As I often peruse articles on education, I am forever baffled by the lack of any meaningful ideas about the direction of education. The only plans that seem to be out there have to do with curtailing collective bargaining rights, evaluating teachers, tenure reform, and Mitt Romney going so far as to say class size doesn’t matter. It is like we are in an endless spin-cycle of nothingness. A washing-machine that doesn’t clean.
We just don’t get it. The only way we are going to make gains in education is if the quality of teachers goes up—an in the capitalist country we live in, that quite simply means we need to pay teachers more. This might be the single-biggest solution no one is talking about.
Let’s take the inane babbling about evaluating teachers. We talk and talk and there seems to be some sort of expectation that if we evaluate teachers more effectively, they will get better. I’ve written about this before, it is as if the problem we have is we just aren’t trying hard enough. But the main question is this: If we get these great evaluations going and get rid of all the dead weight, who is going to replace the bad teachers? It’s not like our public high schools have lines around the corner of highly-qualified, ambitious people trying to get these jobs. At my high school we hire 3-4 new English teachers EVERY YEAR. And that’s just in the English department. Choosing a few applicants from a stagnant pool doesn’t ensure any kind of success. This is why we have such high turnover, the same 3-4 positions are open for the same 3-4 people who couldn’t do the job. And even if we got rid of teachers with tenure who aren’t operating at a high level, we have no one to replace them.
Even if evaluations get done right, there just aren’t enough top-notch people out there who want to be teachers. They want to be hedge-fund managers.
Then we have this idea that everything else but the teacher in the classroom will fix the problem. We say, “we just need to get the right curriculum,” or “we need to institute the right program.” My high school even had scripted curriculum that told the teacher the exact words to say over the course of the entire two hours. That’s right, cue cards that required no deviation. Or we think we just need a great superintendent who will fix all our problems. Or we say, “Our district office is full of idiots and we can’t work with them.” Be that as it may, there hasn’t been a single principal, vice-principal, department head, superintendent, district official, or canned-curriculum that has ever made a difference in the way I teach. I couldn’t even tell you what our superintendent does, but I can tell you in all honesty he has absolutely no effect on what I do in my classroom. I do know a little bit about what our assistant principals do, and to a lesser extent our principal, but I can also tell you their effect in my classroom is so negligible it might be non-existent. I should know, in the last six years my high school has gone through 8 principals and 24 assistant principals. The turnover at administration has been just as bad as the faculty. Those administrators have barely figured out how our school works before they run away. Two years ago, we went through four principals. Think about that for a little minute—four principals in one year.
Oh, and we’re getting a new one next year too.
Let me be real clear, so there’s no mistaking my message here. Nothing matters but the teacher in the room. NOTHING.
Unless you’re talking about the development of new teachers and raising the status and pay of teachers in our society, then you are only talking about fringe issues. Even class size is a fringe issue because good teachers can teach a class of 38 (I’ve done it).
Here’s a crazy idea. What if the teaching job was the highest paid position in your district? What if to be a teacher you needed a PhD and had to have written books, and everyone was fighting over landing the teaching positions? Imagine that. Imagine the district officials and superintendents and principals making less and teachers being at the top. Damn, you could even have a hard-core evaluation system that makes sure that once you reach the peak—teaching—you have to kick ass to stay there.
It is then, and only then, that scores will start going up. Low-income Americans are hard to teach. They are selfish, ghetto, loud, disrespectful, and every single one of them thinks a camera crew is following them around as they star in their very own reality show. We need the best of the best of the best, but when you tell college students that if they go into teaching they will never make six-figures, the really ambitious ones start looking up at the skyscrapers wondering how much they get paid on the top floor of Wells Fargo. Or even the second floor.
Let me give you an example, because I’m a teacher. When I was hired one day before school started for my first year of teaching, they told me I was teaching something called AVID. I had four preps (in a four-block schedule), and AVID was just another edubabble acronym. Within weeks I learned that I was given AVID because no other teacher at the school would touch it. It was a broken program. It didn’t work. So they gave it to the new guy because it had been adopted district-wide and my site had to have a section. They were 9th graders.
