From the article on NYTimes.com: “Ms. Black, at the news conference on Tuesday where she was introduced, made no pretense of having any experience in education.”
I really do understand the value of having a schools chancellor with a strong business management background. I do think, however, that anyone chosen to be schools chancellor who has no experience in education should be required, if he or she wants the job, to spend a year in the classroom first. The school system might be an organization that can be run like a business in many ways; the classroom, however, is not–if only because learning is not a business transaction–and the outgoing chancellor, Joel Klein, it seems to me, very clearly did not understand that. My wife, who teaches in one of the toughest school districts in New York City, tells me that she and her colleagues are demoralized by this appointment because they feel like, yet again, they will be led by someone who doesn’t really understand not simply the nature of education, but the actual work of being a teacher.
In higher education, at least at the community college level where I teach, this tendency to treat the process of education as a business transaction finds expression in an increasingly common metaphor that frames students in the classroom as customers and teachers as customer service representatives. The wrongheadedness of this way of thinking astounds me, not because I think I should not be accountable to both my students and the people who employ me for the quality of the work I do as a teacher, and not because I think there is anything wrong with measuring that accountability in ways that are as formal and rigorous as those used to measure a business’ success–though that does not mean I think the same methods are appropriate to both situations–but because if I have to think of my students as my customers, if I have to think of myself as a customer service representative, then, frankly, the incentive I have is to make sure they are happy and satisfied with the results they receive, which is not the same thing as making sure they have learned something.
Cross posted on The Politics in The Poetry and The Poetry in The Politics.
if I have to think of my students as my customers, if I have to think of myself as a customer service representative, then, frankly, the incentive I have is to make sure they are happy and satisfied with the results they receive, which is not the same thing as making sure they have learned something.
But at the high school level, nobody is saying that it’s all about student satisfaction; that’s a straw man. (I agree that at the CC level it’s trickier.)
The real conflicts are (1) what teachers want to make sure the students learn is not what admins and regulators want to make sure the students learn; and (2) neither of those are often what the students themselves want to learn, if they actually want to learn anything at all.
But even at the CC level I’m not sure your analogy holds. Your duty as a customer service rep would be “represent the store properly to customers, as directed by management.” Those directions may or may not include “focus on customer satisfaction above all else.”
The general process for balancing customer satisfaction and store policy should be made by management, not by a customer service rep.
A teacher is nothing like a customer-service rep. A customer-service rep provides no service independent of the sale. They are the link between the customer and the company’s product. They serve, or find, or direct, or explain the product for the customer. They don’t do or make. They don’t design or manufacture or provide anything. They only sell. That’s why they’re usually at the lowest levels of the company and why they are considered most replaceable.
Teachers are people who have a high degree of specialized professional knowledge, in their subject and in pedagogy itself. They perform a number of highly specialized tasks. They do not direct high-level policy (although they certainly inform it) but they are responsible for teaching. They use their expertise to develop lesson plans, to work with their students, and to work with their classrooms. They guide their work. They are not mindless, and even top-down models do not permit mindlessness.
Their work is the product of the educational enterprise, and it shapes its design and its uses: they are not selling on behalf of a different creator or manufacturer. They are as doctors and nurses to hospitals, or police officers to the police force, or farmers to agriculture. We have brought “client” values to all of these fields, but not in order to devalue the professions themselves. We recognize that veteran status is crucial and we recognize that professionalism is not only a business consideration. We would not argue that a surgeon of thirty years’ experience knows less about the channels of the heart than Meg Whitman, or that the ability to navigate them can exist independent of the practice.
The business model worries me for many reasons, but this analogy fails on its own terms.
As a manager in IT you will manage many people whose job you cannot do. My boss can’t do my job. So I don’t see that the Chancellor of the NY public schools needs to spend a year in the classroom. I’d also challenge the assertion that you have to have been a teacher in order to understand the nature of education. I’d like to hear more on that.
We are going through the same debate here in Chicago. The current head of the public schools is leaving. He was a CEO, not a teacher. The head of the teachers’ union is calling for the next head of the schools to be an “educator” rather than a business person. She’s also started out demanding 4%/year raise for each year of their next contract, so I don’t have a lot of sympathy for anything she asks for. It’s also clear that the Chicago schools have improved scores more under a CEO leader than under anyone who’s been a teacher or principal, so I don’t see the advantage that she thinks would exist actually empirically exists.
RonF:
But a manager in IT who does not have a basic understanding of the jobs done by the people he or she manages is liable not to be a very good manager. One year in a classroom is not going to turn someone into a teacher, but it will give someone a pretty good sense of the specific kinds of challenges that teachers in public schools face on a daily basis and also of just how much work goes into establishing a functioning and functional classroom; and if a year is too long a time, let it be six months. My point is that to have as the head of a public school system someone who has no first hand experience of what happens in a classroom is like putting in charge of an IT department someone who does not really understand the relationship between computers and the people who use them. (I am not sure if that analogy is as precise as it could be, but it gets at the general idea of what I am talking about.)
Regarding “the nature of education:” My wording was a little imprecise, but what I meant, essentially, is this: someone who is not a teacher or who has never observed teachers at work, will have little to no understanding of what the process of educating someone entails from the perspective of the person doing the educating and that understanding, it seems to me, is crucially important for a chancellor to have.
I agree with Richard. A teacher usually needs a year to get his or her feet firmly planted; why would an administrator be better at understanding the kind and amount of work involved? I also don’t see this as a false dichotomy–just as legislators can be educated in the practice of law and the process of policymaking, administrators can be experienced in management and in teaching.
Why not insist that administrators spend a certain amount of time as student teachers or classroom assistants, Ron? The school system could certainly use the extra hours, and the requirement doesn’t seem any more burdensome than the continuing-education credits teachers themselves must accumulate over the course of their careers.
I am fairly certain that Ms. Black has seen the inside of a classroom. One difference between education and other forms of knowledge work is that pretty much every single American has had between twelve and twenty-four years in the classroom. Ms. Black has a BA in English literature, so she spent about sixteen years in school. That is not the same thing as having been a teacher for many years, but it is a little rich to suggest that this person is completely oblivious to the educational experience. There is practically nobody in America for whom that is true.
The other consideration is that for many career fields, my inclination to agree with Richard is pretty strong. IT managers need to have some IT knowledge. Healthcare managers really should know what the inside of a doctor’s office looks like. And so on.
But most IT managers aren’t working in an IT industry that’s falling apart. Demanding credentialed professional educators run the system is a demand that the same technic-professional group whose theories and ideas have been an unmitigated disaster for the last 50 years, maintain their grip on the system they have fouled up.
At the classroom level, teachers need more power and control. At the governance and administration level, it may be that what is needed is the exact opposite.
Robert:
This is true. I should have written in my last comment something like:
There is a difference between having had experience of education, which you rightly point out is true of almost every adult in the United States, and having experience in education.
