Angry Teachers: Whatcha Gonna Do?
Teachers are in a tough spot. I think it’s fair to say there is a growing sense among teachers that the overall quality and attractiveness of this job is deteriorating.
However much you might personally still enjoy teaching, or however much you hated it in the first place…it’s getting worse. For many people, that still keeps teaching safely in the neighborhood of ‘enjoyable’ or ‘tolerable’. But it will also push many over the edge and out of the profession. (Just wait until the economy turns around. Hands up…how many of you are looking to jump as soon as the job market improves?.…Yeah. I thought so.)
Does that sound right to you? I know that my audience is a bit self-selecting, but think about the 5 happiest teachers in your school. Do you think they are more happy or less happy than they were 3 years ago?
If this hypothesis is correct and applies more or less everywhere, what can we do about it? We are all fighting our own local battles. It’s sort of like ‘divide and conquer’ except we were already divided. They didn’t even have to do anything…sitting ducks. It’s not possible for me to follow and meaningfully participate in multiple battles in multiple states and districts. We’re all pretty much on our own.
When I taught in DC I didn’t even have time to worry about Michelle Rhee. The principal of my school is so bat-shit crazy and mean that you never heard anybody complaining about Michelle Rhee. That’s the truth.
But hey, Maria Tukeva is a local legend. She’s been the principal of that school since the Carter Administration and almost 45 percent of the kids can read now. Yippee!
Seriously!?! Last year you got 43% proficient in reading and 49% in math?!?! Was that worth completely alienating, demoralizing, angering, firing and otherwise inducing 250 teachers to flee from your school in four years? Do you ever imagine the organizational cohesiveness you’ve pissed away by having to replace 40–50% of your staff every single year? Or the cost to the city? How is it possible that you received the District’s $10,000 Excellence in Leadership Award when more than 3 decades into your career here you have a 45% teacher attrition rate and most of the kids in your school can’t read? And then you’ll go back and spew to the teachers that we are ‘raising the bar and holding everyone accountable’. Everyone, that is, except you? Explain to me again exactly why people think you’re good at this job.
…sorry…wow… Where am I?…that was obviously a flashback…the PTSD medication is starting to get them under control, but they’re still pretty easily triggered…
Anyway, I spent the last two days reading through the comments of the last post and most of the comments and posts at Dump Duncan. There is a lot of intensity, anger and sadness. But it won’t be easily harnessed and put to good use. Above and beyond all of our state and district and school-level issues, what is it that unites teachers? Whatever it is, how do we formulate that into a message and a program that is meaningful and powerful in the context of national policy and public opinion? (Personally, I think public opinion should be our target.)
Dump Duncan is a respectable sentiment which I support, but there’s a good chance he’s leaving soon regardless. Half the cabinet usually flips at the second term and Obama might not get re-elected anyway. What are we trying to say that goes beyond Duncan and Race to the Top?
Who is best suited to deliver that message and how?
Unions? They’re taking quite a beating lately and have the same basic problem of fragmentation. The national message is weak. Unions have to preface everything they say with something like in order to ensure that every child reaches the highest levels of achievement…blah, blah, blah. Putting children first sounds great.
But a union that can’t put its own members first and allows the opposition to define all key terms in the debate will get steamrolled.
Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss? Well, if you read me, you probably read them. Or you should. They are definitely on the team, so don’t get me wrong about that. Love them both. But their primary mission is not to advocate and articulate on behalf of teachers.
Teachers are going to have to figure out how to do this better for themselves.
Mr. Teachbad
You might have been spying in my rural school. Here’s what the teachers are saying:
“I used to say I was going to school, now I’m going to WORK.“
“I wish I was eligible to retire.“
“How much longer before YOU can retire?“
“I’m thinking that I need another career — anything but education.”
They’re saying the same things at my rural school.
And once again I ask you since you are not satisfied with what we are doing, what is it YOU think should teachers be doing? I’ll Occupy the DOE in March.
C’mon…it’s not ME that’s dissatisfied with what YOU are doing. What I’m hoping to do is identify the challenges that prevent teachers from taking effective collective action on their own behalf. Don’t you think if I had some great solution I’d let you in on it? I’m just trying to rattle some cages and flush out ideas.
I can’t think of the 5 happiest teachers in my school because I don’t know 5 happy teachers. I don’t know one happy teacher, and that includes myself.
