It seems like something happens every six months or so that compels me to write about how teachers are being treated by the general public. This week, it’s the strike in Chicago.
To hear the media (even the supposed “liberal” media) tell it, teachers have walked out for no good reason and they don’t care about the kids and they are just greedy and lazy and we all wish they would go to hell except then who would teach the chillun’?
So let’s look at what the teachers actually want:
1. They don’t want their evaluations tied to student test scores. Why? Because socioeconomic status varies widely from class to class and school to school and this is the thing most closely linked with student performance. Teachers, rather obviously, have no control over this and thus, not nearly as much control over test scores as everyone wants to believe.
2. If a school closes down, they want experienced teachers at that school to be at the top of the list for schools that are hiring. Schools often want to hire new teachers because they are cheap. They are also not as good as experienced teachers. Now who doesn’t care about the kids?
3. They want basic supplies like books and, yes, toilet paper. Assholes.
4. They want to paid more if they are going to be made to work a longer day.
5. They want a raise that isn’t immediately offset by increased healthcare costs.
I don’t know how or why teachers and teachers unions have become so demonized in the US. Go around the world and look at the countries doing better than us. They are almost all unionized. Look around the country. States without teachers unions do worse on average than states with teachers unions. These are facts. It doesn’t matter whether you like them or not. They show, pretty clearly, that unions are not the problem.
The problem is that we don’t take care of the poor in our country.
The problem is that schools in rich neighborhoods get more funding than those in poor neighborhoods.
The problem is that many, many rich people send their kids to private schools. Those kids are important resources because they come with support networks and expectations that kids from the lower classes often don’t have.
The problem is that our country is so focused on test scores we haven’t noticed that test scores don’t correlate with success in life.
I’m tired of it. You want to fix the schools? Tell me how anything ever got fixed by fighting against the people doing the work instead of working with them.
You want to call me lazy? Kiss my ass.
Right now, on average, I’m after school three or four days a week. I run a writing program that I started. Twice this year, I will be teaching what amounts to two classes in one period because I have a handful of advanced students who want to learn more about writing, but I don’t have a class to put them in.
And you know what? All the crap? All the ridiculous accountability that the federal and state governments push? It makes my job harder because I have to spend time on pointless paperwork and other silliness when I could be teaching.
Teaching is my job and I love my job, but I think all the time about getting out. It’s not the students. It’s not the challenges. It’s the way I’m demonized daily no matter how hard I work. Hell, if the right person saw it, they’d probably gripe about this post and wonder why I wasn’t “doing my job” instead of writing this.
I’m a person, that’s why. I get to have interests outside my job. I write. That’s what I do. I’m doing it right now. In a minute, I’m going to go heavily annotate 50 pages of The Sun Also Rises so I can be ready to discuss it with my class on Friday. Early next week, I’ll be spending my “free” time reading 60 or so short stories from my writing classes.
You don’t think I’m doing a good job? You don’t think I deserve what I make? You do my job and tell me I don’t deserve it. I’m tired of being treated like part of the problem when I spend everyday trying to find the solution. You want to gripe about the teachers in Chicago? You can go to hell.
I am a reader of Cate’s blog, who started reading Elephants for Bookends, who liked your posts there too, and who started reading your blog.
I wanted to give my two cents on one particular issue in your eloquent rant (although I agree with most of it!) because I am a member of the public policy community who is interested in evaluating teacher performance. My job is not to dump on teachers; the most important thing to me is students, and I believe we have to understand their teachers to understand how to help them. To be clear, I am not the enemy. I have the utmost respect for the job that teachers do, and I feel like a lot of my life’s work is to help come up with solutions that make teachers’ efforts even more effective.
I think it is really important to understand that value-added modeling (the fancy term for “teachers getting evaluated for their students’ test scores”), when done well — although I freely admit that many school districts do not have the resources to do it well and that we should be concerned about that — addresses many of the issues that you object to. You mention that SES varies in different classes and schools and that teachers have no control over their students’s background. I absolutely agree. If your school, or any school that you know of, is making high stakes decisions about their teachers just by looking at the test scores of the students in that teacher’s class stripped of any other context, they are doing it wrong, and I can send you about 100 academic, peer-reviewed articles explaining why that is bullshit.