I did not suggest that a schools chancellor needs to be a professional, credentialed educator. I agree that, at that level of administration, having someone who understands how to run a business, who has had experience running a business, a very large business, if we’re talking about the NYC public schools, makes an awful lot of sense. I am consistently astounded at how little business sense many of my colleagues have and so they have no awareness at all of what it takes actually to run the school that pays us a salary to educate the students in our classrooms. The problem with having someone in that position whose perspective does not include a really good understanding of classroom teaching is that he or she is likely to put in place policies, procedures and assessment mechanisms that undermine, contradict, conflict with the kind of power and control that teachers need. There is an argument to made that Black’s predecessor did just that.
Richard – sorry, didn’t mean to say that you wanted that. You seem to have a pretty balanced view. I suspect that a lot of people on your side do want that, however.
It’s true of parenting. By the time they have children, most people have spent decades being parented, if not by their mother or father than by other adult guardians. They spend most of those years living in the same home with their parents or guardians, and experiencing parenting on a daily basis.
I don’t think any American is completely oblivious to the basic dynamics of pedagogy, but there’s a world of difference between seeing it, receiving it, and doing it.
I don’t think any American is completely oblivious to the basic dynamics of pedagogy, but there’s a world of difference between seeing it, receiving it, and doing it.
This. Also, teaching is a relationship. The nature of teaching isn’t just to push knowledge at people and hope some of it sinks in; it’s to build that relationship that allows the teacher to understand the ways in which his or her students learn—both collectively and individually. It’s to build trust in the student, and in the parents (at the elementary and secondary levels). It’s enforcing a discipline in the classroom that allows for learning. It’s the use of different teaching methods and interdisciplinary studies. It’s speaking, doing, but also listening. It’s a much more intimate (and mutual) relationship than that of the sales clerk and customer (which is usually no relationship at all).
This is ridiculous nonsense. I was going to say more, but that is all this really deserves.
Applying customer-service-oriented business thinking is not appropriate for teaching. The students are not the customers. The parents are not the customers. The community is the customer – the community needs children that will be educated to be contributing, positive members of society.
Business-thinking about efficiency and process analysis would work well if I didn’t have the creeping suspicion that this whole field is just as much unfounded speculation and poor science as the education field.
Teachers are more knowledgeable and educated than ever, but the process of teaching itself seems to have barely evolved in the past century. Every new development in rubrics, assessment, evaluation, etc. seems to hit fashion, get experimented with for a few years, and then quietly forgotten as teachers go back to the same old ad-hoc mix of socratic methods, tests, and assigned homework for repetition.
It actually feels vaguely similar to the problems we have in software – we get many fads in development such as test-driven development, lifecycles, etc. but all the heming and hawing about process seems to fall apart – businesses face tight deadlines and fall into “hack it out” patterns and start-ups often turn to be far more successful solving old problems with “hack it out” approaches. We experiment, but there are just so many variables that nobody seems to be able to say what works and what doesn’t when it comes to improving the way *people* work and not *stuff*.
Same thing happens in management theory – fads and fashions but in the end it comes down to just flying by the seats of their pants.
Most teachers are hard pressed to explain what skills and knowledge they learned in teacher’s college… a few clusters of jargon and a handful of interesting and completely contradictory theories that vaguely remind me of the Aristotelian model of the universe, but very little in the way of “we’ve proved X and this is how to use it and it works”.
This is a matter of classism and cronyism. Teachers tend to come from a different social class than Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Black. In effect, Mr. Bloomberg said “I don’t care what kind of experience and/or talent your kind have in your ranks, you people who’ve spent your lives focused on education. NOT ONE of you is good enough to handle this job. No one who has had any experience with professional education – anywhere in their careers – is good enough. Rather, I’m going to pick someone from inside my gilded circle who I’ve had dinner with a few times, who attended and sent her children to private schools, and who has never shown a professional interest in education. She’ll do a much better job of cleaning up the mess you little people made.” He has not presented any arguments as to why Ms. Black is the best candidate, he just likes her. And who knows what kind of quid pro quo is going on in the background?
The NYC public schools apparently have tried this outsider-has-better-wisdom approach twice before, and other school systems have also – apparently this has been popular for 20 years or so now – and there is no evidence that these folks are any better at solving our public education system’s problems than the people with actual experience with educating. If there were a magic bullet we would have found it by now. In addition choosing outsiders to lead must create a huge amount of resentment among teachers. The national message is that we want the best and brightest to become teachers, but we choose their leadership from the corrupt elite. If I were a student considering teaching I’d say “no thanks” to that.
I have to say that I agree with the last part of what marmalade said. The hours are long, the work is difficult, and the pay is quite low, but the worst thing is the lack of respect for teachers. I’m going to go through all that so that I can be called a leech for wanting less money than a paralegal makes? For doing a job that most educated people will not consider, let alone want? I hate to feel this scornful about a profession I respect so much for itself, but it makes me ill.
Piny:
That’s not a bad idea. Can you imagine, though, being a teacher and then being told “The CEO of the public schools is going to be in your classroom once a week as a classroom assistant this semester.”
Note that even if the Chancellor (or in Chicago, the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools) has never held a position as a teacher numerous members of his or her staff are likely to have, and I presume that the CEO would be advised by and listen to their staff. Running the schools is not a one-man show.
There’s also the flip side of the issue to consider. The desires, aptitudes and skill sets necessary to become and be a good teacher are by no means the same ones needed to be the top administrator for a public school system, especially one as big as New York’s or Chicago’s. You can’t presume that there are educators out there who are fit candidates for the job.
Piny:
The starting salary for a Chicago Public School teacher with a B.A. is $48,632. That doesn’t sound “quite low” to me. Where are you working? And there are various other positions such as coaching that you can pick up more money. I’ll agree that the hours can be long and the work is hard. But that describes my job as well. You can’t call yourself a professional and then expect an easy job with 8 – 5 hours.
Upon reflection, I think the biggest cause of the “lack of respect” problem is that people see no relationship between how well a teacher does their job and how much they get paid – or even if they keep their job at all. I understand that a teacher’s job cannot be simply quantified by the grades their students get. But after watching my kids go through school there can be no doubt that there are good teachers, average teachers and lousy teachers in the school systems – and yet they all get paid the same and the system cannot get rid of the lousy teachers without going through a very expensive and convoluted process. If teachers were subject to the same process for being evaluated and keeping their jobs as the rest of us were and if the bad ones got less pay or were fired you’d see respect for teachers go up.
Where’s your evidence for this? Here in Illinois our colleges graduated 15,000 new teachers last year. There were 7,000 teaching vacancies in the state.
What would “teach for a year before you’re an admin” actually mean? Well, if you want to hire people with teaching experience, you’d have to
1) ask people who may may want to become administrators to proactively teach as a means of ensuring eligibility; or
2) hire administrators and then have them teach (if needed) before they start working; or
3) select only from the ranks of teachers.
#1 and #2 have the obvious problem that you don’t want people who are unmotivated to teach, teaching. Neither do you want unskilled people teaching. Not all CEOs are good in the field and not all managers are good teachers; we should neither encourage or require that less-skilled people enter the teaching force.
