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Arne Duncan will stop urban teachers from behaving badly?
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Teacher Behaving Badly
Most of us who’ve survived the myths of childhood, the volatility of adolescence and the horrors of a career at one level or another, can recall one or two teachers that helped us along the way and perhaps even inspired us. However, the corollary to that is: How many mopes and useful idiots did we have as teachers that we cannot recall at all? We’ve all had dozens, even scores of teachers, but can only grant Teacher Sainthood to one or two. And of that one or two, what is the likelihood that those rare birds were of a different race or ethnicity than you were at the time? Again, if you reverse the math, that tells you that most teachers are interchangeable cogs in a mindless municipal bureaucracy.
Now apply that logic to aircraft carrier-sized school districts where the teachers do not match their students in either philosophy of life or genetic disposition. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) children are officially categorized as 82% living below the poverty line. In reality, it isn’t that high. The triggering mechanism for that definition is the FREE and REDUCED LUNCH form filled out every new school year by parents applying for free food for their kids. When you give away t-shirts, even the affluent will snatch one. Still, perpetual poverty is major factor in the devastation of American public schools as more often than not, city schools are repositories for the children of the urban poor.
Though I have blasted dysfunction families, especially those led by unwed mothers, as the root cause of the failure of urban schools, bad teachers are the second leg of the public education triangle. Pinhead kids are the third. Arne the Duncan cannot fix families and though he tried to throw poor and semi-literate kids overboard, there are only a handful of selective enrollment schools in Chicago. Duncan never found the 82% solution. I don’t care how much Hope and Change Duncan and Obama deliver, there ain’t enough hope to change 82% of 400,000 CPS students. The only leg of the triangle that professional educators can affect, is teachers.
Let’s build a real-time construct for teacher placement. Large, bad school districts are forced to hire a certain percentage of bottom-of-the-barrel teacher (BBT) candidates every year. Even at this late hour, there are schools that either do not have a permanent teacher in all classrooms, or they threw some English literature boob into an algebra and college math job for which he or she is not qualified. These BBT teachers were rejected by other school districts in the July-August summer hiring circus. Typically they have modest academic skills and usually are inept at classroom management. Classroom management is a euphemism for: Capacity for Handling the Bad Kids. We have a lot of them in Chicago; some of them armed. Clearly the focus of school reform should be teachers behaving badly.
At the end of the school year, just about all teachers are tired, both the good and bad ones. As the July hiring season opens, many CPS staff apply to other school districts where the pay might be better, or at least the children come to school unarmed, and the adults attend parent-teacher conferences in Noah’s Ark pairs Well, this annual reconstitution of teacher staff hits CPS very hard; Chicago loses twenty-five percent of its teachers every year. Thus, you’ve got the equivalent of one hundred percent teacher turn-over in four years.
In reality, it is not that high. After a few years of trying to leave CPS but failing in the attempt, many marginally skilled teachers resign themselves to the fact that they are stuck in Chicago. CPS pays well enough, relative to other districts, and one of the nuances of the teacher profession is that school districts rarely will permit a new hire to transfer in with more than five years of seniority in their pay system. Thus after you’ve been around a few years, you lose money if you change districts. There are exceptions to this policy, but not many. So who are the ones left behind?
Michael Jonas, in Boston.com, writes: ‘Public schools in America have been bent on ignoring the obvious: Almost nothing about the way we hire, evaluate, pay, or assign teachers to classrooms is designed to operate with that goal (performance) in mind. Most teachers receive only cursory performance evaluations, with virtually every teacher graded highly. We use a one-size-for-all salary structure, in which the only factors used in raises are teachers’ higher-education credentials and number of years in the system, neither of which is strongly linked to their effectiveness. And we often let seniority, rather than merit, drive decisions about where a teacher is placed. It is in many ways an industrial model that treats teachers as identical, interchangeable parts, when we know that they are not.’
I taught in Chicago for five years before I became a principal. In those five years I received five performance evaluations, all of them good. Very nice. But not in reality. Never, not even once, did the person who signed the evaluation, ever come into my classroom to see what I was doing, either formally or otherwise. I suppose, because I had strong classroom management skills and could handle the rough trade, there was no need to visit with me. Fine. Unfortunately, this is how most large systems work.
In Boston, ninety -seven percent of all evaluated teachers in the period 2003 to 2008, received a satisfactory rating. At seventy-two of Boston’s 135 schools, not a single teacher received an unsatisfactory evaluation. Yet over eleven percent of Boston Public Schools are on the states 'sheisse' list, and scores of others waiting to occupy the next slot.
Sure I am tough of parents and teachers in this column; HEY, they are the adults in the Bermuda Triangle of Education, kids are still kids regardless of how, shall I say, unpalatably unattractive they become. But Arne the Duncan resorted to using the Daley weapon-of-mass-destruction on teachers and blew up entire schools to get rid of the bad apples, instead of surgically striking at the inept teachers and leaving the good ones in the system unmolested. He was on the right track but he train was going in the wrong direction. CPS is a trainwreck. But Arne was right; improving teacher personnel is the best medicine for a struggling school district. But he never did it. Now he is telling school districts to do what he could not.
‘Teacher evaluation in this country is fundamentally broken,’ declared Arne Duncan in an interview in Boston, ‘to act like teaching does not impact student achievement, I think, is an absolute slap in the face of the profession.’ Hmmm. One of the values I admired in the U.S. Armed Forces is that military leadership rarely, if ever, asked you to do something that they, themselves, had not already done, and done well. Duncan hasn’t even as much as taken attendance in a public school. I suggest our U.S. Secretary of Education suspend his high profile campaign for the Race-to-the-Top funds and spend a day with our troops to understand real leadership. You can’t tell people to do things you’ve never done yourself and expect that they will.
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