Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and some Professors Who Probably Know Better harp at us through the media that American Public Education is sick unto death. It needs to be reformed from top to bottom. The very assumptions that form the basis of public education need to be reconceived. This seems pretty abstract to most people, and I fear that the public won’t know what is happening until it has happened.
In the meantime, the recognizable face of purportedly sick public education is the bad teacher. After all, if the teacher is of paramount importance, it follows that if public education is going down the toilet, teachers are to blame. We need to get rid of all the bad teachers –sort of like “First, let’s kill all the lawyers.” First, let’s fire all the teachers.” We read and hear of Superintendents like Michelle Rhee who boast in the news of how many teachers they have fired lately. And the Los Angeles unified school district which publishes in the Los Angeles Times the names of teachers whose classes have sub-standard test scores. They even published a picture of one “bad” teacher. This is what I mean by “putting a face” on reform.
So, let’s consider bad teachers. They are around. I have no horror stories of my own, but I have had some teachers I would consider mediocre at best and have worked with some others. I have read of really bad ones, but I have known very few. Let’s begin with why bad teachers are bad. You will see that some of reasons are the fault of the teacher. Others are faults in the system that is obstacles to good teaching.
There are teachers who simply cannot follow instructions or work in an organization. I remember a journalism teacher who had, he said repeatedly and at length, long experience on a daily newspaper. He had also taught in several schools, all of which were superior to our school, he said. He had one newspaper class and one yearbook staff. The rest of his schedule consisted of English classes. The problem was that he did not like to teach mere English, and disliked one class in particular, so he just quit going to it. Days later, the Principal discovered a class with no teacher. The kids had been uncharacteristically quiet and well-behaved so as not to attract attention. Needless to say, he was not offered a contract for the following year, nor was he greatly missed.
There is the just plain lazy teacher who is qualified and presumably capable, but doesn’t do what is necessary. It is not so much can’t as won’t, not so much malfeasance or even misfeasance, but just plain nonfeasance. I have known a few of these and some of their characteristic behaviors. They plug their students into the TV and do very little real teaching. I recall one history teacher. When I arrived in the morning I walked past his room where an early bird class was going on. It seemed that they saw all of WWII in video, practically in real time: Winds of War followed by Tora Tora Tora followed by Pearl Harbor followed by The Battle of the Bulge, followed by A Bridge Too Far, etc. Lazy teachers assign a lot of work sheets. They assign little writing, so they don’t have to grade all those essays. Their classrooms are often disorderly because maintaining order requires effort, or too orderly because it is easier to have everyone stay in place and be silent than to preside over meaningful activity. I knew a Business teacher who would set his students to typing and take a little nap. I don’t know whether he had always been that way, had a health problem, or had the teacher’s equivalent of “senioritis.” His students were well enough behaved; he wouldn’t bother them as long as they didn’t disturb him. Some “lazy” teachers just go through the motions; others don’t even do that. Laziness is a fault that is within the teacher’s control, so there is really no excuse for it. Sometimes laziness is the result of burnout, which is an issue of its own. An alert Principal will be aware of the problem and will take assertive action to correct that teacher, or, if that does not work, will prepare a case for not renewing his contract.
Except that not everything that appears to be laziness really is. Sometimes the teacher is spread too thin, has too many conflicting demands on his/her time and attention to do a proper job on all of it. She/he may be overwhelmed and bog down. But more commonly, he will prioritize. He will be far more energetic in areas which have high priority to him, and will look lazy in other areas. The problem is inherent in the system itself.
A teacher may regard teaching as a temporary stage in his career plan. If so, he will favor the long view over more proximate demands. Perhaps he is putting in his requisite two years in the classroom in order to be eligible for an administrative position. Once upon a time, administrators rose through the ranks and were recruited from master teachers – or successful coaches. Today it is not uncommon that a few beginning teachers will be selected for an administrative fast track, and the requisite two years of classroom experience (it varies by state) becomes the mere-est of mere formalities and a temporary inconvenience, nothing to be taken too seriously. I have been asked in interviews “What is your career plan and how will this position fit into it?” In a sense, the system is actively, if unwittingly, encouraging, rewarding even, laziness in the classroom.
