Trial begins in lawsuit by nine Los Angeles public school students challenging California’s ironclad tenure system, arguing that their right to a good education is violated by job protections that make it too difficult to fire bad instructors.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-02T02:25:04+00:00

The public system is failing

Actually, the data seems to suggest otherwise.

http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html

The problem isn't "the public system". This is a far more complicated topic than that.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-02T02:15:49+00:00

The best teachers are the ones who arent here to earn a living, they just do it because they like it

I have to take issue with that comment. For starters, teaching because not for the pay but because you love to teach doesn't make you a good teacher. When I was a teacher, the worst colleagues of mine--and there were some horrible ones--were there because they loved to teach. Secondly, I think teachers are shooting themselves in the foot by continuing to say things like this. Of course you're there because it's what you want to do, but you're fulfilling one of the most critical roles in society, and you should be compensated and treated like the goddamn professionals you are.

Sorry for being picky. It's just a pet peeve of mine, I suppose.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-02T02:10:04+00:00

I just wrote a few comments on that topic; click on my name and take a look if you want to see my opinion. I'm too worn out to keep typing on the subject :)

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-02T02:04:30+00:00

I agree with everything you wrote.

I do want to mention, however, that it's always amazed me how easily distracted everyone in Kansas City is with the school board antics and how they neglect to actually look at what's occurring every day in the schools. The Kansas City Star constantly writes about the drama on the school board as if it's some reality show, but where are the articles about the horrible, horrible conditions inside the schools? Or the articles talking about how the Code of Conduct isn't even enforced? I sure as hell never saw anyone writing about how many science classrooms lack even basic equipment--which especially problematic considering, as you point out, that the district does spend a lot of money per student.

The amount of bullshit that occurs in that district is unbelievable, and yet it seems that all anyone wants to do is talk about the school board. There are other problems that need attention as well.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-02T01:53:31+00:00

I agree that having an evaluation done two or three times a year is a horrible way to assess teachers.

However, using an impersonal metric that doesn't measure teacher quality is also a terrible way to go about it. Let me give you an example. When I was teaching, I had multiple students who refused to take the state exam. These girls became extremely disruptive and distracted the other students in the room, and after about an hour the principal finally removed them. They sat in the library, gave an entirely half-assed effort, and scored at the very bottom. Should their test scores be viewed as a reflection of my instruction? Or what about one of my students who spent over half of the year arguing, yelling at me, and starting fights in my class only to show up one day willing to learn, polite, and non-confrontational--all because his family moved out of a homeless shelter into an apartment. Is it my fault that he was homeless and that it affected his education? Of course not. Or what about the multitude of other problems a teacher has to encounter that aren't his fault, or the fact that sometimes students really aren't motivated to learn. Students are also responsible for putting forth effort and attempting to learn what's being taught-it's not all on the teacher.

This is why metrics bother me. It's horribly unscientific to make a broad metric that connects test scores to a teacher's job security--while ignoring the many hundreds of other variables that affect them, and dangle that over their head with the threat of dismissal. If you have children, is that the environment you want in their schools? I sure hope not.

Not only are they not accurate, but they were originally designed as a prescription to problems in low-income schools--a solution borne out of political expediency. Unfortunately, this rubbish is being pushed in a lot of other schools, and the average layperson doesn't understand why it's bad idea. Instead, they see in the newspaper that there's a push to "hold teachers accountable", which sounds nice, or to "measure their job performance", which also sounds nice.

It's at this point in these discussions that someone usually says, "but you're just complaining and not offering any solutions. It's better that we do something than nothing!"

Well, something isn't better than nothing if that something will actually make things worse. But it's okay, I do have some potential solutions.

I think it would be far more effective for schools to have individuals who serve as master-educators, or teacher coaches. Basically, their job is to conduct regular observations of the teachers in the building and provide constructive feedback. If the teacher is doing well, then it might be a rather short feedback session. You can also have educators provide samples of student-learning to show that it's occurring. Many people have put a lot of work into this very topic, and there are ways to do it. However if there are educators who are struggling, then they can be given the support they need to improve. The master-teacher can co-teach three or four lessons with the struggling teacher, send him to observe successful educators at other schools in the area, provide daily feedback about what went well and what did not, target specific areas to improve, and provide support in other helpful ways. But if that teacher continues to prove unsatisfactory, then dismiss him and hire someone else.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-02T01:25:00+00:00

It's been my experience that there is a process to do so (since I've seen it happen multiple times); the problem, however, is that if you follow the chain of command, you'll almost always find someone who isn't doing his job.

