If only as a hobby, I spend time every day looking over online newspapers, magazines, and other news sources. In the last week I saw several related news articles in American mainline newspapers (the New York Times), and magazines (Time, Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly). These are sources that one would not expect to see antagonistic articles towards the teachers unions and higher levels of school administrations. It is also interesting that these mainstream sources published these articles in the same week…I love a conspiracy!
Regardless of what the reason are for the publishing of these articles, I found much in them that corresponded to most of the experiences I have had as a new teacher. To start this off, here is an article from Newsweek:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/234590
The relative decline of American education at the elementary- and high-school levels has long been a national embarrassment as well as a threat to the nation’s future. Once upon a time, American students tested better than any other students in the world. Now, ranked against European schoolchildren, America does about as well as Lithuania, behind at least 10 other nations. Within the United States, the achievement gap between white students and poor and minority students stubbornly persists—and as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores continue to sag.
Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds 1as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, 1with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not. It is also true and unfortunate that 2 often the weakest teachers are relegated to teaching the neediest students, poor minority kids in inner-city schools.
These quotes reflect an attempt to actually address these problems; if only by addressing them (at least his is a start!). The second quote implies that the skills good teachers possess are in some ways ineffable, that is, hard to pin down, and in any case either you have them, or you don’t.
The next two links to The Atlantic.com site continue with this idea, that if how to describe what a good teacher is, and how do we get them into our schools…
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/5-Ideas-to-Fix-Americas-Schools-2751
The New York Times magazine follows with another attempt to cover this seemingly new found ground with more of the same…
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?sudsredirect=true
A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to.
Admittedly, much of the focus on this topic relates to the following news report (of a Rhode Island school administer who ‘fixed’ a huge problem by firing the whole faculty at a school…
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/education/07educ.html?sudsredirect=true
A Rhode Island school board’s decision to fire the entire faculty of a poorly performing school, and President Obama’s endorsement of the action, has stirred a storm of reaction nationwide, with teachers condemning it as an insult and conservatives hailing it as a watershed moment of school accountability.
This idea, of trying to get rid of recalcitrant, incompetent, lazy teachers continues with Yahoo news:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100305/ap_on_re_us/us_entire_school_fired
In Los Angeles, charter school operator Green Dot took over a high school in the Watts neighborhood and opened it in 2008 as seven small college-prep academies. Green Dot founder Steve Barr laid off all the teachers and asked them to reapply for their jobs.
“You want them to come back, but you have to establish what your vision is and give them the choice: do you believe in this vision?” he said.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan chose to fire teachers en masse when he headed Chicago’s public school system.
Finally, I found (in today’s New York Times) a collection of some op-ed page replies to this notion of dealing with bad teachers with ‘tough love’. I have included a couple quotes which seem to cover the two positions (reformers on one side, and the teachers union point of view on the other side…)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/opinion/l10teachers.html?sudsredirect=true
To hold shamefully underpaid and overworked public school teachers solely responsible for the performance of students in a poor community with a large immigrant population is reprehensible and shortsighted.
There are many lessons for both the Central Falls, R.I., teachers and others to learn. The biggest? They cannot have it both ways — demand white-collar status but be paid like a union irrespective of performance or economic climate.
One of the primary reasons I went back to school to become a teacher was to attempt (Hubris?) to balance out the influence on students by bad teachers. I’d had far too many teachers who shouldn’t be in the business to sit on the sidelines. I can only hope that one of the consequences of the current economic malaise would be to reel in the overweening power that the teachers lobby currently has. Maybe there will come real improvements in our schools! Maybe.