#1 has the obvious problem that the cost is disproportionately high w/r/t the reward. You can’t expect qualified people to give up their job for a year (or more, if they need education) to possibly get hired as an administrator.
#2 has the problem that you need to hire and pay someone for a year before they do what you need them to do. That’s just not realistic. It would functionally mean that we would avoid costs and stick to #3.
#3 has the problem of maintaining the status quo. Even ignoring actual teaching and only selecting for those who have taken education education (I love that phrase) is problematic. Education schools are some of the worst offenders in the “thought police” category, and are notorious for requiring a particular worldview of their students in order to provide certification. It’s pretty damn hard to make it through the screening process unless you’re aligned with the status quo. So unsurprisingly, if you’re looking for people who DON’T agree with the current system, you may often end up looking outside the system.
As for the “why teachers get less respect” thing… well, the above post sort of determines it. Almost every other industry on the planet has people who range from outstanding to poor. In almost every other industry, there are links between skill, recognition, and reward. But in the teaching industry, there are not usually any great benefits for being outstanding, and there are not usually any consequences for being poor. There is also no control: historically speaking, outside private school a student who has a bad teacher can’t complain, can’t tie the teacher’s career to teaching ability, can’t force the teacher to get more training, and generally can’t even demand to be put in a different, equivalent, class.
there are now some people who are fighting hard to at least get and publicize better ratings, though the question of what do with them is still up in the air. But teachers are fighting that, damn hard. people who have protected jobs, don’t acknowledge performance, and refuse to voluntarily engage in performance ranking measures, are difficult to respect. And it’s not as if educators are automatically the best and brightest, either: education majors are by no means the top of the heap. (that doesn’t apply to students who have advanced degrees in their own majors, who also decided to teach. Those are in the “best and brightest” category.)
Just to nitpick… Is 15,000 more than half of those who graduated from Illinois colleges last year?
RonF:
The question of why teachers are not as respected in this country as they should be may have something to do with this phenomenon, but it also has to do with the fact that we tend in the US–and I am talking here broadly culturally–to see teachers merely as deliverers of knowledge, not as professionals in a field (in the same, for example, that lawyers and doctors are professionals in a field). We do not assume, as a culture, that teachers know best what or how to teach, or even that teachers have a good understanding of how students learn or how that learning would be most productively measured–and I would like to avoid the circular argument that would begin if someone were to point out that the sorry state of our schools proves that teachers do not. The sorry state of our schools has to do with a lot more than the quality of our teachers.
And before people start talking about how, well, you know, the unions are at fault because the unions are why all teachers get paid the same and why it’s so hard to get rid of bad teachers–which is the subtext of RonF’s point–I’d just like to point out that it’s not like, pre-union, there was some golden age when teachers were paid what they were worth, when only bad teachers were fired, when there was no pressure to pass students who shouldn’t pass, etc. and so on, and so teachers were more respected than they are now. Teachers unions came into existence for a reason and it was a very good reason; there were lots and lots of serious problems with how teachers were treated.
I agree that the status quo needs to change. It is shameful, and I say this as an educator, when people who should not be teaching are allowed to stay in the classroom because either the union protects them when it shouldn’t or because administrators are unwilling to do the work required to show cause for letting them go. My son had just such a teacher in kindergarten. But suggesting that the unions and their rules are the problem is equally and shamefully irresponsible, as is glossing over the differences between teaching and other professions in trying to figure out how best to evaluate a teacher’s performance and then how to make the best use of that evaluation.
And one other thing. Regarding my assertion in the original post that whoever is schools chancellor ought to have spent some time in the classroom. I did not mean by this that someone like Cathleen Black should be forced to teach. I had in mind when I wrote that something that happened here in NY some years ago. I don’t remember the district, but the teachers’ contract was up and they were asking for a salary increase. A local journalist or talk how host–I don’t remember which–argued very loudly that the increase should be denied on the grounds that teachers don’t really work that hard anyway. And, to be fair, I don’t think he meant that in quite the stupid it way it sounds when I write it like that. He was talking about all the time teachers have off relative to other professions; he was talking about the shorter hours; and he was talking out of an ignorance of what it actually takes to be a public school teacher.
So, one of the local teachers invited him to spend some time–a week, two weeks, I don’t remember–with her in her classroom. He did, and the experience transformed him, and he said so publicly. He still did not think the teachers should get the raise they were asking for because he didn’t think the district could afford it–which is a reasonable argument on which reasonable people can disagree–but he said that he would never again suggest that a teacher’s job was not as hard as he now understood it to be. I wish I could remember more of the details, because I feel like this telling is kind of haphazard.
Anyway, though, so my point about having a chancellor spend time in the classroom was that, just as this journalist learned an awful lot that he could not have learned any other way about teaching, a chancellor who has not experience in education ought to do the same kind of learning.
Anyway, though, so my point about having a chancellor spend time in the classroom was that, just as this journalist learned an awful lot that he could not have learned any other way about teaching, a chancellor who has not experience in education ought to do the same kind of learning.
Ah. Now THAT is a point I can get behind 100%. “Spending time in the classroom” for a short period as a way of becoming familiar with the basics of what is involved in classroom teaching, makes perfect sense.
(of course, at some point there’s still going to be disconnect. You can’t view/experience/shadow everything. Even if your chancellor spends a week observing registration and teaching, and never sits in on an appeal of plagiarism charges, she’ll still be involved in the latter.)
But sure. Take some time. Better yet, take some time controlled by each side: The administration who hired them gets to choose where how they spend one of the weeks, and the teachers union gets to choose where/how they spend the other week.
If the union wants them to sit through a week of presentations on the evils of standardized testing, or if they want them to tour the worst classes; if they want them to spend a week working on an IEP, or try to have an hour in person with 40 different principals; if they want them to see registration, or plagiarism appeals… well, that’s their choice.
Are you implying that we should make that cultural assumption? Even if we disagree I don’t intend to make that argument, but I am not sure what you mean here.
I would also point out that the comparison to lawyers and doctors is not entirely apt. Doctors have a minimum of four years of postgraduate education and generally a minimum of three years of residency, which (in their case) carries a lot of education value. They are also, generally speaking selected from among the most competitive, hardest-working, and highest-GPA college students. They deserve the respect they get.
Those teachers who have equivalent training, expertise, and responsibility–professors, for the most part, or other people who have PhDs–DO get a lot of respect.
Lawyers have only three years of postgrad education. However, I’m fairly sure professors are more highly regarded than are lawyers. In fact, most people hate lawyers.
As for expertise in pedagogy: That’s comparatively rare, at least when it is combined with subject matter expertise. Many (most?) professors, who are the best experts in their subjects, have very little training, if any at all, in effective teaching skills. They’re hired for subject expertise, but “smart,” “knowledgeable,” and “good teacher” are different things. So plenty of smart educated people, including those who teach, aren’t good teachers.