Instead of bitching about the process, it would be far more helpful to demand that people actually use it.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-02T01:21:02+00:00

This topic can be tricky.

Many teachers are willing to endure the low pay, long hours, and sometimes poor working conditions because that's the only job they can see themselves doing. Some people are motivated by things other than money.

However, as a staffing policy, I think it's absolutely insane to expect to fill our schools with good teachers by keeping the pay low and hoping that maybe, just maybe, everyone we hire will be a sort of devoted secular missionary who's willing to endure low pay to do what he or she loves. I've personally seen many good teachers leave the profession for this reason. I know one individual who left to be a welder in the machine shop for a local power company, and he started off with more than double the income, over a month of vacation time, and less hours. I also personally know many people who want to be teachers, but realize that it isn't going to provide the income they need to achieve some of their goals in life.

Instead of continuing to offer low salaries and hope for the best, why not do what everyone else does: offer a more attractive salary, benefits package, and better working conditions in order to attract more talented people?

It's at this point when teachers who, for whatever reason, wear their low salaries as a badge of honor, usually point out that the "best and brightest" aren't always the best teachers. And they're right; they're not. I'd also point out that you're not a good teacher just because it's your passion and you're willing to sacrifice better pay to do it; I've seen plenty of passionate teachers who are terrible at teaching. But do you honestly think that offering better pay and benefits is going to attract worse people to the profession? I don't think anyone can honestly make that argument.

But I suppose what really gets to me is that teachers are tasked with, in my opinion, one of the most important roles in society. That alone should justify better pay and working conditions. And yet, a district manager at a rental car company can make a better living. Hell, a friend of mine who drove a truck made far more than I did. Personally, I think the fact that teachers make what they make is a sign that our society only values education superficially (or views it as little more than job training, but that's a different topic).

As for reducing class sizes and hiring more teachers at the current salaries, I'm not sure. Personally, I feel that a smaller class size leads to a better education. I have far too much direct experience to be convinced otherwise. However, the moment you even mention this, someone will parrot around multiple different studies that claim to say otherwise. Of course, I'm very skeptical of much of the research that's done in education; it's too easy to put together research that supports your premise, and there are plenty of organizations who appear to do just that. I wouldn't be opposed to it--especially if it gives teachers more time to collaborate with their colleagues--but I think the likelihood of it happening is pretty low.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T20:15:17+00:00

You're absolutely right. Sometimes that's the biggest problem.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T20:08:58+00:00

I've written about this in great detail on some education blogs, and I'll try to give you a quick overview of my opinion.

First, if we're truly concerned about bad teachers, then perhaps we should take a look at who we're attracting to the profession. In my state, teachers are lucky to start at $30K per year. So who do you think is going to work a low-paid job that requires many unpaid hours of work (I had at between two to five hours of work that I took home every day), provides very little autonomy, and often comes with a poor working environment? Well, you get what you pay for. Now there are many great people who endure the low pay because that's the only profession they want to do, but you also attract a lot of people who we'd be better off without. Perhaps if teacher quality is truly a concern, the very first thing we should do is make the profession more attractive by offering higher pay, better benefits, better working conditions, more autonomy, etc.

But I'm skeptical about this obsession with bad teachers. To me, it's entirely politically motivated.

Are there bad teachers? Yes, we've all had them. I did, and I'm sure you did. I even saw some when I taught. But are bad teachers the cause of our problems in education? I really don't think so.

It's been a few years since I looked at the data, but the last time I examined the PISA results (which are often used to say "look, look how the United States is middle-of-the-road compared to the rest of the world), I found that schools with low levels of poverty outperformed the rest of the world and schools with high levels of poverty were at the bottom. The United States has very high levels of low-income children, and I've seen firsthand how that complicates education. My school had over 92% of its students on free and reduced lunch programs.

In fact, I think it's worth pointing out that nearly all of these "education reform" solutions were originally designed as responses to problems that exist in low-income schools. It's only been in recent years that there's been a huge push to put them in everyone's schools.

