Fed up with Teacher Hate and Disrespect in this Country

The BBQ Pit
341

Good Lord, let me ask you the same thing about traditional teacher education programs.

As far as the Boston thing, the Boston corps was established a few years back, and I felt (from what I know) that it was a major error, especially if certified teachers were pushed out. I don’t work for TFA (anymore), and I don’t agree with everything they’ve done as an organization, just as I’m sure you don’t agree with everything your cert program does, or your union… however you seem to be incredibly pointed about your criticism about TFA and no other organization oriented to educational reform. I will point out that BPS is something of a quagmire, because they have so many alt cert programs and massive union presence.

If you made this comment about any teacher who fits this description regardless of TFA/non-TFA status I wouldn’t have an issue with you. I’d disagree, but it wouldn’t be prejudicial. So what is the threshold for “helping America’s schools” for you? Three years? Five? Fifteen? What is it exactly? Your cite upthread noted that the attrition rate for teachers nationally is nearly 50% after five years.

I’m not aware of anybody not teaching in a classroom that claims to be a teacher, TFA or otherwise. I know that tons of TFA alumni go to lucrative jobs elsewhere; is that supposed to be a surprise? I certainly didn’t and the majority of people I knew in the corps didn’t either, but that’s not the point. All I care about is that you are a good teacher and working to help your students reach their full potential. Your motivation, whether it’s to never return to a classroom again, pad your resume, or whatever, matters a whole lot less to me. Again, I hope you have the same opprobrium leveled at any teacher that leaves the profession.

Conversely, I don’t care if you want to save the world and love rainbows and children, if you suck, GTFO. More accurately, if you’re not doing anything to improve your teaching, GTFO.

I was immensely humbled in my teaching experience - if I came to the school with ego about my credentials (i.e., none) it was decimated in minutes. That very knight-on-a-white-horse attitude is something I despise, and as a trainer of teachers I instructed my teachers that arrogance and condescension toward veteran teachers was ensuring that they would fail in their schools, and ultimately hurt the kids they were trying to help. Every vet I encountered taught me something about education, even if it was learning what motivated them to not give a shit about teaching anymore.

Out of 33,000 people, I imagine there are many assholes. Sounds like you met some and want to paint everyone else with that same brush. The vast majority of TFA alumni that I know are doing great things in classrooms, policy, non-profits, and yes, even law that are working to close the achievement gap.

342

Do you disagree that top graduates from top schools (which TFAers are) have better non-teaching job prospects than the average college grad? Given the discussions here about “recruiting from the bottom third,” are average new teachers even representative of average new college grads?

Hell, even taking education classes may be detrimental to certain career paths, if you believe some career advisers. Pre-med students at my undergrad college were told in no uncertain terms to avoid all education classes, as these “easy A” courses would just look like a way to avoid rigor and pad one’s GPA. Even if this warning is incorrect, the massive grad inflation in education coursework is well-documented, and employers may prefer candidates with a more demanding coursework background.

343

Which drives me crazy. I’d much rather have education classes be the sort that lead to nervous breakdowns and weeping sessions and the like, the kind of course where you work your ass off to get a B. If these courses are easy A courses, wouldn’t this be an excellent starting point for reforming education–turning these courses into a sort of gatekeeper for teaching?

344

Only if increasing their rigor increases student performance. I see no evidence for this. Without it, we just unnecessarily increase the barrier to entry.

345

I concur for a different reason–people put up with gnashing-teeth weedout courses in engineering and medicine because the jobs that results are amazing. Education jobs have to be worth struggling to get before people will voluntarily struggle to get them

346

Our turnover rate is still better, though it’s an issue. And we’re not wasting public funds on a private venture.

I do. But it’s no secret that alt-certified teachers may be less committed than those who paid for the education and went about it the ‘traditional’ way. My peeve is that your beloved organization wastes money on a very temporary and costly ‘solution’.

I’m just asking if you have to spend a few billion before realizing that you’re not cost effective or…?

It isn’t the teacher. It’s the organization that perpetuates the problem. You’re contributing to the problem you’re claiming to help.
You say that TfA is an educational reform group. What are you reforming? Bad teachers? If you really think that the issue in education is bad teachers, then you’re contributing to the problem even more, because you’re ignoring the administration problems.