And as for assessment… Oy. Assessment is damn hard and frankly most teachers don’t know how to do it. You need to know about study design, you need to know how to test, and you need to know the statistics to analyze it. And education schools don’t so a great job of teaching that, until you get to the advanced degrees and even then it’s usually only the PhDs who can really understand it in my experience. The statistics and math aren’t there, and the ability to read and understand studies isn’t there either. If you pit an B+ average non-teacher science major against a B+ average non-science education major, and you ask them to both design and evaluate the results of assessments, my money would be on the scientist.
I have had many talks with education folks about assessments, facts and their interpretation (and studies, etc) Disagreement aside–there are a lot of ways to answer some questions–from a process perspective, the only people who can really have that conversation are the PhDs and the science folks.
Let me try to put it differently…
Teachers generally need to be broad, which limits their depth. As a small example, they need to be good at:
-subject matter
-pedagogy
-class management
-assessment
-psychology
-organization
-administrative rule-following
-teaching facts
-teaching learning styles
and so on.
Having all of those skills is hard. Having all (or any!) of them at the level of even a serious amateur is even harder. Having all (or any!) of them at the level of a trained professional is even harder and is incredibly rare.
What that DOES mean: Teaching is very hard.
What that DOESN’T mean: Teachers know best about what they do.
In fact, given that most people, unlike teachers, are relatively specialized in their knowledge and professional expertise, and taking a teacher with 20 students (and 40 parents) I think it is very likely that
1) few or none of the parents could teach the class as well as the teacher, overall; AND ALSO
2) many or some of the parents will be more skilled in at least one area of teaching, than is the teacher himself.
IOW, the reason people think they know more than the teacher is, fairly often, because they DO, at least in a limited sphere.
I would trust that teachers, or people trained & experienced with teaching and admin of teaching facilities would know best how to run a school district. Not someone who runs gigantic comercial corporations.
I don’t understand why NYC could not hire someone who has success with running a large public school district somewhere else to take a step up to this post. Is it that there IS no one with experience running & improving complex school districts?
Oh, right, it’s because we don’t respect those types of people.
Gin and Whiskey:
I wish I had more time to respond in more detail to your last two comments, but here are a couple of thoughts:
1. In NY at least–I don’t know about other states–teachers (and I am talking here about K-12) are required to get a Masters degree within a certain amount of time after they start working, and then, in order to get their full license, are required to obtain at least 40 credits beyond their Masters. These 40 credits can be college courses or courses provided by the union (and the ones provided by the union are quite rigorous, based on what I have seen of my wife’s experience). Recently, the requirement was added that teachers need to do a given number of professional development courses every so many years–I forget the precise numbers, though I do remember that it is high enough that we figured out it would make sense for my wife to get a second masters. So, in terms of post-graduate education, teachers actually get quite a lot of it–though I agree that if they start out with just a BA, the comparison to doctors and lawyers who are also just starting out, in terms of education, is, as you put it, not quite apt.
2. Regarding assessment: your comment does not take into consideration the fact that teachers can learn how to do assessment for the grade level, subject matter and students they teach, that one does not need to be an expert at the level you are talking about to design and implement valid assessment strategies–though I agree that it would make sense to consult an assessment expert.
3. Regarding your point that teacher are generalists: It does not follow logically that because teachers are generalists that they “do not know best” about what they do, if by “what they do” we mean teaching. Your comments implies–or at least seems to imply–that teachers’ levels of knowledge, training, etc. remain static, that they do not develop their own expertise(s).
To me, in general, these last two comments are shot through with the kinds of deprofessionalizing assumptions that I was responding to–though I don’t think anyone said this in this thread, and I don’t think you mean this here either–when I said that we have a cultural assumption that teachers are not the experts when it comes to what goes on in the classroom, that teachers are, more or less, merely deliverers of knowledge, technicians more than professionals–if that distinction makes sense.
“What is wrong with public schools” is a big question and the answers have a lot to do with a web of systemic factors in our culture that work to put a facade on education. Unfortunately, everyone (politicians, taxpayers, etc) wants a quick fix to the symptoms instead of really digging in and addressing the sources of the rot. Having had two parents with careers dedicated to public schools, I can see a couple of root causes:
1) Education is a public service that should be administered without the meddling of politics, religion, morality, small group agendas. In other countries with very successful public education programs, the curriculum and instruction is planned and executed by a group of people whose professional and lifelong expertise IS education, relying on evidence-based methods of what works at what stage of child development. In the US, the government (all 3–federal, state, local), politicians/religious nuts/local blowhards, groups and individuals with agendas all get their fingers into the mess of deciding what will be taught in public school and how. Constantly changing decisions are based on political trends, moral panic, instructional trends and the “consultants” and business that push them, religious belief, and local ideas about what is “important”. Professional teachers are supposed to figure out how to deliver this to children in overcrowded and underfunded schools.
2) “It’s the money/resources, stupid.” Lots of lip service about the importance of education, but no one putting their money where their mouth is. Education funding is *always* on the chopping block for budget cuts. Funding for individual schools varies hugely, with a small amount of wealthy suburban districts flush and poor urban/rural schools barely able to keep the utilities on. Communities that are losing their businesses and employment and source of revenue. The death of manufacturing/mining/textiles/etc in the US and the switchover to a service economy has meant less money for schools. It doesn’t take a lot of common sense to figure out why teachers can’t be miracle workers who find some way to make up for the fact that most education is woefully underfunded. You get what you pay for…if it was really a priority, we’d fund it as a priority. But it’s not…our government funding goes elsewhere, even at the local level. Local control via school boards sounds good, but it usually doesn’t work out well for the schools.
3) Parents, peers, and environment have a much bigger impact on kids than teachers and hours at school. Children are not raw material that go into a factory and pass though a process that makes them educated, nor are they employees who can be screened/incentivized/fired. Teachers, even the best ones, can’t consistently make a silk purse out of barrel of random remnants…which is why business and manufacturing paradigms for “quality control” and “pay for performance” are ludicrous. Schools don’t get to control the raw material coming in; they don’t reject the underprepared and underparented and emotionally unstable and cognitively challenged and socially underdeveloped and poor/hungry/abused/etc students in favor of the best starting material…they have to attempt to educate EVERYONE (while still administering programs an services to help all the conditions mentioned above). Even the best teacher will simply be unable to motivate a student who does not want to be in school, does not want to learn/do the work, or is so stressed out and distracted by other things in his/her life (like being evicted, living with an addicted parent, negotiating a dangerous neighborhood, losing a parent or sibling, being chronically ill from bad housing or lack of medical care, or just family conflict, divorce, parent being laid off, etc) that homework is just not on the map. Not to mention parents who consider public school a babysitting service and do not reinforce, emphasize, continue the education at home. Teachers can’t make up during the school hours what kids are missing at home and in the community.