And this brings us to the issue of creating a metric based upon test scores to judge teachers. On the surface, it seems like a great idea. After all, if the teacher does a good job teaching, then the test scores should reflect that, right? Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. I had students who were so disruptive that they refused to do any assignments, take notes, complete exams, or do anything of relevance all year. I also had students who showed up take state exams distracted by family drama, unable to clearly see the test since their parents had neglected to buy them glasses, complaining that their cavities were so painful that they couldn't focus, and plagued by a myriad of other issues. I even had two girls one year who threw the test on the ground and refused to take it. They proceeded to talk so loudly that it distracted everyone in the room. I also dealt with a transient population of students, and I had numerous students who arrived within months of the state exam.

Should their performance be tied to my job security?

I can go on for days about all of the variables that come into play when determining test scores, I really can, but the point is this: there's too much going on to just single out "teacher quality" and tie them to the scores. Even if you make an attempt to modify the metric and account for other variables, you really can't. They differ from classroom to classroom, school to school, district to district, etc.

It's at this point that people normally suggest that doing something, even if it's not perfect, is better than doing nothing. And I agree. The problem is that not only do I think these solutions will fail to weed out bad teachers (hell, many of them will just drill-and-kill whatever is going to be on the test, and that's not the kind of classrooms we want), I think that imposing a generalized and impersonal metric on teachers only further serves to make the profession unattractive to the sort of talent it desperately needs.

If I'm a bright, talented, high-performing college student, I already know that I can make at least double the starting salary by going into a field like chemical engineering, I know that teaching offers high hours, high stress, and numerous other issues that I've already mentioned. Now add on top of that the realization that my job security is going to be tied to a metric that could easily identify me as a bad teacher due to issues that are outside of my control--a metric that was designed not to give me helpful feedback, but to fire bad teachers. Great, that's just another reason why I should avoid education.

So what should be done about this?

Honestly, it's not that difficult to tell if a teacher is doing his job. It really isn't. Ask the teachers in any school who's good and who's bad, and I'm sure you'll hear the same names from nearly every person. Instead of using a metric, I think it would be more beneficial to have more in-depth observations or interaction with a master-teacher or someone whose job is to provide instructional support. But I'm not suggesting a few observations a year or a person who's constantly watching and looking for teachers to screw up. Depending on the class, require examples of student mastery or student learning. Observe multiple labs in science classes. Hell, require that science teachers have their students doing science instead of reading about it. Have a regular presence that provides helpful feedback, encourages teachers to use their own teaching style as long as it works, and identifies those who need help. If a teacher is struggling, then provide more observations, more help, co-teach a few classes and see if they can learn by the example of the master-teacher, and send them to observe other teachers in the area who are known for being exceptional. If they can't improve and still struggle after receiving all of that support, then dismiss them.

There's a lot of voices in the education community that have written a lot about effective observation systems that are done properly, so I'm not going to rehash what's already been said. I also don't have the time to go point by point into how it works since I'm already rambling on a bit much. If my memory serves me correctly, Anthony Cody has written extensively about this very topic. You might look through some of his blogs and see what you can find, and that might help you encounter some others who are discussing the topic.

Anyway, I hope that helped. I'm sure I forgot to mention a few things, and I'm usually a bit more concise with my writing, but I'm already spending more time on this than I wanted to :)

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T19:27:17+00:00

Except I did say it's a problem. It's just less of an issue than others.

Actually, it's been my experience that burned out and unmotivated teachers are that way for a reason; often times, they're simply the result of serious issues for which they have no control or recourse of action.

Let me give you an example.

I taught in a district that's been said to be one of the worst in the United States, and I taught at a school that was--at the time--the lowest performing in the district. At my school, a student could literally tell you to "get the fuck out of my face" when you ask him to take notes or participate in class, throw pencils at you while you're teaching, start screaming at someone else and stand up ready to fight, actually start a fight, or break markers and thrown them all over the room so that the floor is covered with colored liquids...and no matter what, the principal would not intervene or even allow you to send the students to the office. I had a girl shove me into my desk, and I sent her to the office knowing full well what would happen. Right on cue a few minutes later, I get a call from my principal. "Umm...Mr. John Doe, why is So and So in my office?...Oh, well, you need to call her mother and discuss this with her...No, I'm sending her back to class".