Yes, it is all insulting and unbearable…the question is…what can we do to remedy the situation and counter the attacks on the profession. I am retiring with no regrets and great anticipation. What can be done to help the poor demoralized educators I leave behind. Brainstorm ideas.
I wish we could organize a grass-roots effort for a National Teacher Walk-out Day (or longer.)No unions or any other organizations for the sake of purity. Just teachers standing in solidarity for the profession and what it should be.
I am jealous of a teacher at my school who just quit halfway through the year. She must have some sort of secret stash of cash.…because we haven’t gotten a raise in NC for the past 4 years. If I knew what else I could do with a middle childhood teaching degree, I would be out asap.
At a staff meeting today, the admin. showed stats for referrals and suspensions. Guess what!? Our suspensions have been cut in half this year!!! Isn’t that great!?? NO ITS NOT. It just means the admin. is sweeping more behavior issues under the rug and creating less power (I don’t know how that’s possible) for the teachers…yes, its ok for a 12 year old child to throw chairs in the cafeteria, as long as mom comes in for a conference and we talk it all out.…way to solve the behavior issues in our school admin, way to go.
I think you might work in my school. I work in NC too, moved here away from my entire support system to teach. The first couple years were great. Gov. Easly made teachers a priority, our salaries started to approach the national average, and then the bottom fell out. I am going back to school (part time, still have to earn enough to keep a roof over my head… barely) in the fall because I am executing a 3 year plan for exiting this profession. Screw this.
The only happy teachers I know are the Young and the Crappy (plus the Young & Crappy). Anyone whose been around the block more than once is miserable.
Maybe I’m showing my pioneer ancestry, but I’m a little surprised that more teachers don’t get together and start their own schools. This is America and the opportunity is there. Does it take a lot of work — yes. But we’re teachers, we know how to go out and learn new skills.
Think about it. Almost everything that infuriates us is mandated from somewhere On High, be that the principal’s office, district office, superintendent’s office or the Oval Office. More and more parents have seen this swiftly rising tide of idiotic dictates and said “Oh no, not with my kids you don’t!” Even those of modest means have found workable alternatives to the schools where us teachers remain trapped.
If we get together with like minded people, build upon sensible principles, do the research, plan prudently there is absolutely no reason why teachers cannot build the type of school we know every child deserves.
What’s preventing this? Fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of risk and failure. Fear of being labeled crazy. A lot of fear.
But let’s face it, nobody’s going to ride to our rescue. If we want to change education, we need to change it. Not just talk about changing it, not just demand that someone else be changing it. But actually getting out there and DOING it.
P.S. I do practice what I preach and have started preliminary research and wouldn’t mind teaming up with similarly motivated colleagues.
i totally want to start my own school! and i think b/c parents are equally unhappy w/ public education that there is a growing market for it. i’m all in.
I think that’s an interesting option. Maybe more teachers will start to do that.I guess I tend to think about it more in terms of the profession. How can we stop the job of being a teacher from getting worse for most people? It ties in nicely with the book club discussion we’ll be having next week. http://teachbad.com/2012/02/10/welcome-to-teachbads-book-club/
Unfortunately, I can’t join your book club yet because I have zero disposable income and literally 47 books in my “To Read” pile.
Anyway, improving the teaching profession means improving working conditions. The only way I can see to do this is to get into leadership positions. But the deck is stacked under the current regime. So the way is circumvention.
The other part of the problem is a PR problem. We can no longer rely on unions to promote our position, as they are regarded as bloated and self-serving. A guerrilla campaign of blogs, articles, books, twitter, and documentaries by actual teachers would serve the purpose. But getting the attention of the nation is hard, and shifting the massive tanker of public opinion even harder. Plus, where do we trench-working teachers find the time?
Teachbad, I really like your site and sense of humor. I sometimes can completely relate to your articles and the comments that follow. However, the past few articles w/comments have made me appreciate my job even more. I love teaching and love it now more than I did 3,4,5 years ago. I teach at a school of “unchosens” (we have school choice here and we get those students who don’t utilize the process: 65% f/r lunch, over 40% of my students are “high-risk for drop-out” where the state average is 5%). We are a school deep in restructuring, and I teach 9th grade math. I am never told to focus on our state test (nor is any other teacher in my building). We actually recently switched to a “new math” curriculum that teaches lots of stuff not on the state test but is a much stronger curriculum in general. I love my students. I love that my administrator enforces the code of conduct while not interfering with what I’m doing in my class. I don’t say these comments to be a contrarian but to let you and other teachers know that there are schools out there where people still love to teach. Schools where things are getting better (no thanks to the fed gov’t). Schools with competent administrators and teachers who work together to ensure student success. I love my job.
