Double post.
Teaching has high turnover in some areas, but who are they turning over? The good ones, or the bad ones?
Now, it could be that teaching retains the good ones because the job is so tough that only the truly dedicatd will stick around. I think that’s true in some areas. But I also know a lot of teachers who just go through the motions, and it doesn’t seem to affect their careers one bit.
Zoe: Just how are you accountable, though? What happens to you if, say, you receive worse than average reports from parents about your teaching methods, or you have a habit of turning good students into unruly students, or you have a bad attitude, or in other ways don’t measure up to your peers? What are the real-world consequences?
In my company, you get an annual performance review. If you get a bad review, you get put on a remedial plan closely monitored by a manager. Your pay is also frozen - not even cost of living increases. If your next evaluation comes up negative again, you’re out the door. If you get an average or better evaluation, you’ll qualify for raises again in a year. So one bad evaluation has a minimum result of no raises for two years, plus a bunch of extra work you have to do and close supervision of your work. And of course, you can be fired at any time for a variety of sins. About 10% of employees wind up in this situation per year.
How does that compare to the consequences a teacher might face for being below average?
I’m sorry that this is so long, but you asked…
I can only tell you what happened in my school. Each year we were evaluated by one of the principals or by the Director of Curriculum and Instruction. Usually it was the DCI. She observed our classrooms and checked our lesson plans for each six weeks. She looked to see how our students were doing on proficiency tests. She sat in on parent conferences. She considered our pass/fail ratio, professional development studies, the variety of activities in the classroom. She checked our records for the number of assignments for students. Had we reported absentees to the office? Had we marked when students were tardy to class? Had we prepared report cards on time? Had we used audio-visual aids in the classroom? Had we brought in guest speakers? Had we contacted parents halfway through each six weeks period when a student was in danger of failing that six weeks? Had we participated in candy sales? This list could go on and on and on as any teacher knows.
I also volunteered to be evaluated for the “Career Ladder.” That would mean that I would receive a bonus. The evaluation had two parts. The first part was a written exam. I scored well enough on it to receive the maximum bonus. On one of the sections I had a perfect score.
The second part of the evaluation was a year long process of organization of materials as evidence of my professionalism. It covered many of the things that I described as being checked by the Director of Curriculum and Instruction, but there was much, much more. It was a matter of going through my files and pulling things out. But it was also a matter of getting letters from parents, principals and colleagues. I had to document every claim.
All of this was in preparation for the State Evaluator who came to my classroom to observe. I could choose the class. I chose one of my fundamental English classes. I remember because they knew it was important and they wanted to be so good. The evaluator later said that she had had to grade me down on classroom discipline because I hadn’t had any problems with discipline and so she hadn’t had a chance to observe how I would have handled a problem! (Of course that was her error, not mine. At any rate, I made the next level and served as a mentor teacher.
Yet, that was the year the Executive Principal tried to fire me.
Tenure is there to protect teachers from angry little know-nothing men (and women) who play pollitics with other people’s careers. They are going to have things their way and to hell with what the contract says. I filed a grievance when the principal claimed that I had been insubordinate. I knew that if it went in my record, that could be grounds for dismissal.
The ruling by the Assistant Director of Schools was in my favor. The accusation of insubordination was not allowed to be placed in my file by the Executive Principal. It was only another couple of years before he was given early retirement – at noon in the middle of the week. (He had a habit of doing things like this.)
But I have seen teachers fired. I’ve seen three of them fired for being involved with students. (Two on the same day!) Many teachers never make it to tenure. (I have seen a principal try to fire a non-tenured teacher for letting his hair grow out back in 1969.) Tenured teachers can be fired for conduct unbecoming a professional, leaving their post of duty, and insubordination. I knew one woman who was too crazy to teach. She was a graduate of Columbia, but she was becoming senile. She kept trying to drive off in the principal’s car. Her car was a white Cadillac and he had a red Volvo. She would lock her classroom door and not let students in. The list went on and on. They got her to retire and then she was murdered.
