Fired Up

   The differences between people in education and people in the corporate world are vast. I am often in awe of some of the things that I am told about or experience for myself in the world of education. One of the things that I cannot fathom is the fact that despite the problems, no one seems to want to stand up and make changes. It seems that the people that do want to make changes are thrown to the wolves by the very people that ask for it. In Washington DC, Michelle Rhee was steeped in controversy for her handling of DC schools. She took a down district and made some radical changes. She offered teachers a lot more money, but at the risk of dissolving unions. In Texas, unions do not hold as much power up north, but they have still shaped the fabric of the system that we live in.

  No matter where you work, firing someone is a process. There are certain instances where firing someone is pretty cut and dry. In teaching those thing wind up in the news. However, what happens when you have a teacher that is toxic, or one that is wanting to read the paper more than teach? To get rid of that teacher it actually is a lot harder than you might think. Administration places them on a growth plan. If for some reason administration does not follow through on the growth plan then the growth plan is invalidated and the procedure would have to start over again. Only when it can be shown that the growth plan has been failed by the teacher then they can start the proceedings to be fired. This long process has to be followed to the letter. The contracts that hold teachers to their jobs also protect the teachers from being fired needlessly.

   The system is broken. It is known that bad teachers are out there. They can hurt things more than anyone else. I know of them in my school. I also know that some of them are protected because they are involved in programs that are deemed important. They continue to teach, or not teach, and the product of that system results in students that are ill prepared for the world. I think that the districts loose sight of this. It does not matter if the teacher is there doing something else. Bad teachers do more harm than good. I look at it like this. If a child starts out with a bad teacher in their 9th grade year, they may only get 50 percent of what they were taught. Then move that in to 10th grade and they are 50 percent behind. The student still moves to the next grade because bad teachers do not fail that many kids. They have to deflect suspicion.  The student then gets in a teacher's class that is bad for the second straight year. They loose out on 50% more of the education they would get with a competent teacher. They are behind a whole year by the time they go into 11th grade. Districts have to look at the pros and the cons of keeping good teachers in the classrooms and bad teachers out of the classrooms.

  What I look at when I get together with teachers or hear from friends. I hear that the kind of teachers that are getting flack from administrators are teachers that have not been affiliated with special programs like athletics. In fact, some of the worse teachers that are with the athletic programs are protected. We have to prioritize the education of students first. I have a friend that is catching a lot of flack right now because she does not get a long with an administrator. She is a friend, and I cannot comment on her teaching ability, as I have never seen her teach. She is really intelligent and is a person that does not compromise her values. She has been put on a spit at the school she works at. A teacher she works with, I know only in passing, is a coach that has on several occasions made serious errors in his class. He however has not even been talked to by their administration. If we want to fix the system we have to trim the fat. It is the answer that is the best for kids. Districts have to do this. The kids demand it. As a teacher that considers themselves a decent one, I have seen what two years of a system that caters to keeping bad ones in their place.

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
John F. Kennedy

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Back in Black

It has been a while, in fact an entire semester of school has gone by, but I return to you ready to spin a few more stories about education. My absence has been a mix of being busy and probably some frustrations with the education system. See where I work the morale has gone right out of the window. A place which two years ago was a beacon of positivity has now become a place that is a shadow of its former self. Each day it seems there is another problem that is forcing us to reevaluate the way that we do things. Friends are contemplating leaving education. People at school that I talk with are thinking about leaving. The entire school seems to be angry. This dark shadow is not unique to my school. In fact it is happening all over. I spoke with several people that have talked about how hard this last semester was, how tired they are, and how they are having trouble getting up each morning. This comes on the heels of the massive layoffs in the state, and larger class sizes for everyone.

    Apathy of the kids and lessening parent involvement are just a few of the problems that have created a negative outlook by teachers today. The last part has to do with the people in charge of the system. This is where we make decisions to try and better our numbers that actually create more problems than they solve. In the corporate world management often makes problematic decisions. Often this results in dissension among the lower ranks, but if the policy does not increase revenue then the change is out. In education there is no real way to measure how the product is affected. The decisions that are made are often not evaluated months down the line to determine their effectiveness, and the decisions that are thrown out often show the easiest decision that impacts only staff and does not cause any waves in the community. Ask a teacher, any teacher, about how he or she feels about administration and decisions they have made recently, and I can bet you that they can give you a list of problems. Now I realize that not everyone is a teacher, so I will give you an example. The best example is to take our make-up test requirement. In theory this sounds like a great idea. You take a kid that failed a test and give him the option of making up a test to get a 70. It is hard to argue with that. Then you make it mandatory for all teachers because the grades and the retention rates in schools are getting higher than you would like to see. The result is lower retention rates, but the collateral damage is that a lot of these kids now rely on that safety net all the way through the year. They come to you with the knowledge that failure is not an option for you, not for them. It is this attitude that reminds me of the A and E show Hoarders. There are a lot of shows like it, but these people live in houses that are so piled with clutter that they are unable to get themselves out of it. The attitude that these administrators have is very similar to the Hoarders themselves. They know there is a problem, but ignore the larger issue. They keep on going until the entire house is rotting, and the city is condemning where they live and threatening to kick them out. We are in a similar situation. There is a problem, but the powers at be are ignoring it. They think that more stuff with solve the issue. Another policy will fix it. It does not. In fact it just keeps getting worse. The entire thing keeps getting worse. This creates a problem with the people in the system because they know that it is not fixing the issue. Inevitably, at some point the system starts to falter and another band-aid is needed. When will the cycle stop? If you want to fix the morale problem in education you start at the source. Stop making bad decisions.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Mark Twain


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