All further comments from you will be blocked.
I’m only kidding. I’ll just edit them to say what I want.
But seriously, that’s awesome and I know it’s true. I talk to a lot of teachers, friends and through the blog, and I know it can still be a great job if the right person finds the right school. One of my long-term goals is to develop a system where schools are somehow rated on teacher satisfaction and retention. All the time I talk to people who I worked with at the Maria and Darry show. They all have better lives now in other schools or doing something else. I believe CHEC is perhaps an especially awful creation.
I’m curious what you and others think of the general argument that teaching, on average for most people, is getting worse. Ask around and let me know.
Teachbad
I am in my third year of teaching and looking into grad school for something else entirely. I am so beaten down by my administration in my charter school that they have given me a “Teacher Improvement Plan” which I lovingly refer to as my just the TIP plan. Admin. basically meets with me once a month and tells me everything I’m doing wrong in my classroom, without help or guidance to make me improve. Because none of them have administrative licenses, and one was never a classroom teacher. How many days until June?
92 days until June…but it’s WAY too early to start thinking about that. Keep your eyes on Spring Break.
What do people think about charters? I worked in one that was run by a bunch of morons, but my wife and I LOVE the charter school our kids go to. Thoughts?
TB
My first teaching position was in a charter for high school students, and everyone who worked there loved it. We put in more hours and worked more closely with parents than in traditional schools, and we never resented any of it. The district closed it when they had to start supporting it financially by itself instead of the state and a corportate sponsor paying for it.
Public school, charter school, private school, phooey-patooey school. Doesn’t matter what you call them, they all come in a wide spectra of qualities. There are jaw-droppingly great public schools, there are mediocre charter schools, and there are astoundingly bad private schools. (Yes, I have evidence to prove that last one.)
I think charter schools are oversold to the public as a cure-all to all of education’s problems. And frankly, they’re not. The same misguided, or flat out dumb, people can work for a charter or a private school just as easily as for a school district.
What I like about charter schools is it gives parents another choice. Freedom to choose is one of the founding tenants of this country, and the more the better. Monopolies in both the public and private sphere are inefficient and evil. When I come to power, families will have direct control of their share of educational dollars.
Charters might be a great option for an individual teacher or an individual student/family, but — as they exist in most inner cities — are an inherently evil knife to the heart of inner-city schools.
Virtually all charters enroll via an application process. Therefore, all the students in a charter will have parents who are sufficiently aware/concerned to investigate the charter and sufficiently functional to complete the application process. And, virtually all charters are much more able than neighborhood schools to get rid of disruptive/unmotivated/problem students (either by informal suggestion or by formal expulsion).
These skim-the-cream aspects of charters mean that the students in charter schools will invariably, on average, be more motivated/functional than the students in the neighborhood schools.
Conversely, these skim-the-cream aspects of charters mean that, as charters expand, the neighborhood schools will see an ever-increasing percentage of unmotivated/dysfunctional/problem students. And, they mean that there will be ever fewer aware/concerned/functional parents sending their children to the neighborhood schools and willing/able to fight for improvements in those neighborhood schools.
For these reasons, charters are good politics in the short run (that is, they keep the aware/concerned/functional inner-city parents happy), but they condemn the neighborhood schools to a vicious downward spiral.
Clearly, the socially-responsible approach is to eliminate charters and instead focus our efforts on improving the neighborhood schools.
Gosh LaborLawyer. Up until recently I was one of those “happy parents”, since I had two kids in a DC charter school.
Thing is, it’s my belief that the larger an institution is, the less able it is to achieve its purposes and the less responsive it is to the kinds of improvements I’m sure you have in mind. That’s one of the reasons the founders of the school my kids went to started it in the first place.
I’m not saying it was perfect, but I knew and trusted the folks who ran it, and it was one of the reasons we actually stayed in DC as long as we did. (Eventually, Teachbad’s driving his Monster Truck through the neighborhoods at 3am blasting Night Ranger drove us away. I can’t stand Sister Christian whether it’s coming from Grave Digger or not.)
I’m kinda bothered by how easily you’re dismissing this school that my kids thrived at and that I put a fuck of a lot of work into. So if the only “clearly responsible” thing to do is grind all that up and chuck my kids back into DCPS… sorry man, fuck that. You’re going to have a much bigger fight on your hands than you think.