I want to believe, however, that the hard work we are doing in academia and the public policy community to support teachers’ goals is having some effect, and that decision makers at many levels (though not all) understand that it is really important to make apples-to-apples comparisons. The most basic way to do this is to compare the changes that students make from year to year — in other words, if a student was struggling the prior year, scoring in the 10th percentile, if they are in your class this year and they score in the 12th percentile, that is considered a success and not a failure. Comparing the students against themselves means that their SES is taken into account, and you’re not comparing them to the private school kid with engaged parents and no problems at home. There is a lot of technical sophistication that can be added here, and as they say, the devil is in the details, but I think this makes my essential point.
Just as you do not want policymakers or the public to demonize teachers without a clear understanding of their day to day job and the challenges they face, I do not think the community of people trying to approach educational reform this way are categorically bad. I know scores of people personally who are fighting really hard for the same things you are, you just don’t see us, because we’re geeks sitting behind our computers fussing over minutiae that really matters in the end, but isn’t “sexy” and therefore doesn’t get airtime.
I think a huge problem is that key decision-makers do not always take the time to understand this readily-available information about how to use test scores. I also think my community is not great at marketing ourselves, and we do not always communicate clearly with those outside of research. Unfortunately, though understandably, it has gotten to a point where someone says “test scores” and many folks say “OMG WHY ARE YOU USING THOSE? WHYWHYWHY?” I say hey, you say ha. Hey, ha, hey, ha. I am in agreement with you that standardized tests are not everything we would want to know. I would like to see us keep doing more. However, I feel strongly that the answer is not to stop trying our hardest to get purchase on what works in education, and on limited research budgets, that means we need to understand some rough proxy of what kids are learning.
If I were king, I would not tie high-stakes decisions about teachers’ careers directly to test performance, but I *would* keep testing students (by telling them to try their best because it is information that will help us but that they/their school will not be punished if they struggle, and by just having them take the test on test day and not teach to the test), because I think to not take data simply because there are aspects of it that we are having difficulty getting right would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Overall, the one good thing I can say about NCLB-style policy is that there is an increased effort to making decisions based on science and available data. This is not always done perfectly, but the wind is blowing in that direction, and that is what we want to see.
Anyway, I hope this long rant-y comment gives you something to think about, and I hope my essential message came across — that I care about the same things that you do, but that my skill set is somewhat different and I bring a different perspective to the table.
Most of all, I hope that you keep fighting the good fight, because you sound like an awesome teacher. I will keep working to get the technical details right to help you in your job. I am so sorry that so many people crap on teachers without understanding what a difficult, important task you all have.
Thanks for the lengthy reply. I agree with most of what you say, but a lot of districts don’t use scores the way you write about.
I would also point out that there is good evidence that standardized tests don’t really do much, if any good, if you already have an equitable educational system. I’d recommend the book Finnish Lessons by Pasi Salhberg for some discussion of what excellent, non-tested schools look like.
When I was in school we did exactly what you suggest. There was a test once a year. It didn’t count for anything for anyone. It was no big deal. I wish we could go back to that.
Wow. So much to say about this.
Jason, we both know you’re a good teacher. It’s obvious you care about your students and your subject matter. You’re intelligent and hard working. I just described about 25% of all teachers. Quite possibly less.
I know exactly what is wrong with education. I can show anyone who cares to look and listen.
My next door neighbor, a fellow English “teacher” has shown four complete movies and six TV shows to her classes this year. We are in week five. I have heard this both from the kids and through my wall. Not a day goes by when we don’t hear a video playing next door. She does this because she cannot handle the students in the class and her way of fixing that problem is to show them movies so they don’t misbehave.
I would venture to guess my principal has no idea this is going on. Why? Because every teacher in the building knows well ahead of time exactly when he’ll be dropping by for an evaluation. This is what I call “Starting Up the Dog and Pony Show.”
I’ve struggled with mentioning this to him. I have done so in the past at another school and the principal wrote on my evaluation that I was not a good “colleague” to teachers who had issues with discipline and, well, teaching. No, I’m not, and I never will be. Struggling is one thing. Willfully failing to do your job is quite another.