And as I’ve pointed out, TfA can also replace teachers. That’s not filling a gap. That’s fulfilling a contract with a district. Not only can a TfA teacher replace a vet, but they can also weed out newly minted teachers with licenses because, again, the district has to fill that TfA contract…they compete with new teachers who have a year of a student teaching and full vetting on their resume.
**
If you have a HIGHER turnover rate than traditional teachers and you’re putting some out of jobs AND taking government funds, you’re PART OF THE PROBLEM.**

It’s no secret that a TfA stint pads a resume. Maybe if you weren’t offering summer internships with Goldman Sachs you’d be taken more seriously.

disclaimer: I work for a private educational company. No union. And I don’t put other teachers out of jobs.

347

Oh, wait. I remember. TfA is about abolishing tenure and unions…they are pro-voucher and pro-charter (Rhee, Kipp)…maybe even advocate merit pay with test score cheating thrown in, eh? Mm-hmm. Some reform.

348

Eh, as much as there is to disagree with TfA’s specific set of tactics, it’s a bald fact that tenure needs to be reformed. Tenure as protection from political persecution of established teachers and as protection of academic freedom is great–however, tenure is being construed in many places as protection from merit-based firings, which is not.

349

Wow! This is a concept I never heard of or thought of…

350

Change how one gets tenure; sure. But do away with it? It’s hard enough to keep good teachers teaching. :confused:

And even in union-heavy places like Denver, I’m well aware of many teachers who got the pink slip last year when schools started closing [to make way for charters]…they were the ‘louder’ ones - ones who challenged admin, fought for the kids, tried to do the right thing and weren’t bad teachers at all. (A few sucked and that was fine to see them go. But most were really truly wonderful human beings.) All of the union-active members at my old place were pink-slipped. Some found other jobs. A few went into early retirement. Just because you’re tenured doesn’t mean you’ll stay employed. The district (here) can keep you on ‘the list’ for a year or two and then you’re off the rolls. If you can’t be placed, there’s nothing they can do for you. Now, for shitty teachers, who cares, right? For good ones that get the boot for politics, it really stinks. (There’s an unofficial…blacklist.) And in this economy with so few teacher positions, it’s not like they have other options.

351

I just have to say the sacking of teachers and the gutting of the education system have, in my opinion, little to nothing, to do with teachers or test scores or current parenting trends. And everything to do with one group hoping to ‘privatize’ schools. This is code for predatory capitalism. Once everything else, has been moved offshore, what’s left for the profiteers?

‘For profit’, schools will prove as good for your child’s education, as, ‘for profit’, health care has been for everyone. The first step is to gut them, the second step is to pit teacher against parent. Like this thread, everybody is pointing fingers, none of them are entirely wrong.

I hate to say it, but I think it’s where all this is headed.

352

I don’t think tenure keeps good teachers teaching. I want to keep my job by being awesome, not by being hard to fire. I think teachers, like everyone, evaluate jobs based on alternatives. The rewards of teaching keep good teachers teaching, and not getting fired is much more of a reward for bad teachers than it is for good teachers.

353

I agree with this.

And Left Hand, it is hard for a teacher to want to serve in a hard to serve school if it’s so politically charged and senior teachers are telling you to keep your mouth shut, don’t rock the boat, don’t report violence on campus, pass the fuckoff basketball player who skips 70 per cent of class because the principal needs him at the game, keep your head down low and do what they say to keep your job, etc.

I have had teachers (and professors) tell me to NOT do “this” until “you’re tenured” (before we kind of did away with that in CO) with “this” being something very very obvious, like demanding rewrites or teaching history with actual history in it (that’s another subject) or implementing a certain behavior/academic plan in your class.

354

Tenure is important in a job as politicized as teaching is. What if being awesome in your job meant you had to do something that your boss and your neighbors thought was a terrible idea? This is the situation teachers sometimes find themselves in, and that’s the advantage of having tenure.

355

Indeed. Nothing like being a teacher for 5 years and making THE SAME salary as your first year. No, I am not kidding. After adjusting for inflation at that time I was making about 25% less in my fifth year as I was in my first.