One method that was used to get rid of teachers was to harass them into quitting. One teacher in our department had built her life around teaching. It was everything to her and she was very good at it. But she had been teaching for about 30 years and she had her Masters Degree + 45 which meant that she was making a lot of money. The school needed to cut her and hire a new English teacher at an entrance salary. So they started putting the pressure on her. She began missing school and they harassed her about her attendance. She became very depressed which just made it all worse. She was so depressed that when she found a lump in her breast, she didn’t see a doctor. She was dead by graduation.
Another English teacher who was also the bookkeeper had taken over 35,000 dollars in school funds. She put a bulletin through her brain.
I had quit the year before on disability from depression. Three out of eight gone in no time.
Most of the actual incompetence that I saw was in new teachers that hadn’t been weeded out yet. (I’m talking about teachers who were teaching American history who didn’t know that Russia was an Ally during World War II.) That’s why I support higher standards for teachers and a nationally required teachers’ exam.
Sometimes principals are too afraid of fighting for the dismissal of those teachers who really are not qualified. It takes a lot of time and effort and principals don’t have a lot of spare time on their hands. No one in the field of education does.
Good grief another teacher bashing thread with the majority of the participants only connection to the profession is having once been a student. I wonder how many dentists get people telling them how to do the job. I don’t have the patience at the moment for empirical research, so I am going for the anecdotal.
I have a friend who is a special education room with 10 emotionally and behaviorally disabled urban high school students. These young men (by a 10-1 margin these rooms are male) have hit him, threatened to stab him, and kill his family, and they like him. For most of them, he is the only male figure in their lives that doesn’t spend the majority of their time in jail. Some of them are in foster care, some of them spend their afternoons in treatment centers, at least three of them have mothers with drug addiction problems. Half these young men are fathers.
This man does manage to teach, but he has to teach all subjects and has to break them up into 15 minute blocks to keep relative calm in the room.
I am also a special education teacher at a charter school. My students are also urban youth, but my population is different. We don’t have any self contained rooms. I make about 8,000 dollars less a year than my friend does. There isn’t enough money in the world to make me trade places.
I think furt is probably right, but here’s an idea:
Let’s pick out one medium sized school district, spend a ton of money there, and see if we get good results. Build world class facilities; raise teacher pay by 40%; spare no expense; and see what happens over 10 or 15 years.
Oh, wait a sec, that was already tried in Kansas City and it was a complete failure
JEE-ZUZ!
Where do you live, man? Are they hiring?
I’m in my 7th year of teaching, with my masters, and I only make more than 10 of the people on the list. And I’d be willing to bet one or two of the ones I make more than are aides of some sort (or not full-time teachers), given the other numbers I see. (Full disclosure: in my district, I’m probably right around the 35th percentile for salary.) I am very well aware that different states have different standards for teachers; I could name three states where I could easily see another 10k above what I do.
I don’t know, but if you agree that it’s difficult to distinguish between good teachers and bad teachers, then how will raising teacher pay make any difference?
Incompetent people are at least as motivated by money as competent people, as far as I know.
:shrug: If dentists were paid with public funds and they (or their unions) claimed that increasing dentist salaries would improve the quality of dental care, then they could reasonably expect some skepticism and hostile questions from the taxpayers. Particularly if there were many dental school graduates who could not find jobs.
You’re damn right it was. I’ve posted on here about the Kansas City school district and how throwing tons of money at it resulted in more problems than they started with (I used to work with teachers to do Engineering demonstrations in the District) but I’m not going to waste my time doing so again.
That’s human nature. People tend to favor public policies which serve their own perceived interests.
Here’s a question for the OP or any other teacher who thinks that teachers should be paid more to attract more people into teaching:
Since you are already a teacher, raising your pay (or the pay of other current teachers) will have very little effect on your decision to become a teacher. If the goal is to incentivize the most capable people to become teachers, clearly the more effective way to spend 700 billion dollars would be to dramatically raise salaries only for teachers who start after 2009. At the same time, one should cut the salaries of current teachers so that the worst ones will be incentivized to leave the profession and make room for the superstars who are on the way. While it’s true that this may cause some good people to quit, these are all people from the pool of losers and incompetents who were becoming teachers before the big Pay Raise. So on average, the pool of teachers will improve and that’s what’s most important for the students.
