Andrew Rotherham, referencing a Boston Globe article reporting another call for differentiated pay, this time from Massachusetts State Board President, Paul Reville:
It’s almost as though it makes sense to align compensation with system goals or something…but we know that’s crazy talk…
Pity the poor bloggers who don’t have Jason Dyer running wild in their comments. He’s holding court right now in my last post, running something like a mathematical Total Request Live.
People drop by and say, “Hey, does anyone have an engaging, concise problem to motivate (eg.) matrix row reduction?” and Jason pops back with an awesome seven-word problem involving $5,000,000 in a stolen leather satchel which covers the entire standard.
You’re like, “Cool, but can I see that in a tenth grade,” and the dude obliges.
Credit, also, to Steve Peters, my UCD roommate, now at MIT for a doctorate in robot clouds or something, for putting his big brain to use around here.
What I’m saying is that perhaps I have underestimated these internets of yours, thank you.
And I envision a curriculum that in toto amounts to not more than 50 percent of the school day, so that there would be many variations and additions depending on the state, region, and locale. I also envision a curriculum that encourages projects, intensive study, and creative teaching.
If we’re to turn this job into a profession, is consensus too much to assume here?
A Year Ago
I can count on one hand the number of educators I’ve met (in real life or around here) who believe that hard work trumps passion in this job, that the latter follows the former, that caring’s the easy part, that “passion” has become loosely defined through overuse. And even then I’d have three fingers I wouldn’t know what to do with.
Our shot at professional credibility still seems like a long one but in the week preceding my last post I read some extremely encouraging assessments of teaching’s present and future state. I bring you excerpts.
Marc Dean Millot
Marc Dean Millot puts the professionalism angle to rest with an outstanding twofer:
His model of peer review is a stunning display of good sense.
Assume a teacher is charged with the educational equivalent of malpractice after a half dozen students failed to achieve proficiency as measured by state tests. The educator’s case would be reviewed by his peers, against a standard of care established by teachers, applied to the circumstances surrounding these six students.
Like a lawyer or doctor, he would not be accountable for student failure per se. The professional question would be whether this teacher did what any teacher should have done in this situation with these students.
What a teacher “should” do will obviously be the subject of intense debate, but the question is far from unanswerable.
He ends with a glance at my bedside diary:
It seems to me that teachers should not only welcome this approach to a review of their individual performance; they should be clamoring for it.
Grant Wiggins
Over at The Faculty Room, Grant Wiggins places blame for teacher attrition on the equal compensation (financial and otherwise) enjoyed by good and bad teachers alike, as imposed by their union, which, of course, puts this all back on NCLB.
We will never attract the best and brightest in large numbers under typical school working conditions. And as long as union contracts keep up the fiction that we are equals, that we are “all” professionals, then teachers will be treated more as laborers than experts with appropriate executive control over important decisions. (Don’t you see that as long as we are all equals, there can never be 6-figure pay for the really excellent among us?) We are going to need 2 million teachers soon. Anyone who truly values creative control, collegial collaboration, and professional decision-making opportunities would properly think twice about teaching as a career — even if those of us who still think of teaching as a calling are offended.
George Parker
The president of the Washington Teachers’ Union offers a self-recriminating op-ed which goes just to the line of saying, “Our priorities have sucked.”
As president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, I have a duty to represent more than 4,000 teachers. I also have a responsibility to work with our schools chancellor to improve the learning environment for students and teachers. At times it may appear that my duties of teacher advocacy and management collaboration conflict, which is not the case. The old-school paradigm of union rigidity must give way to a new-school approach of working productively with school leaders to improve student achievement.
Sarah Weisz
Sarah Weisz worries we scare off a lot of talent by obliterating “training” at the expense of “calling” in this job.
When we think about attracting new people to the profession, people who may want very much to teach without feeling “born to teach,” I think it’s important that we make a place in the rhetoric for them, too.
Deborah Meier
To dramatically improve schools, we need to transform the profession–making it attractive to thinkers and do-ers.
Maybe We’re Better Off Without Them
I won’t ask you to alter your vision for this job to reflect mine. I won’t even put a value – positive or negative – on either vision. I will make two closing claims, though:
I left teaching a year ago and took a corporate job. The people with whom I work are talented, smart, and exceedingly professional (and still manage to be fun, interesting people in the process). The job serves the Children’s Bureau’s efforts to review and continually improve the Child Welfare Program … a noble goal.
None of my co-workers write poems about the nobility of their calling.
I’m not saying you’re a bad teacher if you write poems, but my personal experience tells me that the best teachers are far less concerned with the noble calling than with getting the job done, and done well.