4) Teaching is a revered profession in many other cultures with successful public education programs. In the US, it’s considered a low status, fallback for people who couldn’t make it as investment bankers, doctors, lawyers, etc. (see also the status and pay for what are considered “care-giving” jobs, like social work and home health). Many people who are not in education think teaching is a part time job (“You don’t work all summer and just have to watch a bunch of kids all day!”) when it’s really seasonal employment (teachers are paid a 9-month salary and spread it over 12). Teachers are always blamed for the crisis in education when they are the infantry on the front lines trying their best to carry out impossible and ever-shifting orders from a committee of generals without the right tools or resources. We rely on the fact that many people in teaching are there because they really believe in it (and some are just going through the motions to pay the bills, as in any other job). The best and brightest choose other careers where they will get more pay and more respect. If we really want the best people, we need to value them enough to draw them into teaching as a viable career and make it possible to succeed. Teaching has a skyrocketing burnout rate. And if it was such a cushy “part-time job with full-time pay”, why aren’t people rushing in to get in on this boondoggle? Why are we always short on teachers?
Putting in a new administrator, incentive program for teachers, tweaking tenure, adding another hour of school per day, etc. are not going to fix the systemic and structural problems that work together to create the symptoms of an underfunctioning public school system. Until we really value education and devote the resources to it that it needs, and also find a way to either fix cultural problems like poverty, underparenting, drug/alcohol problems that affect families, lack of proper basics (food, housing, employment), racial/ethnic/socioeconomic divisions in property and residency, and get noneducation agendas out of education, the public schools and their students are going to limp along.
I’ll paraphrase Paul Farmer’s take on global health and apply it to education…It’s not that we don’t have the money to fix these problems: we do. The truth is that we choose to spend that money on other things. I’m not listening anymore when some figure shakes his head and says, “there’s just no money to fund these programs/improvements/initiatives”…that’s a bald-faced lie. There IS money, we just allocate it elsewhere.
Kaija,
Great comment! Thanks.
I want to echo Richard – Kaija, your comment was great. I am the daughter of teachers, the granddaughter of teachers, and the sister of a teacher. I teach, but at a graduate level, not in public schools, yet we struggle with analgous problems (and with businessmen being brought in to run universities who have no experience with or respect for teaching as a profession, too.)
Precisely. But you know who gets to do this? CHARTER SCHOOLS. So when people start clanging on about how much better this or that charter school did on some standardized test, it makes me sick to my stomach, because that school could reject every kid with an IEP, every kid who needed remediation, every kid with an emotional disability, and once they started their school year, any time a student threatened to drag down the school’s scores, they could just boot that kid back to the public schools.
I don’t think this is true. At least in my home state, charter schools are bound by the same laws as the other public schools, . They can’t legally reject kids with disabilities or learning disabilities, because they receive public funding. They have to be open, and they have to provide kids with disabilities with the same accomodations they would receive in other schools. So far as I can tell, that would include an IEP. I don’t think a school can just say, “We don’t have the facilities to deal with kids with disabilities, and we don’t want to build them.”
I have no idea how many of them simply break the law. Normal public schools mistreat kids with learning and other disabilities. My family’s experience with our district was what got my parents involved in a charter school. I have no idea whether that school would have accomodated me successfully, but my parents probably would have been able to keep it from trying to flunk me out of tenth grade because I meant extra work for my long-suffering teachers.
I also will cheerfully concede that a school started by a small group of parents who know each other and share the social and cultural capital needed to run a school can be closed in practice to certain kids or segments of the community. I have no idea whether Jon & Mary Q. Anti-Public bother to do the sort of community outreach that might make a charter school a haven for PWD students who have been abused by educators. I kind of doubt it.
Hey, I’ve been in a lot of doctor’s offices. I could totally run the AMA!
Jake, according to data published by the Illinois Board of Higher Education, 70,724 Bachelor’s degrees were conferred by Illinois schools in the 2008 – 2009 academic year. Running a search at this page for all Education degrees conferred gave 14446 Batchelor degrees in Education awarded during that same year. Some probably were not teaching degrees as such, but the overwhelming majority of them would be.
Richard:
This is putting words into my mouth, which I do not appreciate. If you want to know what my thinking is regarding teachers’ unions, the need for them and what role they can and should play in this then say so and engage me. But don’t presume you know, and don’t doubly presume to tell others what I think.
Kaija:
If public money is to be spent on something I cannot see how you can – or should – avoid political involvement. And that brings all the rest in. I’d like to know where these countries you refer to are.
Money is definitely a factor. But it’s not strictly linear. Washington D.C. spends a huge amount of money per capita and has one of the worst systems based on pupil outcome. Plenty of rural districts in the U.S. spend a lot less and get much better results. But it’s a strong factor, and I’ve posted here in the past pointing out the negative feedback loop that funding schools with property taxes leads to in communities hit by bad economic problems.
Bingo.
Seasonal can be part-time, or it can be full-time. Let’s look at it this way, then. A full-time blue collar job is 2080 hours a year. That’s 8 hours a day for 52 five day weeks. A professional on salary is going to put in a 50 to 60 hour week, at least, so let’s say that’s 2600 to 3120 hours a year. How many hours a year do teachers put in?
Where’s this? Here in Illinois they are a glut on the market. Kids around here that graduate with a B.A. in Education often end up working as a unpaid/low paid classroom assistant for a year hoping to catch on somewhere the next year. Now, if you’re trying to hire in a particularly undesirable area I can see where that location may be short on teachers. But I’m curious to know what area you are talking about, because we could ship you quite a few of our extras.
You can say that about any issue. There is money to fix healthcare, there is money to fix the military, there is money to fix the levees in New Orleans, there’s money to fix the roads and bridges, etc, etc. There’s damn good reasons that education doesn’t and isn’t going to get all the money it wants, just like there are damn good reasons why every other public need doesn’t get the money it wants. Everything needs money. We don’t have enough to do everything. America is a wealthy country, but we’ve been pretending we’re a lot richer than we really are by running up the credit card bill for quite some time now.
Oh, and I’ll also support the concept that the private schools are not strictly analogous to a private business. The fact that there are a number of things that cannot be transferred from private business to the public schools doesn’t mean that there are not a number of things that can be transferred, though.
Speaking of how teachers are perceived in America, this sure doesn’t help. I’ll posit that this may well be a local issue and that the evaluation criteria aren’t perfect, but ….
piny –
This page talks about protection for students with disabilities regarding charter schools; however, it notes:
This article is unfortunately truncated but it suggests that a number of charter schools in New Orleans are accused of picking and choosing to avoid students with disabilities and racial minorities.
Here’s parents with kids in a charter system talking about a rule that kids who drop below a 2.0 are pushed back to public school, and describing the struggle they had getting a charter school to hold a special education staffing and provide needed services for their children to the point that they gave up and went back to public schools.
Here’s an article that begins with a graphic showing the disparity in percentage of special ed students between the regular schools and the charters in two school systems.
A later quote from the same article:
It seems reasonable to say that, although there are laws in place that appear to require charters to refrain from discriminating against students with disabilities, these laws seem to be inconsistently followed in at least some school systems, whether through passive neglect or active manipulation of entrance criteria.
It seems reasonable to say that these laws do not cover students with behavior or conduct problems that have not been identified as bona fide disabilities and thus are not covered by federal anti-discrimination law.