Fast-forward six years, and the AVID program is thriving. I’ve brought in 5 other teachers, a counselor, our principal, even people from the local community college to be part of our AVID Site Team. We recruit from our feeder middle schools, we have a Junior Trip to Southern California, end of year banquets, parent nights, field trips, college panels. How do you explain this?
Do you credit the superintendent who decided to sign off on bringing some program called AVID to the high schools? Was it my string of 8 soon to be 9 principals none of whom had any idea what AVID was? Was it the AVID program itself, did it change some policies, or start using some magical AVID curriculum? Did they limit the AVID teachers’ ability to bargain collectively? Did they start evaluating us? Did they take away our tenure? Did they start giving all the AVID students multiple-choice tests all the time? The answer to all of these is no.
Then why does AVID work all of a sudden if none of these things have changed?
The teachers. And a counselor.
I turned the AVID program at our school from a joke nobody was laughing at to an actual program that sends kids to college. But I can’t take full credit because the other teachers involved have also been tearing it up, and our counselor is a powerhouse of caring. Now do you see? None of that other stuff matters. Call it AVID, Puente, MESA, EDGE, AP, Honors. The programs themselves are meaningless unless you have someone in the room who is doing the job right.
I always find it funny when a student says to another student, “AVID is awesome. It is such a great program.” I feel like telling them, “No it isn’t. It’s a program just like all the others, it just has different letters. In fact, it is a program designed to make you take notes, organize your binder, and get into study groups. You hate that kind of shit. The only reason you like AVID is because Ms. Eastwood is your teacher.”
We need to focus, but the things we continue to focus on DON’T MATTER. Tenure reform, teacher evaluations, district policies—DON’T WE GET IT? Nothing will ever change until teachers are valued.
I don’t know the name of our superintendent. I heard the name of our new principal, but I’ve forgotten it because it’s really hard to say. I know very few names of district officials in the office across the city. I know the names of crappy curriculum I am supposed to teach. But the names of the curriculum, like the names of all these people don’t matter, because they will be gone before I learn their names properly anyway, and I will once again be alone in my classroom. The new principal probably won’t ever set foot in my room. It will take him a year to remember who I am among a faculty of 100, but he’ll be gone before that happens. The superintendent definitely won’t set foot in my room. He’ll be let go two years premature of his five year contract, but we’ll continue to pay him $280,000 a year even after the school board has let him go, because that’s what we’ve done with the last 4 superintendents anyway.
$280,000 a year would buy us 5 new teachers, lowering class sizes and making scores go up—true. But more importantly, it could also raise the salaries of 10 teachers to the kind of levels that might attract more people to the field.
Nothing matters but the teacher in the classroom. And in America, that means money. If we are serious about improving education, nothing matters but the teacher in the room. You need to show us the money, or all this talk will continue to be what it always is—fringe babble. And in a presidential election year, we sure don’t need any more of that.
Matt has hit the nail on the head. Only good teachers can make education work. In ten years, I have taught private, public, suburban, rural, urban, high and low income students. It’s always the same reality; you are alone with the kids, and you either teach them or you can’t. No technology, administrator, or curriculum can change that. The money part is also true. I make less, with two master’s degrees, than my sister with a bachelor’s degree who runs a Starbuck’s. But I love my students and the positive difference I make in their lives, so it’s worth it.
What’s more important to a society, school or Starbucks? Just saying.
Thanks for the thoughts KCMO.
Matt: Love your posts. Years ago, after spending endless time reading/studying literature on school reforms, I concluded:
1. Anything is better than nothing – ie, we need some plan, some structure, and some intentions in schools & classrooms; &
2. Nothing works all the time – no research-based, cutting-edge, teacher proof, technomagic is going to fix everything.
As you say, it’s the teachers. You might use well Ipads for every kid and plenty of whatever goodies fill some classrooms, but I believe you’d do fine w/some pencils, old pads/spiral notebooks, and comics – or whatever you could scrounge.
