Having put both my sons through school as well as subbing as a second job, I have seen a lot of bad teachers that only have a job because of seniority–and they are bad because they know that they cannot be fired (easily)! Why should we work hard when there is no threat hanging over our heads of being fired. Some people need a fire under them to keep them working hard. It’s the teachers that work hard regardless that we need more of–unfortunately, those types of people are leaving the teaching profession because they are tired of working next to someone who just doesn’t care! We need to return to the days when we were rewarded for being a good worker and let go when we stopped performing to an acceptable level. Maybe then, the hard workers would return to teaching because ALL teachers are hard workers! Our children deserve for us to try something different!

So instead of asking why we are laying off so many teachers (remember, I got a pink slip with NINE years of seniority, that’s mighty deep to be going into your teaching pool), and if there are some better choices to be made, we start pitting low seniority teachers against higher seniority teachers. It’s always the eager young teacher vs. the burnt-out veteran, which gives great optics, but has little in common with reality. I’m 45 and got a layoff notice (since taken back), I’m not some kid. Frankly, I’ve seen lousy teaching (imho) up and down the seniority ladder. What I haven’t seen is someone calling b.s. on this false dichotomy. Here are some better choices:

1. Administrators need to “man up” and do their job to move out dead wood, and I don’t mean teachers who refuse to use technology later than a transparency projector, but teachers who are not doing their job. They have the tools as most of the contracts in the state have PAR (Peer Assistance Review) programs. They need to observe and write it up, which many prefer to avoid by “passing” teachers off to another site.

2. We need to pay for education and quit engaging in magical thinking. We guarantee a % of state spending for education (http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/prop_98_primer/prop_98_primer_020805.htm), but we’re still pushing being 47th in per pupil spending and heading downward (http://www.sacbee.com/2010/05/23/2768808/peter-schrag-lawsuit-is-risky.html).

Louise, your professional life sucks, I’m not going to put whipped cream and cherry on it. I know your pain at least second hand. I’m not gonna go into details, cause this is the Internet, but I’ve seen something similar happen (bad teacher with seniority stays, while good teachers without are pink slipped), but I’m pretty clear about where the blame lay, with the admin who didn’t have the huevos to make a case of firing the SOB.

Kevin
Math in the News

Tim: I hear a lot of anger roiling under a lot of my colleagues’ 2.0-themed writing and blogging. There’s this undercurrent that people who use less technology just need to go, and now. […] There’s always this crisis— in other people’s schools; it’s a habit of speech in these 2.0 conversations that I’m pretty sure is being received as encouragement by the people who would privatize all of public education as a matter of policy.

On a very rare occasion, I’ll see a teacher demonstrating some tech-enriched activity with actual children, and I’ll think, “Neat. Unique. Must imitate that.” But much more often I just hear hectoring and crisis-talk and generalized calls for the reform of some horrible system that doesn’t bear any resemblance to the schools I know.

There are serious issues to resolve in teacher quality. There is also a certain pedagogy you’d like to see in K12 schools. There is certainly overlap between the two, but perhaps you overestimate it. Certainly, my opinion is that the overlap isn’t large enough to deserve the tone of your post I’ve quoted here.

I thought I got into this to teach. I love to teach. I love to write curriculum. I’m a planning geek. I love to open the world to my students, who inhabit a four block radius, hiding out for a very real fear of being shot. I love to help them learn to think deeply and question everything, to worship math because it is magical, to know how to write in order to get ahead in this world and make themselves understood, to read constantly and widely, to see the science of life, to know what has come before and what is going on now, to know all that is available technologically and discern what is useful and what is not and then take advantage of it, to know and appreciate the beauty and soul of all that and music, art, movement…etc.

I do all that, but with the constant distraction of all of the above – and now, looking for another job for no reason other than that people who DON’T want to teach can be guaranteed a job. And as I sit and write this in my classroom, the ubiquitous sirens wail outside in a neighborhood my students will never get out of without the strongest teachers America has to offer. It is desperately sad to me.

I am unsatisfied with my current evaluation system. I was evaluated this year and don’t think I learned or grew as much as I would like.

Among my summer plans is to outline my own evaluation system and convince some of my colleagues next year to try it out and to help me improve.

How would you want to be evaluated? It would have to be robust so that most educators could give you meaningful feedback. It would have to combine craft with larger ideas. It can’t take too much time on the part of the evaluator, but more of my time. What about student feedback? Testing?

I’m guessing you’ve never worked in a system like ours, where dedicated teachers kill themselves every day to educate their students.

You guess wrong.

But, I’ll back off. I’m not in your exact system, so you could be right, maybe your union has gone too far and broken things.

I’m surrounded by teachers who are tired, cynical, and vocally would probably claim to be just “doing nothing until they can retire”. What they’re really doing is the same thing they’ve done for decades – not really nothing, just nothing new or innovative. While I wouldn’t teach that way, it doesn’t mean they’re being an instructional vacuum. It just means they’re bored, they’re recycling the same curriculum and assessments over and over, and they don’t feel it’s worth trying to break out of that boredom this late in the game.

I’m also in a political climate where our Ministry of Education is run by an incredibly economically-conservative government who masquerades as “liberal” while undermining public education under the guise of “accountability”. They hand data over to free-market freaks who take our precious quantifications of student learning and manipulate them into scores that sing the praises of wealthy private schools while mocking the schools who are doing the hard work in tough places.

If accountability measures are actually something that could be kept under control, and do more good than harm, in your neck of the world, great. Where I’m at, all I can see is the damage being done.