Now, imagine that you have to deal with that bullshit every single day, every class, sometimes for up to 50% of a given class. As you do this, you realize that the many good students in the room are having their education stolen from while the students in the nearby suburbs are having largely uninterrupted and safe instructional time.

As much as you want to be upset at the disruptive students--which often amount to ten or twenty percent of the kids--you see that their homes are violent, that their parents are screwed up (my worst student's mother was literally a crack whore), you hear stories about how they've been shot at or seen family members killed, and you realize that they're this way for a reason. Oh, and don't even think about providing them with counseling services. You have one counselor at the school, and she's so overworked with other irrelevant duties that she barely has time to meet with students.

But instead of the school offering a place for students to participate in safe activities after classes are over--you know, so they can avoid a bad home life as much as possible--you see that your school has been gutted of any extracurricular programs. There's sports once they get to high school, but the middle school students have been moved into elementary buildings because of some past superintendent's desire to create "community schools".

While the cards may be stacked against you, it's still important to do the best job you can. Hell, maybe if you make class exciting enough, the problem students will be less disruptive and everyone else will learn more. So you look around at your options, and you realize that you have less than $200 per year to buy supplies for your class. The problem is that you teach science. You're lucky to get one microscope for your class. So what do you do? Well, you take your $33,000 salary and start spending your own money because you genuinely want your students to succeed. Of course, most of what you've bought has been utterly ruined by a handful of students by the end of the year, and they also disrupted most of your labs, but you know you're going to do it again next year because the alternative--that your students don't have the opportunity to experience science and instead are stuck reading about it in a textbook--is completely unacceptable.

So you go home, buy a pizza and some drinks to relieve the stress, and read in the newspaper that your new superintendent who has no education experience and is given a monthly car allowance that's larger than your two-week paycheck is not trying to make the schools safer, isn't trying to fund your classrooms, and isn't trying to help the families in the area or provide safe extracurricular activities for the students. No, he's blaming you for the problems. In fact, he's quite explicitly saying that teachers are the problem here.

And then you go to school one day, and you see that your principal has hired a consultant (who makes far more than you) to take up your planning time with meetings about collaborative solutions. Okay, you say. Let's get rid of the principal, get rid of half of the administrators, fund our classrooms, fund a quality alternative school for the disruptive students, hire child psychologists to help students work through their emotional issues that prevent them from learning, fund extracurricular activities, hire a few more security officers to keep an eye on the buildings, stop hiring superintendents who are little more than local politicians, give teachers autonomy over their classrooms, and a whole list of other changes that would make the schools a better place.

But no, this consultant isn't here to listen to that. Instead, she wants to know what you can do throughout the day to improve education in your classroom, as if you haven't been spending thousands of dollars of your own money, staying until 7pm at night planning your lessons and grading papers, tutoring students for the local science fair on your own time, making home visits to parts of town that you make you feel unsafe, and sacrificing your own health and emotional well-being to be a sort of unappreciated, secular missionary. There's always something more you can give, and you suddenly realize that your school, which won't buy sufficient science equipment, will gladly pay this woman many thousands of dollars to get you in a room to brainstorm additional ways you can give. Just wrap your head around that last sentence.

Now imagine that you've been doing this twenty years or more, you've seen nearly twelve superintendents during that time--all with their pet programs, big promises, and utter failures--and you realize that if you just hold on a bit longer, you can retire and rid yourself of all of this bullshit. You're stressed out, you've watched as some of the most beautiful and amazing children grow up, start wearing the gang colors, get pregnant, graduate if they're lucky, and over time start sending their emotionally troubled children back to your classroom, and you have to watch as these wonderful children are now impoverished adults exactly like their parents were. It'll drive you to drink, I tell you.

I'm not defending lazy and unmotivated teachers, but after teaching, I can understand why they're that way. But I also realize that they're often--not always, but often--a symptom of much large issues that need to be addressed first.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T18:56:48+00:00

You'd be surprised at how many incompetent superintendents go from one district to the next, screwing up each one for about four or five years, and earning salaries in excess of $250-300K. John Covington is a perfect example. He rode into Kansas City on his white horse from the Broad Foundation's superintendents academy (a foundation run by a weathy right-wing billionaire), instituted a ton of new policies and closed down dozens of schools, screwed up a number of great programs and dumped one of the worst high schools into a successful college prep program (totally destroyed it), and a few years later left the district in shambles for a job overseeing the worst schools in Michigan for $1.5 million over the next four years.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T18:48:00+00:00