And we underestimate the idiosyncrasies in good teachers. I hate those who seek to push all teachers into one pedagogy – claiming research justifies this de-humanization.
Oh well, been in this Biz 30+ years – same story one way & another over and over. As KMCO sez above, you do it cuz you love it.
Thanks Mike, and you’re right. It is very humbling when you start going into the classes of great teachers because you realize there are so many ways to do it right. Different pedagogies, approaches, schools of thought, relationships with students and teaching styles. That’s why we call it an art, right? I’m not sure I understood that when I first started teaching, but I do now.
I hate to say it, but had it ever occurred to you that the people in charge of the money do not want your ghetto students to succeed? That they want them to fail? That secretly, deep down inside, they want them to f— off and die? They’ll never admit it of course, why that’s racist, and nobody wants to be seen as racist. But if you can BE racist and not LOOK racist, why that’s perfectly fine.
I think it’s stupid and I’m saying this from a completely enlightened self-interest point of view. Their fate to some extent is my fate. I want them to do well, because I want me to do well.
But I’m not sure where you start. Until you get people running things who are more – enlightened, you’re not going to even begin to get anything close to what you outlined above.
Change the attitudes of the people controlling the money, and you’ll get your salaries, etc.
Owen,
It occurs to me every time I write one of these posts that those in power are not doing enough (or anything) to help low-income, underrepresented students succeed. That might in fact be what you would call my major lens. What I’ve outlined in this piece is one simple idea: The person physically in the room is the only one doing any educating- not the principal, the superintendent, or anyone else. I like what Mike says, that you can do it with spiral notebooks and overhead projectors. None of the other stuff matters. You are right that we need to get the people in charge to understand these things so we can change attitudes etc. That’s what this blog is all about-awareness- a window into what our schools are really like, and some things we can think about as to how to improve them. Paying teachers more is one of them. Scores aren’t going up because we adopt some textbook or hire some principal. That money would be better spent on the only people doing the educating- teachers.
The simple answer to the question of why teaching is not valued is simply that most people don’t perceive the skill of teaching. They may feel that enthusiasm, interpersonal skills, and organizational skills are important, but not the teaching itself.
There are many reasons for this unhappy situation, but one of the prime reasons is that people understand teaching as the transfer of information or understandings from one person to another. This is simply not what teaching is. In fact, what it really is can be difficult to explain even if a person is familiar with the prerequisite concepts, which most people are not.
Anyway, since most people are blind to the existence of teaching, it’s should be no surprise that they’re not willing to pay for something that they cannot perceive.
What to do about this situation? I can see many possibilities but none of them qualifies as a quick fix.
Meanwhile, an issue that we really all need to get on board with is the concerted attack on public schools (including public universities) by the Ferengi of our society who wish to turn all public institutions into privately-controlled (and therefore undemocratic) profit centers.
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Great article, Matt! Would you please send this as a letter to the editor of the Oklahoma Daily in Oklahoma City? I’ve been trying to voice those thoughts for months, but you hit the nail right on the head! I doubt they will publish it, but it’s worth a shot!
I urge you to see the documentary AMERICAN TEACHER. In this film, a charter school in Harlem offered starting salaries of $100,000.00 per year. (It may be MORE; my memory for statistics sometimes falters.) 6,000 applicants applied for each position! The film features the young Harvard-educated second grade teacher who was hired. Guess what? She is brilliant, idealisistic, very well-compensated … and her students are performing brilliantly. Do you think there is a correlation between the motivation, prestige, and salary she receives and her performance in the classroom?
Do not misunderstand me. I believe she would be a brilliant teacher wherever she landed. However, don’t you think she is more likely to remain in the classroom when she can do both things she dreamed of — assist inner-city kids AND live comfortably?