It seems reasonable to say that, as long as the public schools are the catch-all and the fall-back position for any student removed from a charter for poor performance or conduct, by definition the public schools will bear the larger responsibility for low-performing and disruptive students.
RonF:
Sorry, my wording was imprecise. I was not trying to ascribe the blame-the-union position to you–since you’re right, I don’t know what your position is–but rather to point out that the fact that teachers are all being paid the same salary, etc., which is something you brought up, is the result of union contracts, which you did not mention explicitly and which others, both here on this blog and out in the world, have in fact blamed for much of the problem with the school systems in this country. Anyway, I’m sorry it made you feel like I was presuming to speak for you.
Regarding this:
This is a more complicated question than it might first appear because I am not sure the terms of your comparison–to blue collar workers and salaried professionals–are quite accurate. Teachers’ work is, to my mind, when you start to talk about hours and salary–I am leaving aside the question of benefits for the moment–much more like someone who is in business for her or himself than either of the examples you give. Here’s what I mean: there are, in a teachers contract what might be called “billable hours”–the term in my contract is “contact hours”–which refers to the number of hours a teacher is required to be on the job, which, in the case of K-12, means in the school building or doing official school business (like field trips). These are the hours on which a teacher’s salary is calculated and the wage teachers are paid for those hours must account for all the “non-billable” hours that a teacher must put in in order to do her or his job, like lesson planning, evaluating and responding to student work, professional development (the cost of which often comes out of teachers’ own pockets), staying after hours to counsel students and/or meet with parents and much else.
The idea is the same as someone who sells her or his services: he or she needs to calculate how many billable hours he or she can reasonably work in a week and then charge for those hours a high enough fee to account for the unbillable hours that are part of running her or his business. Now, obviously, this is not a perfect parallel, since teachers get benefits as part of their contract, which the entrepreneur does not–but my point here is not so much about the amount of salary teacher make. I’m talking first of all about how we think about the number of hours teachers work and about the relationship between how they are paid to the actual number of hours they work.
There are, on average, around 35 weeks in the K-12 school year, and teachers are contractually obligated, again on average, to be in school about 6.5 hours per day (my wife is there for seven). So that’s 32.5 hours per week, and about 1140 contracted hours over the course of the school year. This document records teachers’ work patterns and it seems to show that, on average, teachers work 35-40 hours per week, including the unbillable hours I talke about, but that this work is spread out over 7 days a week, rather than 5 or 6. As far as I can tell, though, the survey does not account adequately for the “unbillable” work that teachers do during the summer and other breaks, much of which involves planning and professional development, since teachers who were on break during the time of the survey were not included.
ETA: Other estimates of how much work teachers do on top of their contractually obligated time in school put the number at 2-3 hours additional work per day. Those extra hours, though, are notoriously hard to quantify.
Regarding the questions surrounding Ms. Black’s qualifications, this is from an article in Friday’s NY Times:
Black’s predecessor, Joel Klein, got a waiver. There is no indication yet as to whether a waiver will be granted for Black.
The repeated rule is an hour of prep for an hour of teaching time. That’s overblown, especially for experienced teachers.
But how can a teacher spend about an hour a day preparing for and completing all the work of the classroom? How would they even have time to review their materials, let alone draft assignments and lesson plans and grade papers, let alone keep records and submit grades? ESL-mill teaching requires significantly more prep time than that, and that really is an industry with low professional standards and incentives. 2-3 hours a day sounds like a reasonable baseline.
California has a chronic teacher shortage, and a perennial recruitment drive.
But that’s not quite how this works. Because Chicago also has a teacher shortage.
Go back to the private-sector analogy that doesn’t really hold true:
Say there were a ton of IT jobs up for grabs in California and virtually none–in fact, far too few–in Illinois. You would see a mass migration of interested applicants to California, right? Young people would head out there, get good jobs, set up households, raise families, and eventually retire and die as Californians. That’s what does happen, anytime an industry is huge in one state and tiny in another.
There is no shortage in affluent districts in any state. Those jobs are in demand, and teachers lucky enough to get them keep them. There are massive personnel problems in impoverished schools. Those schools have huge difficulty attracting and retaining teachers. Those are the schools that account for the high turnover rate, and the schools that reflect the shortage. They get teachers who are unprepared or incompetent–and even those people don’t stick around when they don’t have to. That glut of graduates? They will take those jobs under duress, and they will quit as soon as anything better opens up. Some of them will give up in despair because of those jobs–teaching has a high attrition rate, within states and within the profession.
Those are also the schools with abysmal performance rates. The schools that are punished with takeovers, decimation, dissolution. The schools that can’t offer their teachers basic classroom materials or even classrooms, let alone a supportive working environment. Those undesirable jobs are the jobs we need to fill in order to fix our schools. And those are the jobs that are not good enough to take.
RJN,
Can you explain that professional/technical thing you keep bringing up? You’ve said it more than once so it’s presumably relevant, but i still don’t get your point. Perhaps a hypothetical…?
Regarding professional development: most people pay their own. Doctors, lawyers, psychologists, real estate agents, beauty salon workers, etc. Continuing ed is a cost of doing business. Some professions allow you to skip it (though it’ll hurt your career) and others make it mandatory, but in any case it is rarely paid for by anyone other than the person taking it.
Same with planning. Do teachers spend their own time thinking about their job, so that they can do a better job and (presumably) get a raise, not get fired, get promoted, etc? Maybe; what if they do? That is true for pretty much every single professional I know, though few of them seem to think it’s abnormal, or a problem. If I got paid a nickel for every minute that I was thinking about work when not getting paid, or that I was helping someone else to do the same thing, I’d be a rich man.
Now for the arguably less-pleasant elephant in the room argument. this isn’t aimed at you personally, not only because generalisms don’t apply to individuals but also because you’re not in the category I’m talking about. however, there’s really no way to beat around the bush and still make the point, so i’ll just make it.
I think that a lot of the differential in respect comes from the perception that teachers are, on average, less educated or academically focused or intelligent that are members of some other professions.
And on average, i think that perception is correct.
Here’s some base data, in the form of the average GRE scores by major, as provided by the ETS. http://testprep.about.com/od/thegretest/a/GRE_Scores_Major.htm
The GRE is a standard grad school exam that everyone takes. It has a huge sample base. It’s imperfect and biased–as are all such tests–but there’s no particular basis for believing that it is biased against ed majors. It also doesn’t distinguish between education, academic focus, and intelligence–a failing of all such tests–but again, there’s no particular basis for believing that it is biased against ed majors.
The AVERAGE score for 2008 was Verbal: 462, Quantitative: 584, Writing: 4.0. I will type that as 462/584/4.0.
Ed majors have low scores, or more accurately very low scores. Though they do write better than average. (http://testprep.about.com/od/thegretest/a/GRE_Education.htm) For example, the highest score in education is for secondary with a verbal 484, quantitative 576, writing 4.5. Early childhood (420/498/4.1) and elementary (440/522/4.2) are far worse. With a couple of exceptions, the entire education division has some of the lower scores in the list.
