Why Parents Want Their Kids to Stay Out of Teaching

This year's annual PDK/Gallup Poll of public attitudes toward public education found for the first time a majority of American parents unwilling to advise their children to become teachers:

Two-thirds of Americans say teachers are underpaid, and an overwhelming 78% of public school parents say they would support teachers in their community if they went on strike for more pay, according to the 2018 PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. 

Even as most Americans continue to say they have high trust and confidence in teachers, a majority also say they don’t want their own children to become teachers, most often citing poor pay and benefits as the primary reason for their reluctance.

Here are just a few of the good reasons that the majority of parents have made the right call:

• The level of teacher demonization for student test score performance over the past twenty years turned teaching into a pressure cooker that stews teachers and students before blowing up schools entirely.  In order to increase the number of corporate charter schools and other "choice" options, politicians and corporate reformers cynically designed No Child Left Behind in 2001 to "hold accountable" schools and teachers for not reaching federally-mandated proficiency targets that were known at the time to be impossible to achieve by the vast majority of children across America.

• Over the past two decades, corporate reformers and politicians have put in place teacher evaluation schemes that are invalid, unreliable, and unfair to teachers.  Untold numbers of teachers have lost their jobs as a result, even as many other teachers fled to other career fields to escape the unrelenting pressure.  Those who have stayed now focus on producing test scores by any means necessary in order to survive evaluations, which, in turn, results in moral breakdowns, nervous breakdowns, and miseducated children.

• Targeted mass killings in schools with weapons of war threaten the safety of all school personnel and children.  Growing numbers of politicians and corporate lobbyists make the case for arming teachers in schools, and kevlar book bags are now prominent on schools' mandatory supply lists for parents.  Who can blame college students and their parents for thinking of their safety and that of their children?

• In an effort to make teaching teacher proof and to reduce the number of teachers, corporate reformers and politicians continue to deprofessionalize the field with lucrative programs that turn over significant and increasing amounts of student learning to screen time governed by computer algorithms.  

• The metastasizing of the corporate cancer known as "rigor" has turned schools into training grounds for the increasingly alienating and disaffected corporate adult workplace.  Teachers are expected to function as efficiency-driven managers who increase the bottom line (test scores), and their own creativity and ingenuity have been sacrificed on the alter of standardization and quantifiable results that ignore the sociological and psychological realities of children.  

• Teachers have continued to lose economic ground to other career fields over the past decades.  With a wage gap larger today than it was in 1980, teachers work two jobs to maintain some semblance of middle class living standards.

Student-Teacher Relations Are Central to Authentic Education

From Wrench in the Gears

March 3, 2018

Today I share a guest post from an elementary school teacher in Maine, a state in the vanguard of Ed Reform 2.0 implementation. Unless changes are made, this year’s freshmen are expected to graduate under the state’s new proficiency-based diploma requirements. In recent months, push-back against this new educational paradigm has grown substantially. Parents, teachers and students are finding standards-based education, a model that emphasizes technology-based education delivery, highly problematic. Here is one teacher’s perspective:

“I love technology. I love it so much that I got my Masters in educational technology through Boise State University in Idaho. Through this program I learned to teach online, gamify my curriculum, personalize learning, use countless technology tools, and promote digital literacy in the classroom.

When I switched to a school district that had one to one technology for my students, I was over the moon! That was until I actually saw it implemented on a large scale. What I saw was not more engaged students, but students clicking through activities without a moment’s notice or even thought. What I found were kids wanting tablets, but not wanting to learn on them; they just wanted to play on the devices.

So I tried to implement activities that would get them really thinking and creating. We made PowToons for our learning. We used educreations to show our thinking. We used Google docs to share writing. Most of what we tried did not enhance learning one bit. Sure, it looked cool and professional, but my students could present a wonderful powerpoint and not even be able to answer questions about what they presented.

In addition, I had to sift through hundreds of different websites, tech tools, and resources to see what would be the best to use in my classroom. I found very little that was better than what I had been using in the classroom before technology. I was disheartened to discover that this was not the silver bullet I thought it was for education. The funny thing is that I thought technology would save me so much time. It really hasn’t, except for a few instances where I don’t have to grade spelling tests; and the apps that I use for spelling do not promote better spellers.

Unless you think I am now anti-technology, I am not. I use technology every day both personally and professionally. I appreciate how it connects me with some of my family far away. I love how I can create products only imagined before, like an iMovie. I love the ease of a word processor and platforms to collaborate and share my writing with others. I also love having my students use the technology for many of the things listed above, but now I know they need so much more than a flashy program for learning. They need me. They need my instruction. They need to discuss face to face with myself and their peers. They need to struggle through problems, with me encouraging them to press on and knowing when to come alongside them and help, but not enable. They need human accountability.

There is a movement in our country to transition students into more digital learning. I could go on about why this is all happening, but others have done that work for me (see Save Maine Schools and Wrench in the Gears). In the end, it will boil down to fewer teachers and more screen time for even our youngest learners. Kids will adapt and learn to click through the system like Pavlovian subjects. We will probably have “experts” claiming increased performance on their very narrow metrics.