^ Don't feed the troll, guys.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T18:42:41+00:00

It's obvious you've never taught. Oh please, continue to bless us with your enlightened prescriptions for reform of a job that you've never done. While you're at it, pick a few other professions and let us know how to fix their problems.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T18:39:10+00:00

That's strange, because I've seen multiple tenured teachers fired.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T18:34:45+00:00

Hey, lets accept a politicized framework for this issue and get really upset about one of the lesser problems in the education system.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T18:30:35+00:00

Jesus, it's almost as if your opinion is an exact copy of political talking points or a talk show rant.

Oh please, do tell us what you really think.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T18:26:03+00:00

After teaching in an urban district and watching administrators target good teachers for vindictive, personal reasons, I have to disagree. It still amazes me how harmful some principals and administrators can be.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T18:15:27+00:00

I was with you until I read your edit. We need to treat our educators as professionals; subjecting them to problematic metrics that are based on a narrow definition of education is not the way to do this. I'm surprised that you as an educator would be willing to work under such a policy. I think this obsession with test scores and "teacher quality" metrics is ultimately harmful and leading to an even more industrialized environment than we already have.

lawanddisorder · 2014-02-01T18:04:02+00:00

You got it. The presence of a shitty teacher almost always means that there's a principal or administrator not doing his job. Tenure protections don't prevent you from being fired, it just means there's a process that must be followed. It irritates me how many people misunderstand this.

Source: Former teacher here.

ariellecyan · 2014-02-01T17:38:40+00:00

Thanks for telling me how Herman Cain and Sean Hannity feel. But why do you feel the need to take up this issue? Personally, I'd rather see some effort to raise their wages knowing that it would improve a lot of people's lives. The potential impact of such actions on inflation and hiring are debatable.

ariellecyan · 1 day

Do you have a vested interest in people being paid shit wages? I'm trying to understand your motivation for having that opinion instead of one where people should be fairly compensated for their work.

bluenaut · 1 day

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to add that to my wish list so I don't forget it. I can find an old version somewhere.

swefpelego · 2 days

Oh, this is brilliant; thank you making me laugh! I suppose you can say that I'm now making mouth noises...

bluenaut · 2 days

I don't see how there isn't death built into the system

I never really thought about that, but you make a good point. Part of what prompted me to ask this question was a conversation I had with a close friend of mine; he's begun volunteering with the homeless and tutoring at a low-income school, so we got to talking about the politics of poverty since I have a lot of experience with teaching in an impoverished community. After we had a few drinks, I openly stated that I think the existence of poor people is just a byproduct of our economic system and that while it's entirely possible for a kid in a rough part of town to leave that life behind, the old work harder/get an education/learn a better skill prescription isn't scalable for the entire low-income population. While this is just my opinion, it seems to me that there just aren't enough well-paying jobs to employ everyone at a middle-class level or above. For whatever reason, this seemed to make him upset, and he felt the need to go on a rant about why utopias are impossible as well as some ill-informed polemic on communism--which I didn't even bring up. I quickly ended the conversation since it reeked of cultural conditioning and I got the distinct impression that he didn't even understand what he was talking about (i.e. communism is bad, and I can't talk about it for more than thirty seconds, but it's still bad). I mean, I have degrees in politics and history, and even I feel like those subjects are way over my head at times.

Anyway...not to get off topic.

I'm definitely referring to relative poverty, just to clear that up. I know that the poor in the United States have it pretty good compared not only to folks in the past, but an enormous portion of the people alive right now. I guess I've come to hold the opinion, however, that the same mindset of continual improvement that we so often apply in the business world should also be actively applied to our culture, economics, and politics (of course that depends upon what you define as improvement). While things aren't so bad in perspective, we can certainly do a hell of a lot better. I guess I just get frustrated when people not only seem unwilling to improve anything, but act as if what we have now is best that can be done--and take absolute delight in divulging the reasons why they believe it to be.

I guess I believe that if our system truly does necessitate poverty for a portion of the population, then improving or even replacing it is a matter of utmost concern...which is what brought me here. I wanted to see if I'm missing something, and this subreddit has always been helpful for pointing me in the direction of relevant data or summarizing the prevailing viewpoints on a topic.

bluenaut

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