God, ya know? The more I think about it, the only socially responsible thing for us to do is eliminate DCPS and focus on creating local neighborhood schools.
I’m also intrigued and enthusiastic about the idea of teacher-owned-and-run schools above. Git ‘em.
Boy, evidently I’ve got lots of opinions on this! Thanks for getting me thinking about it!
So, you state:
“the neighborhood schools will see an ever-increasing percentage of unmotivated/dysfunctional/problem students. And, they mean that there will be ever fewer aware/concerned/functional parents sending their children to the neighborhood schools”
This implies to me that you believe that I was being allowed an easy way out, but if my hand were just somehow forced in the right way, that I and other parents like me would roll up our sleeves and “fix” the schools you want fixed.
I think that’s absurd. I believe what’s wrong with failing DC schools has a lot more to do with the fact that there’s a sizable percentage of families struggling desperately just to get by, and that that makes it somewhere between hard and impossible for them to have enough of themselves left to give to their kids and their schools. If you accept one of the key premises of this site, that these problems are much bigger in scope than teachers or even whole school districts are equipped to “fix”, then surely you can’t think that the solution is simply to chuck us back in there and wait for me to get desperate and fed up enough to fix it?
It also implies to me you think it’s my kid’s duty or responsibility or purpose to raise the average motivation/functionality/non-problem-ness of a local DCPS student body, or perhaps that it’s my job and responsibility to raise the average awareness/concern/functionality of the parent community. Again, if your idea is for me to sacrifice my kids’ happiness, well-being, and education at the altar of what you think is socially responsible, you’re not going to have an easy time getting me to buy into that.
No you don’t have to send your kids to a shitty school. But you also should not be smugly sitting around saying how great your kids’ charter school is when you know damn well that the school is paying the teachers crappily, requiring them to be available before and after school, at weekends and in “vacations”, and then firing them at the end of every year so they never get a pay raise, eventually not hiring them back when they get too uppity.
If you are personally paying the teachers of your kids the extra $20K so that they are making a decent wage for the hours they are putting in, if you are guaranteeing them continued employment if they teach reasonably, if you are making sure that the teachers have all the supplies all the children need for the great educational experience, then please disregard this message.
I am all for people doing their best for their own kids, but not at the expense of the rest of society. It might be best for your kids to have their own personal slave following them around to carry their books, clean up their mess, cook for and bathe them. But we decided that their benefit does not outweigh the rights of the other human being. Similarly so for the underpaid, insecure, overworked charter school teachers.
As opposed to the “underpaid, insecure, overworked” public school teachers?
BTW, the charter school where I worked wasn’t full of the “cream” nor was it filled by lottery or any other competetive ritual that people seem to perceive as being the norm for charter schools. We were actually trying to build our student numbers and we simply offered opportunities for career development that our regular high schools didn’t offer at the time, as well as a GED program for 16–17 potential dropouts (they had to pretest to meet minimum academic knowledge.)
Huh. Well, I can say that I personally bought supplies for our school, and put up shelves and cleaned up boiler rooms and built garden boxes and did a bunch of other things as well. I wasn’t the only one, nor was my effort all that remarkable compared to what some of the parents were doing with the school. The administrators and teachers asked for us to be partners and told us what we could do, and we did.
I also knew several of the teachers well enough personally to know that they were pretty stoked on where they worked, and that the partnership between the school and community was a big part of what they liked about teaching there.
It’s not like they didn’t complain about work, don’t get me wrong, but the scope and severity of complaints weren’t comparable to what you’ll read in these here comments. And I don’t think a single one of them would trade their gigs for one at Teachbad’s old school, not even for $20k.
Also: I missed the meeting where “we” decided that 1.) our children having slaves would be a good thing, and 2.) but that would be wrong, so we won’t do it. But if you make the next one tell them “no” and “yes” for me.
If you are on a Teacher Improvement Plan are they looking to get rid of you? I was recently placed on one and have made the suggested changes in my classroom. If you have improved over that time period — mine goes until the end of the year— will I still be laid off?
I would be on my guard. It would be really interesting to see some data on how many teachers end up getting canned after being on plans and what they did to make things better. It can probably be as arbitrary as your principal wants it to be. If your gut tells you that they don’t like you, look out. Also, document what you have done to ‘improve’ and make sure you know all the ins and outs of how one does and does not get fired in your district.
Good luck and let us know what happens.
Teachbad