Would you support such a policy?
Well no, but thats because it is grossly unfair.
I think I’m a good example here. In 2010 I am going to be looking for a job. I’ll have spent the last four years teaching high school and college on two continents. During that time I’ve proven to be a pretty good and dedicated teacher. I’ve also picked up some specialized skills that I imagine will be useful in the districts I’d be interested in teaching in. I think I am the kind of person you all want to hire.
I have to start making decisions soon about what to do in the future. It looks like I’d be able to start teaching immediately, without going to grad school. Big plus. And I’m eligable for some programs where I could get paid a teacher’s salary and basically get free tuition while getting an MA in education. It’s a sweet deal.
But there are a lot of other things I could do. I could just as easily go to law school. Even though I’d probably want to work for non-profits and not be rolling in dough, I’d probably end up with more cash than a teacher. I may also want to find a job with an overseas NGO, where I can make more money and have a bit more excitement and room for career advancement. Or I could bounce around some American Schools abroad for a while. They get good money and I wouldn’t have to deal with a lot of the problems teachers in America face. Or I could go back to school, get an advanced degree in something specialized like Sino-African business relations, and put my experience to work doing business or getting involved in government stuff. Or get the education I need to start teaching college, where I’d have a more interesting intellectual life and make more money.
So right now teaching is my back up plan, not my first choice. And I’ve already pretty much decided that if I do it, I will only do it for a few years while I figure out a “real” career. What needs to happen is people like me need to be convinced that teaching is a good first choice and that I should stick with it. You need people to choose teaching, not fall into it. I’m not sure money is all it would take, but it would help.
I didn’t want to muddle up this thread, so I started my own on administrators.
Come on in and enjoy the show!
No, because that’s a profoundly stupid policy whose effects you’ve not thought through.
As I said, bad teachers are often teachers because it’s the best money they can get. Good teachers are often teachers because they can afford, barely, to survive on the salary while doing something that they feel makes a difference.
If you reduce pay for current teachers, the good teachers who are barely making ends meet will say, “Screw it!” and move en masse to get a different job. I could, as I said, probably be earning double what I’m earning now, if I decided to do computer work. I teach because I think it’s worth doing. I’m not complaining, but I will say that if my salary dropped significantly, I would leave the profession–and I think I’m a pretty good teacher.
The bad teachers won’t be motivated to leave the profession by a drop in salary, at least not significantly motivated, because they’re not qualified to do much else.
Your proposal would scrape away many of the current good teachers. It’s a profoundly dumb proposal.
Daniel
How exactly is it unfair? If the goal is to recruit teachers from a pool of elite superstars, then why should we hand a windfall to teachers who did not have to jump all of these hurdles?
Anyway, shouldn’t staffing schools with the best quality teachers be the top priority, even if it means pushing out a few decent people along with the incompetents?
Assuming for the sake of argument that you would make a good teacher, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you need to be further incentivized to choose teaching. If there are 5000 wannabe teachers who are just as good as you or better; and only 4000 open slots next year, then there is no need to raise teachers’ pay to further encourage you to go into teaching.
As someone point out, there are a lot of positive aspects to teaching in public school. The pay and job security are pretty good compared to a lot of private sector jobs. The benefits tend to be very good. The job isn’t dirty like being a garbageman. The days and hours aren’t as demanding as most full time professional jobs. And you get a good deal of autonomy.
All of these things attract many bright young people every year into teaching and so far, nobody has demonstrated a shortage of qualified applicants.
:shrug: Plenty of people are already choosing teaching. Why do we need more?
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. A lousy teacher might be pretty close to quitting anyway. But anyway, it’s not an essential part of the policy.