. Perhaps he is occupying himself until he can get a job he really wants. Perhaps he is marking time until he gets accepted to a graduate school. Teaching is a convenient steppingstone to his “real” career. “I am only temporarily a teacher. It will do until I can get something better.” It is not surprising if teaching is not his highest priority. His eyes are on the prize, and the prize is not a career in teaching. I remember a biology teacher who gave his students work sheets to keep them busy while he sat at his desk, studying for his commercial pilot’s license. Another, when I approached her during the membership drive, informed me she didn’t care what kind of retirement benefits the stupid union had negotiated because she had no intention of retiring from teaching.
But usually the conflicting demands are right there in the school and are reflected in the teacher’s work load. We probably see this most often with coaches, although by no means all of them. In most school districts, a coach is more likely to be fired for a poor win/loss record than for mediocre teaching. His priorities are clear. Hence, more videos and fewer essay assignments. The teacher who is spread too thin, who is expected to do too many things, does not have time to do a proper job on any of them. I remember the young rookie teacher who was required by the Principal to take a particular course, as were all new teachers, at her own expense, of course. She was also trying to balance the demands of being a new teacher with being Volleyball coach. Both the class and practice were at the same time. Either missing class or trying to reschedule practice would contravene direct orders, and thus would be dismissal-worthy acts of insubordination. (As I recall, the union managed to negotiate a compromise that mitigated her no-win position.) To the casual outside observer, this teacher’s chronic unpreparedness and lack of focus would look like laziness and indifference, but was pure distraction actively caused by the building administration. Here the system is at least as much to blame as the teacher.
A teacher can be “bad” because she/he doesn’t have the environment or the resources to be better. Having too few books means that there are not enough of them to check one out to each student, pretty much precluding homework. Not assigning homework bespeaks laziness to many an outsider. This is just one little factor, not necessarily decisive in and of itself, something that a seasoned teacher can often work around. But it is a factor that in worst cases can doom a teacher’s best efforts. The observer sees only what is not getting done.
There can be too little physical space, too many students, too few desks or even chairs where they can set their little butts. Politicians, Pundits, etc., love to tell us that class size is not a significant factor in student achievement. Anyone who has taught knows that a seasoned teacher can manage a large class. The problem is that more time and effort go into management, less into actual teaching. At my school, some years would start with wildly imbalanced class sizes. One class might be too small to work well at ten students; another might be standing-room-only at 40+. Over the next couple of weeks, the counselors would balance things out. In the meantime, some students would get discouraged and drop out. As soon as a class got down to 30 or so students, the difference was always dramatic; everything would settle down. A rookie teacher who is given an unmanageably class, particularly if it is too large for its physical space, is being set up to fail. She will look bad to any observer and will be easily dismissed as a bad teacher. A teacher, of course, has little or no control over the size of her classes or the space in which she must teach them.
A teacher can be “bad” because he is inexperienced. The 4Ps who maintain that experience has little to do with effectiveness are either naïve or disingenuous. Teachers are made, not born. Schools of Education do not turn out seasoned teachers; they only provide some valuable background, some context. Teachers grow on the job. When I look back at my first few years, I am embarrassed. When I retired after 44 years, I was not only a better teacher than when I began; I was better than I had been ten years earlier. But too many districts prefer to hire the youngest, least experienced teachers because they are “cheaper.” After a year or few, when they have more experience and move on to a better district or grow discouraged and drop out of teaching, they are replaced with more “fresh meat” or, in the worst cases with successions of substitutes. If there is no union or if the union is weak, it is all too easy to just fire them, often about the time they know what they are doing. I gather, from Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education and other sources, that this is common practice if not deliberate policy in the dysfunctional urban schools we read about so often.
Some teachers are bad because they simply aren’t suited or qualified to be in charge of a classroom. Perhaps they don’t have the personality, and believe me, this can be an important consideration; not everyone does. Perhaps they have moral problems, sexual or otherwise, that should not and cannot be tolerated.