All those “why do they get more respect” doctors? Well, they’re usually biology majors (489/629/4.4) or chem majors (486/678/4.3). Bio and chem majors are perceived as more intelligent than education majors because they are,, not because of societal pressures.
In fact, if you start looking at GRE scores you’ll see that there actually is at least a decent correlation between public perception of a major and GRE test results. Quick: do you think of philosophy majors as smart? You probably do, and you’re right (590/635/5.0.) Do you think of social work majors as smart? You probably don’t, and you’re right again (429/165/4.1.) Economists? If you think they’re smart, you made a good guess (504/708/4.5.) And so on.
That carries through to school. Education programs in the undergrad setting simply aren’t as rigorous as are other majors. And education programs in the grad school setting aren’t as rigorous, either, at least below the PhD. level. Programs which give a master’s en route to a Ph.D. often have a very different focus from programs which are designed to end in a master’s; the latter are generally far less rigorous because they best students usually get a PhD.
People who are are smarter not only do better in school, they get more from school. The quality of the incoming students is lower and the degree gets less respect as a result. There’s a reason that graduating magna with a biochem major gets more respect than graduating magna with an education major, and it’s the same reason that a MS in biochem gets more respect than an MA in education.
I’m not trying to antagonize you. But I don’t know how else to say it.
Also, you can’t ship teachers between states easily, the certification processes are different.
My mother and sister and uncle and aunt and grandmother were all teachers, at levels from kindergarten to university. I myself have taught home school for a few years. In raising three kids, some of whom had educational and emotional problems that strongly impacted their educations, I was repeatedly struck by the devotion and level of caring of the teachers in public school systems ranging from a tiny mountain town, to a mid-sized city, to a wealthy suburban district. I really do not get behind bashing teachers – I’ll bash their unions all day long but most individual teachers are pretty damn heroic.
That said – G&Ws assessment above is spot on. I worked for a couple of years at the University of Colorado, in the admissions department. My job wasn’t heavily involved with the graduate school of education, but I had a degree of contact and a lot of casual, low-level information, both on new students entering the program and existing teachers coming back for continuing ed. And that casual low-level information was terrifying, when it came to the intellectual – note, not the attitudinal – attainments of the students involved.
Just as one trivial example, the grading system in these classes provides almost no feedback regarding quality of work. Every class – and I mean every class – turned in grade sheets with exactly two grades: A, or D. When I inquired, I found out that you have to get a C- or better to get state funds for your continuing ed. If you showed up and did the work, you got an A. If you didn’t show up, you got a D. Nobody was failed, because an F raised red flags back in the home district – if you signed up for class and then never appeared again, you “earned” a D.
This was not in rocks-for-jocks fluff classes aimed at getting undergrads a slightly higher GPA. This was (allegedly) MA and PhD level students doing (allegedly) MA and PhD level work, in a well-regarded educational graduate program at a well-regarded state university. And nearly every one of these alleged masters candidates who came into our office looking for help, had more issues and more trouble dealing with routine paperwork and ordinary application procedures, than did the most addled of the helicopter-parented undergrads who came wandering in to fill in the same forms.
Richard, when I talk about hours I mean all hours that a given teacher will put in doing work for his or her job. So, yes, writing lesson plans at home counts as hours just as much as the time they put in facing the students. My wife was a teacher for 3 years. She put in 8 and 10 hours days when school was in session, but outside of the week or two before school started she put in very few hours when it was not. But I was wondering what the general case was.
Teachers unions seem like many other unions to me. They started out enabling their members to use the power of collective bargaining to improve their bad working conditions. But I would say at this point that there is a perception that teachers’ unions are more concerned with getting more money for their members than they are with the quality of the educational system’s output. Given that they are a public union, the are not dealing with corporate bigwigs who are amassing fortunes and throwing pittances to their employees. They are trying to get that money from John or Jane Q. Public. Case in point – the Chicago Teachers Union (the CTU) has opened up their campaign for their new contract by demanding a 4% raise for each of the next 3 years. This at a time when there’s rampant unemployment, and those who are employed in the private sector are lucky if they are seeing raises at all. Hell, I just got notified by my employer that they have managed to make money this last year and as a reward will re-instate 1/2 of the pay CUTS we endured two years ago. This really engenders an “us vs. them” attitude from the public towards the teachers, as they are sitting there saying “Why should they get that when I {don’t even have a job/haven’t seen a raise in two years}?” That really damages their image.
Hm. piny, you point out that there’s a granularity in demand vs. supply in the market for teachers. We see that in Chicago as well. What new teacher would have teaching in the Chicago Public Schools as their first choice, especially since as a new teacher a) they get the least desirable school and class assignments – which are pretty undesirable, and border on dangerous in many cases, and b) they are required to live in Chicago. Most college students in Illinois state schools come from the Chicago suburbs. They want to teach in the Chicago suburbs – generally within a few miles of where they lived until they started college. But the demand in those areas greatly exceeds the supply. The last thing those kids want to do is to move to Chicago.
So, you said that California has a teacher shortage. What’s the granularity of it?
Um, yeah. Shouldn’t they be? Isn’t that the whole point? Complaining that a union prioritizes the needs and wishes of its members over the needs of non-union members, seems like complaining that a country prioritizes the needs of its citizens. They’re supposed to do that; it is why those structures exist at all.
It doesn’t mean that I like the unions, or agree with their goals. But I do respect how they work.
Teacher’s unions are–should be–representative of the goals of the teachers, not of the parents. If teachers’ goals happen to be “better education for all” then the unions’ and parents’ interests will align. But if teachers’ goals are “get as much money as possible,” (and why shouldn’t they be, if everyone else acts like that? Teachers aren’t saints,) then the unions and parents will fight it out.
G&W:
Unfortunately, the stereotype of education degrees as second class programs–at all levels–and of education majors as not the brightest lights on the tree, so to speak, has its roots in the kinds of data you cite and the experience Robert talks about, and I will add my own experience of the education courses I had to take when getting my MA in TESOL, one of which was an extremely rigorous course in language testing and assessment, while the other, a methods & materials class, was a complete waste of time, not much more than show and tell. I will say, however, that some of the smartest people I have known have been public school teachers with education degrees–and I mean book smart in the way that GREs purport to measure–and I also know of several education degree programs that are seriously, seriously rigorous in what they teach and how they grade.
Leaving aside, however, the question of whether GRE scores, etc. are at all an indication of why teachers are not respected–because I am not sure you can correlate the two phenomena–I want to go back to the list you made of all the things teachers need to be good at:
Your comment about this list that the breadth it represents limits a teacher’s depth misses the point. Being able to create an environment in which all of those things cohere into a functioning classroom where students can learn requires a breadth and depth of intellect and imagination that is–and here I am also thinking about your question about the distinction I keep making between technician vs. professional–as professional on its own terms as the work of an engineer, doctor, lawyer, etc. A K-12 classroom teacher is not merely a deliverer of knowledge, analogous to the man or woman who comes, for example, to install your cable TV or phone lines; and I think that we as a culture tend to see teaching more as the delivery of knowledge than as the creation of a functioning classroom environment; and if knowledge is something that can be, simply, delivered, then how hard a job can it be, right?