What I see in my own school district is not better learning but more behavior. As we push kids beyond what they are capable of understanding, and think that “personalized learning” through technology will be the answer, we are sorely misinformed. Technology has its place in the classroom, but it should never replace what has made education great for hundreds of years-teachers.”

Signed, An Elementary School Teacher in Maine

The Profession That Left Gerald Conti

  Gerald Gerald Conti’s retirement letterConti Letter

62 Percent of American Teachers Work Two Jobs

This may be news to those who believe that those fat cat teachers have it made in the shade.  From today's NYTimes, some clips from an op-ed by Eggers and Calegari:

. . . .WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.

We have a rare chance now, with many teachers near retirement, to prove we’re serious about education. The first step is to make the teaching profession more attractive to college graduates. This will take some doing.

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

So how do teachers cope? Sixty-two percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet. For Erik Benner, an award-winning history teacher in Keller, Tex., money has been a constant struggle. He has two children, and for 15 years has been unable to support them on his salary. Every weekday, he goes directly from Trinity Springs Middle School to drive a forklift at Floor and Décor. He works until 11 every night, then gets up and starts all over again. Does this look like “A Plan,” either on the state or federal level?

. . . .

The consulting firm McKinsey recently examined how we might attract and retain a talented teaching force. The study compared the treatment of teachers here and in the three countries that perform best on standardized tests: Finland, Singapore and South Korea.

Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don’t.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don’t.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do.

And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it’s 1 percent per year. In Finland, it’s 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.

McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a minimum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money. . . .

Does Duncan have a plan for teachers?  Sure does, as a matter of fact:  

• discourage teachers from getting more training in their fields, 
• discourage new teachers from professional preparation, 
• evaluate teachers based on test scores that reflect the gaps they cannot close,
• provide pay bonuses based on test scores, thus discouraging teachers from working with the children who need the most help, 
• turn teaching into test score production management,
• drain existing teacher resources, cut benefits, and drive down teacher pay by encouraging more corporate welfare charter schools, 
• ignore poverty and pretend that teachers can fix poor children with total compliance and brainwashing,
• portray teachers as selfish mossbacks who resist change,
• continue to encourage the resegregation of American schools.

Weingarten to Hire Fed Pay Czar to Develop Plan to Fire Teachers

Everyone who has followed Weingarten's ascendancy to her position as AFT President knew that she had been the pick of the Oligarchs. Her earlier sweet talk about gutting the teaching profession with pay per score plans had earned her the Business Roundtable's seal of approval, and now she is returning the favor by shifting her tepid endorsement of weakening ethical teaching into a full-blown advocacy for busting her own union. Randi Weingarten should be recalled by the AFT membership, and she should be put out to pasture with the other nags.

At a time when the greed merchants and uncharged felons of Wall Street burrow into the system once more to plan another financial catastrophe a few years hence, Obama's man in charge of deciding how many millions the CEO criminals should get has just been subcontracted out by Weingarten to create a plan to fire teachers for their "misconduct." The scourge of the nation--teacher misconduct!! Misconduct will surely include refusing to go along with educational genocide that is occurring in urban schools, where cognitive decapitation in segregated environments is the order of the day for the poor and the brown.

Bob Herbert thinks it is a great idea, even before Randi offers her speech today on the matter:

. . .The use of test scores, as Ms. Weingarten sees it, would be part of a new, enhanced process of teacher evaluation that would offer clear professional standards for teachers. It would replace current practices, which in many districts across the country are lax, haphazard and, in the words of Ms. Weingarten and others, often amount to little more than “drive-by” evaluations.

It is not uncommon for teachers to be observed in the classroom just a couple of times a year for only a few minutes each time and then get a satisfactory rating. Under those circumstances, hardly anything is learned about the quality or effectiveness of the teachers. Most teachers are routinely rated as satisfactory, and many are never evaluated at all.

Ms. Weingarten is urging school administrators to observe teachers more closely and more frequently. (The enhanced, clearly articulated professional standards she is calling for are already in use in some districts. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.) Experts trained in best practices and using a variety of objective data, including measures of student achievement, would do the evaluating. Teachers who are struggling would be given an opportunity to improve their performance. If, after remedial efforts, they still did not measure up, they would be fired, whether tenured or not.

As Ms. Weingarten put it, “We would have to say, ‘Look, we helped you. We tried. You’re just not cut out to be a teacher.’ ”

Ms. Weingarten also addresses the fact that it is sometimes scandalously difficult to remove teachers who have engaged in serious misconduct. While emphasizing the need for due process, she bluntly asserts, in a draft of her speech: “We recognize, however, that too often due process can become a glacial process. We intend to change that.”

The union has asked Kenneth Feinberg, the federal government’s so-called pay czar, to develop a more efficient protocol for disciplining — and when necessary, removing — teachers accused of misconduct.

This would be a big deal. Mr. Feinberg is highly respected and widely viewed as independent. He administered the government fund that compensated those who were injured and the families of those who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. He also administered a fund set up in the wake of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007.

He is not the kind of guy to go into the tank for the teachers’ union. (John Ashcroft chose him to lead the 9/11 fund.). . . .

Any friend of John Ashcroft has got to be a friend of ending misconduct--among teachers.