I’ve taught for 27 years. Throuhout my career, I’ve heard people denigrate “throwing money at the problem” of education. In my entire career, that’s the ONLY solution I’ve never seen anyone attempt — until I saw AMERICAN TEACHER. Me? I’d like to see more money “thrown” at the problem. I’d like to see more young people from the top 10% of their graduating classes at top-notch universities compete for challenging and deeply fulfilling teaching positions. I’d like to see teaching be so well compensated, so highly regarded, and so creative that the best teachers wouldn’t dream of leaving the classroom and “their” kids.
You know Kim, why is it they always say the United States throws more money at schools than anyone? And documentaries like “Waiting for Superman” claim the same thing. But when you ask teachers or students we’re like, WTF? The money they’re throwing seems to only go AWAY evidently, because I don’t see where it goes. To our superintendent who makes 280,000 dollars a year plus a car allowance maybe. To other boneheaded programs and ideas people at the district have. But it never goes anywhere where it can make a difference. And we both agree the place where it would make the most difference is in teachers’ salaries- PERIOD.
Matt, I whole-heartedly agree with what you wrote about in this post. I am a young, second-year teacher who has seen what a teacher can do with a group of kids. I teach at a school in Baltimore County with a majority of kids in middle to low class with a mix of ethnicities and races, but mostly just a lot of attitude and “thugging.” I was brought in, in January after a the original teacher left due to mental incapacities and a slew of incapable substitutes. My job was just to babysit and get control of these kids, I was once congratulated by a peer when she saw that my kids were actually sitting in seats. I didn’t understand why she had such low expectations for the kids. I was bound and determined to teach those kids and that’s exactly what I did. Most of the time it wasn’t pretty and there was a lot of trial and error, but I tell you what, I absolutely made a difference in their scholarly life that year.
Fast-forward to one year later and I finish my first full year as the teacher, start to finish. At the end of the year, all my students were begging me to teach French II the next year, they said they enjoyed French so much, they wanted to move on and desperately hoped I would be teaching it. I saw how having just one teacher who is enthusiastic, relatable and driven could change around the perceptions of their students. I even had a few students who compared this year with the year before, they couldn’t have been happier with their experience in French.
Another way I see how a teacher can be the sole impact on a student or program is through attendance and notes. I teach a period one class in a High School, where a majority of the students bus in from the city a good half hour drive away. So naturally, we get a lot of tardies. Plus, honestly, when were high school students ever good about getting out of bed to go to school? Everyday, almost every student in my class was in first period within the first five minutes of class. I was always pleased because that meant there wouldn’t be many students coming in for makeup work, until I got a note one day from a student thanking me for being such an awesome teacher that she actually wanted to get out of bed every morning to come to school. That’s when it hit me… my students liked me and the class environment so much, they were willing to drag themselves out bed at 6 AM just to come to school.
That’s when I started taking credit, if it weren’t for me, who knows how late these kids would come into school, if at all? I started realizing it was my duty to not only teach, but discreetly giving kids a reason to come to school. Even if it were just one period a day, at least those students knew they would have 45 minutes of an enjoyable learning environment.
So I 100% agree with your statement that teachers need to be valued more. We need more esteem in the professional world, which will happen when all teachers start taking themselves more seriously as professionals. But we also need to change the system. We need to loosen the grip of tenure, making it easier to get rid of teachers who effectively just show up and we need to make teachers feel like the hard work they are doing is being accurately compensated.
Really wonderful thoughts Sarah, thanks for adding your voice to my blog. You sound like a great educator. I think we need to take credit when we do things right. It seems like no one is ever paying attention, except maybe the students (hopefully). So if they like your class, you must be doing something right.
I also think all of the various curriculum changes in the ed. world won’t make a difference if you can not connect to your students. When I was first starting out as a teacher all of the jargon and “strategies” that you get in ed. school were helpful, but now, after 10 years in K-12 urban classrooms and part-time college teaching stints-I want to to do what works with my personality and the material that I can connect to the students, to maximize learning and engagement and minimize the b.s.
As far as principals go either they are effective in the building or you never see them. I only know the difference because I have seen both.
What is going on with the attack on teachers and the vilification of experienced teachers and unions is quite frightening and misguided.