I have read in this morning’s paper that “School Hits Bumps on the Road to Reform.” http://www.idahostatesman.com/2011/01/06/1478112/troubled-ri-school-hits-bumps.html
It seems that the school district fired the entire faculty of the high school, en masse, “in a radical, last ditch attempt to raise student performance.” The district re-hired them, but now, there is a lot of absenteeism (an increase from before? The article does not say.), and some of the re-hired teachers have quit, “fifteen since August.” “The administrators thought the teachers would be grateful for the second chance, [but] they were wrong,” the article tells us. Ingrates! Wretches! “False Danish dogs!”
But what is the rest of the story? I am sure there is a rest of the story.
I have some ideas what is going on here. This sounds to me like a thoroughly demoralized faculty. Remember that they were all fired. Why would they be demoralized? Being “downsized” is traumatic enough, but being fired from a teaching position is a career death sentence. One of the first questions on an application is “have you ever been dismissed for cause or been refused a renewal of your contract?” You would have to answer yes. The cause? You would have to answer “incompetence,” or perhaps “dereliction of duty.” (If you did not, you would probably have your certification yanked for lying.) There is usually a line or two for explanation, but it is unlikely that the personnel director would read that far. The fact is that you have been punished as hard as the law allows. Those who quit may have done so out of disgust, or they may have decided to bail out (jumping contract is also a serious offense) while they still had some options, however reduced, for future employment.
But the Board relented and took the prodigals back, did they not? I suspect that those who were taken back will always wonder if the district was motivated by mercy and magnanimity, or by reconsideration of these teachers’ true worth, or by recognition of the practical impossibility of re-staffing a whole school on short notice. How could you know that they weren’t preparing, in advance this time, to do it again?
But these were all bad teachers, the worst of the worst, weren’t they? Don’t they richly deserve to be sacked and drummed out of the profession?
It is apparent that this school had serious problems: “just 7 percent of 11th-graders were proficient in math in 2009.” That must be the fault of the teachers, mustn’t it? Not necessarily. This sorry performance may have had underlying causes that would thwart the most heroic efforts of the most dedicated teacher. The article characterizes this district as being in a “poor, heavily immigrant city,” two strikes against it academically. The Reformists tell us there is absolutely no connection between family and student achievement. The preponderance of the literature tells us otherwise. Some factors are linguistic. Numerous studies have established that early childhood verbal interaction with adults is an important component of the child’s language acquisition. Children in poor homes are, on average, spoken to less than children in more affluent homes, hundreds of words a day compared to thousands. A child’s language skills when he enters school will affect his academic performance then, and for years to come. A child from a low-income home is likely to start school already behind others in his age-group. And other factors are demographic. The child in a more affluent neighborhood or suburb is likely to attend a better-funded and better school, with better facilities and a better-qualified and more stable faculty, than his age-mates in a poorer part of town. He has access to better teachers. Family income does make a difference. At this point, Reformists say “Yes, but we are talking about improvement: ‘Value Added.’” But the student who starts school ahead generally is able to learn more rapidly and stay ahead. I am not saying that children of low-income homes are less educable or that contents of their educations should be different, only that it may actually take more time, effort, and support systems than is required by those children who dwell in the tents of prosperity. Yet resources too often end up being lavished on the children who need them least. In short, these teachers probably feel that they are being punished for conditions that are beyond their power to remedy. Might this impact morale? You bet!
But aren’t there at least some bad teachers in this school? I’m sure there are. Identify them by a thorough and fair system of evaluation, something much better than the blunt instrument of scores on bubble-sheet tests. Remove obstacles to good teaching. Provide mentoring and other resources to individual improvement. Then, and only then, should those who refuse to do what is necessary to “shape up” be told to “ship out.” The Reformists probably think that if they start making examples of individual teachers (by publishing their names in the local newspaper), or of whole faculties (by canning the lot of them), anxiety, if not sheer terror, will spread to all teachers everywhere, spurring them on to ever greater efforts. “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”
But who cares about any of this crap as long as the Board’s courageous action fixes all that ails the schools? The problem is that it won’t fix anything. If anything, it will make things worse. Imagine that you are an at-risk student, and suddenly all of your teachers change and are replaced by strangers. Will you perceive this change as positive? Probably not. One very real “teacher problem” that plagues failing schools is faculty instability – large annual turnover; inexperienced teachers who leave again about the time they have some useful experience; marginally prepared teachers on “emergency” credentials – year after year; and endless series of substitutes rotating through classrooms that may not have a regular teacher all year. Instead of addressing such problem, Reform seems bent on getting rid of the very stable, experienced teachers who could be the nucleus around which an improved faculty could be built. One wonders at the true motives of the Reformists.
But none of this probably carries much weight with Reformists, most of whom repeatedly proclaim that neither education nor experience has any bearing on a teacher’s performance.