parents and many employers would like a well-rounded student that is able to work in groups, think through problems critically, and be well-rounded.  Very few of life’s problems or workplace tasks come with multiple-choice answers.

n      Exposure to fewer topics:  What is tested is what gets funded and taught, so if your child is not going to grow up to be a calculator, a dictionary or a test designer, they are severely disadvantaged by the push to have teachers teach to the test.

n      Greater inequality:  As the lowest performing students are subject to the whim of random reforms, teachers under fire, and school closures, they suffer from the problems they bring to school and a lack of stability and coherent instruction in the classroom. If they are getting a worse experience, they are more likely to perform poorly, become disengaged, and drop out.  My guess is that this is contributing to the widening inequality we see in our society.

n      Destruction of community:  When school closure based on testing or “poor teaching” is exercised, students lose the bonds they have formed with their peers, their teachers, and their community.  

Act on it!

n      Monitor your child’s homework and see what is being taught.  If you notice that the work is not very enriching and is more test-oriented, speak with the teacher.  If instructions come from higher, speak to the principal or go to a local school council meeting.

n      Don’t fixate on your child’s test scores.  If they do poorly, find out what concepts they find challenging and work with them.  If they are a bad test-taker, they may very well respond to a far different style of teaching and learning.  Worse, you are unnecessarily stressing them in a way that doesn’t encourage improvement.  Tests should extend learning, and these tests don’t.

n      Attend town hall meetings when school administrators want to close schools, punish teachers on untried evaluation systems, or fixate only on test scores.

n      Write to your member of Congress to repeal No Child Left Behind and to reign in Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan’s arbitrary use of discretionary authority to implement similar reforms.

People with the education level of many teachers can take their talents elsewhere.  If we make the profession appear so undesirable, those who might do really well and impact a whole new generation of kids will decide it is not worth it.  I already watched a friend who is amazing with kids, highly educated and organized, and a trained teacher leave the profession because it was too stressful and she was not supported.  I know scores of Teach for America alums who taught two or three years, were probably pretty great by the end, but who have now left the profession.  This doesn't fix our system, and it is unfair to our kids.

 

Speak out!

Tell me about a really great or bad teacher you had.  What made them good or bad?