You could just leave the pay for current teachers alone and give the Big Raise to teachers who start after 2009.
Good grief. Didja even read that? The problem there is that they ONLY threw money at the problem. They didn’t do anything about incompetent administrators or teachers.
I’m not proposing raising teacher salaries in a vacuum–maybe you’ve noticed. I’ve proposed raising salaries, raising standards, making teaching self-regulating in the way law and medicine are self-regulated, and reducing class sizes. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I’m also in favor of eliminating tenure, and I’m in favor of intelligent merit-pay proposals (merit pay based on raw student achievement scores is idiotic, equivalent to paying doctors based on how healthy their patients are; intelligent merit pay tracks individual student achievement over time and projects individual potential student achievement based on past achievement, then averages these projections and compares them to actual average student achievement, for each individual teacher).
Daniel
As the wife of a teacher, hell no. Do you think that all of the current good teachers don’t need to pay the mortgage, buy groceries, and put clothes on their own kids’ backs? You would drive out countless dedicated professionals with decades of experience. This isn’t the 1940s where most teachers were single women who didn’t have to support a family. My husband and I have made the decision that it’s worth it to us to live a more modest lifestyle so that he can teach. But if it gets to the point where we can’t support our own family on our joint incomes, he would be forced to leave the profession.
Okay, sure, that’s much more reasonable. And if you’re dealing with a species other than humans–say, a species without a hardwired sense of justice–this might work. It’s an efficient approach, and if I take myself out of the equation, it seems fine.
But our species has a strong innate sense of justice, especially when it comes to our own sorry asses. A proposal like the one you’ve made would torpedo morale among current teachers. If it applies to individual districts, you create a strong incentive for good teachers to move to a different district, which disrupts all kinds of things.
It might be workable–it might not have unintended consequences other than destroying morale. But the morale destruction would make it unworkable.
Daniel
Heh. The pay isn’t good compared to jobs with equivalent levels of schooling. The job security is.
True.
I love the baselines you’re setting. It’s also not clean like being a secretary or accountant. When was the last time you cleaned up vomit at work? I don’t teach kindergarten, or I’d be cleaning up shit and piss as well. How often do you pick up used Kleenex? How often do you bandage other people’s bloody scrapes?
There’s a job I heard about where this guy dons a wetsuit and goes diving into a sewage treatment plant to do repairs. Hey, teaching’s not as dirty as that guy’s job! Now there’s a positive! 
Of equivalent pay? Are you kidding? If I were paid hourly, I could earn more money cleaning cages at the animal shelter.
Spoken like someone who has no idea what he’s talking about. My schedule is so strict that, if I follow it exactly, I can teach science OR social studies for fifteen minutes a week. I break the schedule sometimes in order to teach what I think are essential subjects, but I know that when I do, I’m breaking district rules. We have tremendous oversight.
Brazil, why on earth do you think you have the expertise even to comment in these threads?
Daniel
Counter-anecdote: most of the incompetence I see is in teachers who are within striking distance of retirement. They are jaded, burnt out, and in a rut. They haven’t stayed current on best practice, and so rely on some pretty unengaging teaching methods, and/or the same worksheets they’ve been using for decades. They are out of touch with kids, and often seem not to like them anymore. Yet they are stuck because they have to put in their 30 years or 35 or whatever they are striving for to get a certain amount of pension. There is really no way to get rid of these people, because they aren’t breaking any rules, but often the kids hate them and their classes are stultifying. They are also making the most money and teaching the choicest classes.
The attrition rate is mostly comprised of new teachers.Half of new teachers quit within the first five years. Why? Poor working conditions and low salary. You can’t even know if a person is going to be a great teacher in the first year or so, because there’s a steep learning curve in the first couple of years; so much about teaching can’t be learned in a college course, but must be discovered on the job. As for teacher shortages, the attrition rate is highest in the poorest schools, so you get higher turnover in districts with the neediest kids, and if they pay isn’t up to snuff, of course people will be leaving, for better conditions and higher pay-- the good teachers and the bad.