Again, I am not arguing with your characterization of education programs or the people who enroll in them; it seems to me that the line of thinking you are pursuing misses the point.
And also, regarding this point:
I am certainly not complaining that teachers have to do professional development. You’re right, of course; it is a cost of doing business, but people who are in business for themselves have, all else being equal, some control over making sure that how much they charge accounts for that cost, in whole or in part; and people who work for big enough companies are usually able to get at least part of that cost paid by their employers.
But professional development is not merely a cost of doing business either; it is also, or should be seen as, part of the job, and it needs to be accounted for, talked about and respected in that way too.
RonF:
Without knowing the union’s reasoning behind this demand–and also without knowing whether this is simply an opening bargaining position–I would agree with you that it is, at best, a politically unwise thing to do. At the college where I teach, the leadership of the adjunct faculty union has asked for a 50% raise over the next three years and threatened a strike if they don’t get it. This has caused quite a bit of dissension among the rank and file both because so few people could afford a strike at this point in this economy, but also because of how unreasonable the union’s demands are in this economy. (I will leave aside the question of whether such an increase would be reasonable under different circumstances; there are arguments that it would be and arguments that it wouldn’t). Adding insult to injury, the adjunct union leadership has justified its position, in part, by misrepresenting how much work the full time faculty do, suggesting that we get paid a full time salary for part time work, amongst other things. I am someone who never thought he would cross a picket line, but if the adjunct union decides to strike–and I teach at least one course a semester under an adjunct contract (which is a weird artifact of the union structure where I work)–I will cross their line.
Finally, I just want to say that I am writing this comment sitting in my office at school, waiting for students to come in for conferences; it is a depressing time for me. In one class, almost 90% of the students have either a D or F average and most of them are likely to fail the class, since their grades reflect assignments not handed in from the beginning of the semester or an inability to take me seriously when I say things like, “Proofreading and editing matters, and if you don’t take your own work seriously enough at least to proofread for spelling and punctuation errors, don’t expect me to take it all seriously when I grade it.” It is demoralizing, to say the least. More than in any semester in recent years, I can’t wait for this semester to end. Right now, though, I am kind of drowning in work and so, while I am really enjoying this discussion, please understand if I don’t respond to any further comments.
Agreed. Though given the discussion above, if we’re still talking about the “knowledge” and “respect” issues, perhaps those aren’t the best professionals to use as analogies. There are plenty of other professionals who have more similar levels of respect, from nurses to optometrists to chiropractors to social workers and so on.
I agree with that as well. But they are also a deliverer of knowledge, and to many people that is–or should be–their primary focus and skillset by a large margin.
In preschool, you’re generally looking for kids to be happy.
in early grades, you’re looking for them to be happy and learn “how to be a student,” and hopefully learn something.
But by the time to get to middle and upper grades, you’re looking for them primarily to learn something.
I’m a parent, and I do things all the time which fall into the category of “kid doesn’t like it now, but they will be glad I did it in 10 years.” If i had a choice between a math teacher they loved (but who hardly taught math) and math teacher they hated (but who managed to teach them math) I’d take #2 every time once they were 7 years old or so.
Well, arguably the goal of a functioning classroom environment IS to be sure that knowledge gets delivered. A good environment is not necessarily a priority goal in its own right.
I think it’s a lot more fun for teachers and administrators to talk about (and teach) democracy and personal growth and self respect and social justice and political awareness than it is for them to make sure that Jenny and Al can solve the quadratic equation. If they need to teach the equation and if those things are necessary to teach the quadratic equation, then they need to be taught. If they’re not necessary, they are a distraction from what should be being taught.
Perhaps we’re disagreeing, or perhaps we’re both right.
You seem to be arguing that the “how hard a job can it be?” thoughts stem from the mischaracterization of teachers as technicians and not professionals. I’m arguing that it stems from the thought that even if they are professionals, they’re perceived as being less intelligent/educated, so the job itself, even if it’s a professional job, is perceived as being not especially difficult. I.e., “(a) Bob is a teacher; Bob isn’t smart; therefore you don’t need to be smart to be a teacher; (b) hard jobs require intelligence; therefore being a teacher isn’t a hard job.”
I am certainly in agreement that your point is also true, but if I’ve got to choose only one, I’m sticking to mine.
Good luck. In deference to your situation i have tried to respond in a way that may be interesting for you to read, but which doesn’t require you to post your own response.
I think HOW a person is smart is often misread by tests. The lady who was my bipolar son’s special ed coordinator would probably have had a hard time balancing a checkbook and she was easily confused by the difference between Canada and China. But her emotional intelligence for producing results with troubled children? About 50,000 times greater than mine. There’s no standardized test for that.
I like your phasing hierarchy of skill needs, G&W. I would make a terrible kindergarten teacher, a bad elementary school teacher (if they hadn’t been my kids, I couldn’t have done it), a decent high school teacher, probably a great college prof – because my skill & knowledge sets are oriented much more towards conveying and analyzing information, and not at all oriented towards people. My goateed clone from the mirror universe, Anti-Robert, would have a reversed set of skills and a reversed set of outcomes at those teaching levels. Both Robert and Anti-Robert are really smart; both Robert and Anti-Robert are really dumb. Smart and dumb at different things, though.
The union may be asking for raises now because cost-of-living increases have been eliminated for the past several years; I know in California, teachers often lose their cost-of-living increases even when times are flush. Trimming that stuff from the budget when it’s convenient, with the expectation you’ll just pay later, means sometimes you need to pay when it’s inconvenient.
Hope Chicago high schools still have librarians. San Jose’s don’t, at least not the ones that serve the part of the city that’s majority non-white.
Chicago school teachers haven’t missed any raises since I’ve lived around here.
I’m coming to this conversation a bit late, but I have a couple links to offer.
It’s far worse than a misguided business ideology – there are also a bunch of billionaires putting their charity money into education. Here’s the picture in Seattle:
http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/the-lines-of-influence-in-education-reform/
As for Blake:
“Ms. Black has freely acknowledged her “limited exposure” to unions. She and her children are products of private schools, while Mr. Klein attended New York public schools. She sits on a charter school advisory board, but joined only a few months ago and so has yet to attend a meeting.” (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/nyregion/11schools.html?_r=1&hpw)
She’s chairman of Hearst Magazine, and here’s what she apparently said (I got this second-hand) this about Cosmopolitan’s Iphone sex-tip app & how much she’d charge for the sex tip of the day: “Yeah, $2.99. Cheaper than a hooker. I didn’t say that, did I?” (The radio show is at http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-08-10/future-magazines)
She’s director of the Coca Cola Company, heinous for “deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses.” (http://www.killercoke.org/)
So let’s sum this up. Disrespectful of hookers, fan of private and charter schools, rich, and full of Coca-Cola corruption. Great.