I work in a school with approximately 25 teachers. I would not be incorrect in saying at least half of them have no business being teachers. They either don’t like kids, don’t know anything about their subject area, or are within a few years of retirement and are coasting through each day while letting their classes look like a slightly tamer version of Mardi Gras. The kids trust me and they talk to me about what goes on in their classes. I am shocked and offended almost daily. I also feel terrible for my students because they WANT to learn and they aren’t able to.
Just today one of those teachers wanted five of my AP students (who are on the student council) to go out to the baseball field to pick up poles and put them in a barn at the beginning of first period. I told him (and them) that there was absolutely no way I was going to let that happen. They needed to be in class to discuss the rubric for a paper they are writing. The kids understood, the teacher was pissed, and when I mentioned it to my principal he looked at me like he couldn’t figure out why I would feel that way before quickly walking away.
There HAS to be a way to get rid of these people. I think a lot of these silly environmental and procedural changes are attempts to break down the impenetrable wall of bad teaching. Instead of firing everyone who can’t teach, schools (like mine) decide having study halls would fix the problem. Or block scheduling. Or 90-minute daily “Team Meetings”. Or basing evaluations, in part, on standardized test scores. I’ve seen all of these come and go in my tenure as a teacher. Not one of them worked and, in fact, did more harm than good.
Every teacher should have a video camera in the classroom. An evaluator should be able to turn on that camera and see exactly what is going on in that classroom at any time. The problem here is finding decent evaluators. My principal is scared to death to give teachers bad reviews, let alone fire the ones who can’t teach. Even with this system in place he wouldn’t man up and do the job. It has to be someone unbiased, intelligent, and organized. Maybe we can outsource that to Norway, Finland, or any one of the other countries whose educational system makes ours look like the laughingstock it really, truly is.
Back to grading Gatsby essays. My two cents.
I was hoping I’d hear your thoughts on this.
Obviously, I have not been in every school in the country, but my experience has been pretty different from yours. In general, the teachers I’ve encountered have been overwhelmingly competent and often excellent. This even goes back to my time as a high school student.
Have I seen some terrible teaching? Yup. But it’s been the exception as far as I can see.
You’re right the administration plays a big role in things. If they are doing a good job checking up on teachers, the things you describe don’t tend to be problems. Where I teach, for instance, we aren’t even allowed to show videos without permission from an administrator. I tend to request permission about once a year.
I don’t know any good teacher who would have a problem firing the teachers you described.
I will say, I wouldn’t be thrilled with a camera in my room. I tend to perform not nearly as well when I know I’m being watched. A lot of time in my writing classes, kids are just writing. Much of the instruction in that class comes later, when I conference with them about what they’ve written. On camera, I’d probably look like a fairly disengaged teacher in those classes. I’m not. And my students know I’m not. But an outside observer might not see it.
It is interesting how different our experiences have been. I will say that I am very grateful to our union. Do I agree with everything they do? No, but my life would be much more difficult without them.
You’re right about the various fixes. They never work. It’s just nonsense coming, indirectly from a politician who doesn’t know anything about how education works.
You really ought to read Finnish Lessons (Pasi Sahlberg should send me royalties). When I read it, it made very clear everything we do wrong and exactly how to fix it. It won’t happen in my lifetime, but it’s still good to know what education looks like done right.
I would really like to teach at a school with good teachers. I have no idea how awesome that would be. I really can’t imagine being in that kind of situation.
As for the camera idea, I think people would see much the same thing in my classroom depending on the day, the class, and so on. My kids do a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of writing in class. I circulate quite a bit in order to make sure the ever-present devices are put away (cell phones, etc.) and to get a visual tab on how the kids are progressing. It’s also a good way to make myself available if the students have questions about the work. I don’t think anyone would see anything wrong with the way we run the show. It’s important to have a variety of things going on from day to day and that’s what happens.
The difference in our classrooms as opposed to some others is that when it’s time for our kids to work they are working, the room is quiet, and you can almost *see* the concentration. In several other classes in my building you would think you were watching “Girls Gone Wild” or a live feed from Daytona during Spring Break.
That reminds me that last week I walked by a social studies classroom during my prep and the kids were playing beer pong. Hopefully without the beer. I’m sure it was a lesson about the War of 1812 or something. No doubt an incredibly clever hands-on lesson about military strategy.