It may or may not show up in a prospective teacher’s interview or references. But it should be apparent sometime within the first three years. In my state, a teacher with less than three years in-district has a different status than he enjoys thereafter. The first three years are “probationary.” A new teacher is hired from year to year with no particular expectation of renewal. He cannot be fired in a totally arbitrary manner – for example, if all his observations and evaluations are excellent. Still, it is relatively easy for a Principal to say “Sorry, you just aren’t working out like we hoped. I am not recommending you for renewal.” But thereafter, he goes on “continuing contract.” Now, he can be fired only “for cause.” It is up to the Principal to make the case that he is not doing his job or has behaved badly in some serious way. A strong union will make sure that the Administration carries out the dismissal by the book and makes its case. “Continuing contract” makes for a more stable faculty. Whether a stable faculty is better than one with a lot of turnover is another topic. If a weak teacher is not weeded out early in the game, when it is relatively easy, that is not a teacher problem, or a union problem, but an administrative problem. The administration was not paying attention.
The unqualified teacher is a different matter. One wonders why such a person is ever hired in the first place. Whether a teacher has the necessary qualifications, at least on paper, should be apparent up front. Does the applicant have an academic major or at least a minor in the subject to be taught? (This is probably more an issue for high school, where a teacher is usually hired to teach one or two courses in the subject(s) of specialty.) Does he have a current state certificate? Does he have at least a Bachelor’s Degree in anything? Unqualified teachers are seldom a problem in good schools; they just don’t get hired there. Where they do exist, they should be let go and told to apply when they are qualified to do so. When I say “good” schools, I mean the great majority of American public schools that at the least do pretty well for most kids in most ways, most of the time.
If Jonathan Kozol (Savage Inequalities 1991) and David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle (The Manufactured Crisis 1995) are even partly correct, we gather that unqualified teachers are a real problem in the worst schools, for two reasons. The bad schools that Reformists have made poster children for public schools in general are, first and foremost, under-supported and under resourced. They may be in “poor” districts that have generally lower per capita income demographics with a relatively poor per capita tax base. Getting well-qualified teachers to come and stay can be problematical because such districts have difficulties paying teachers a competitive wage. Classrooms must be staffed, so the district becomes dependent on “cheap labor:” teachers with provisional certificates, hired on an “emergency” basis; part-timers, who need not be paid benefits; or, failing these, successions of substitutes, who often have no qualifications whatsoever beyond being warm bodies. This is not a teacher problem; it is, at root, a financial problem.
More egregiously, these schools can also be found in low-income parts of relatively prosperous districts. First, the “good” schools are funded, equipped, and staffed, and then the “poor” schools get what is left over. Such deliberate neglect is not a teacher problem, it is a moral problem. Years ago, in one of my graduate courses for aspiring administrators, the subject came up of why some schools in a local district seemed to get all the goodies – computer labs, and such – while other schools did not. But a teacher from that district explained, “Why, because you have a better class of kid there, of course.”
Ironically, small schools, much touted by Reformists, especially small high schools, may have a problem with teacher qualifications. If a small school is to offer a full curriculum, some courses may be only one section each, with the result that teachers often have to teach several different subjects. He may not be certified in all these subjects. Indeed, he may not be competent in all of them. It may be practically impossible to find a teacher with exactly the right mixture of qualifications, especially since this mixture may change from year to year. But if a teacher is assigned to teach a class, it is a poor career move to refuse, for whatever reason.
Sometimes teachers “burn out.” We apply this term to veteran teachers who are no longer as effective as they once were. It may be that he has simply gotten tired of teaching and/or of kids; he has done the same thing long enough and needs to do something else. But it is usually more complicated and often has systemic roots. More than routine, more than obstreperous kids and a never-ending stream of papers to be graded, frustration causes most teacher burn out – the feeling that effort is ultimately futile, that there is no way one can change his environment, that there is no way to win, being blamed, in the case of test scores, for something that is the result of policies handed down. I can think of no better recipe for burn-out than being mired in a poor school that is going nowhere. Too often, the burned out teacher is someone who has simply given up and goes through the motions and runs out the clock to retirement.
What to do about bad teachers? Fire them? In some cases, yes. But the Reformists never suggest working with these “bad” teachers to improve them. They never say anything about decaying physical plants that are difficult environments in which to teach. They never say anything about institutional policies that are barriers. And they never, ever say anything about the tens of thousands of teachers who every day strive to improve what they teach and how they teach it, but are stymied by their own system’s bureaucracy. Fire all the teachers? Sorry, if the Reformists are really interested in making schools better, there are lots of other to fix first.