That, along with being offered not much more during job interviews in my fifth year of teaching caused me to seriously re-evaluate teaching as a career. I didn’t go into teaching to be rich…but fucking hell…the purchasing power of my salary should at least go up, even if slightly, as the years go on.

Teaching is a joke. If you are thinking of entering teaching, don’t. It is a fucking joke.

356

Generally, doing things that your boss thinks is a terrible idea is a good way to get (justifiably) fired. While I can appreciate the desire to work however you want without risk of being let go, it’s not usually the way it’s done. In fact, that’s the opposite of how things are done, the boss decides how the work is to be done, and the worker bees (like me) do the job the way the boss wants it to be done. I can certainly lend my personal expertise in discussing the best way to do it, but it’s his call, because he’s the boss.

Is the education world that starved for competent management that the school executives can’t even be trusted to implement grammar school teaching criteria?

357

To the degree that that’s a problem–and it certainly is a problem in some cases–I think the solution is to fire the administration, not to create an incentive for administration to get rid of experienced teachers through backhanded methods. If administration is regularly doing their best to prevent awesomeness, we’ve got a terrible problem; why would you solve it by making it harder across the board to fire teachers?

BlinkingDuck, I know what you mean. My first year of teaching I got a $500 signing bonus for being a male working in a hard-to-serve population (I know, it was the weirdest affirmative action I’ve ever heard of, but hey, $500!) Otherwise I earned less than $30,000, but I had the understanding that I’d average a $1,000 raise every year in addition to cost-of-living increases, and that if my school made adequate growth every year (as it had been doing), I’d be in line for a $1,500 merit pay bonus. Since I was planning to start a family, this sounded difficult but doable: in my fifth year of teaching, I could look forward to about $35,500/year plus cost-of-living (about $37,300 adjusted for inflation). That’s setting aside the fact that, in 2007, our state government was discussing ways to increase NC teacher pay to bring it in line with national averages, including a proposal for an across-the-board 7% pay raise–getting me up to a respectable $39,900 by my fifth year.

Instead, the merit pay was eliminated; cost of living was eliminated; and pay-for-experience was frozen. I’m currently earning $30,850–about a 17% pay cut from what I projected (or 23% less than the most optimistic projection).

Yes, we’re in a recession. Yes, times are hard for everyone. I get that. Money sucks; I get that, too. What I DON’T get are people suggesting that teachers are overpaid, or even adequately paid.

(If nothing else, I imagine this post will give Rand Rover enough fantasy material to get him through another night of lonely drinking. It’s important to me to do good in the world.)

358

I need to see if I can find the numbers that show the increases in students, teachers, and “other” (which I presume is admin and support staff) over the years. IIRC, teacher numbers have gone up more than students (maybe not so much in the past two years, but I think this was over 10 or 20), so classrooms have shrunk, but admin/staff levels outpaced them both. I have to wonder how much this (admin) costs and if it’s necessary.

Regarding the current conversation, while I’m all for making it easier to fire lackluster teachers, I fully recognize that school administrators are often fuckwits. While I’m sure they’re out there, I have yet to meet one who strikes me as particularly competent. Normally a business that hires incompetent managers fails to one that avoids them, but schools aren’t like normal businesses. Competition is minimal, and as I wrote much earlier, I often wonder how much the “customers” actually want good teachers, as opposed to ones who won’t complain about Johny’s behavioral problems or fail the star tennis player off the team.*
*Completely unrelated, but an interesting thread topic might be “should taxpayers subsidize youth athletics”

359

Classes didn’t shrink. Classes are bigger for basic ed. Maybe the art teacher, music teacher or the reading resource room teacher has a smaller class, but no, my Geography class had 43 kids and 39 desks a few years ago.

The addition of more special ed teachers may be what you’re speaking of…here, we’re all about saving some cash with larger classes.

It really does make for some ineffective teaching. You (read: anyone) try to manage 150 kids (40 at once) and tell me how well it works. Too much admin - grading effectively, requiring re-writes, contact with parents, managing assessments - everything that ‘good teachers’ are supposed to do.

360

LHOD, if you want to make more money, why don’t you go into a field that pays better? Lots of jobs have a teaching component–I, for example, educate my colleagues, clients, and adverse parties all the time. (How’s that last sentence for a straight line?)

Also, I can get through my lonely nights of drinking witout your help, thankyouverymuch.