When you work in education, it's easy to become discouraged about national education reports. Most of them are written by those with little understanding of education. Nearly everyone believes they are experts in education, because everyone attended school. As I have pointed out before, this would be like believing you understand surgery because you had an appendectomy. Teachers cringe as state and federal legislators opine on the ills of public education. "Yes, yes, senator. Would that our schools were run as efficiently and as productively as you run our government."
Most national reports tie school success to achievement on a state standardized test designed to measure a narrow range of skills in literacy and numeracy. There are many of us who question the validity of these tests. There are many more who believe that too many of our schools have become dismal testing centers, largely due to the federal pressures of No Child Left Behind.
Most national reports tie school success to achievement on a state standardized test designed to measure a narrow range of skills in literacy and numeracy. There are many of us who question the validity of these tests. There are many more who believe that too many of our schools have become dismal testing centers, largely due to the federal pressures of No Child Left Behind.
One of these reports came out last week, and it has several of my friends and colleagues talking. It is a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality. The Council gave letter grades for teacher quality to each of the states and ranked them according to several factors. West Virginia received an overall grade of D+, ranking it 41st in the nation.
If you are a good teacher, it is very difficult to not become angry and hurt when you read these reports. You know that you've spent as many hours learning your profession as your friends in law, accounting, or medicine, only to be paid a fraction of what they earn. You know that you work in one of the only fields where the practitioner is held entirely accountable for the performance of her client. (We do not hold the doctor accountable for the health of an overweight smoker, nor a lawyer for the deeds of the murderer he represents.) You know the hours you spent before and after school, offering extra help to students, assessing student work, talking to parents. You remember the sleepless nights you spent worried about the student who lives in a tent in a cousin's back yard, or the one who asked for extra food in the lunch line because she wouldn't get dinner that night. And you already beat up on yourself this week because you've tried everything you know to engage that one student, and he still stared at you blankly, looking at the clock above your head.
If you are a good teacher, here is what angers and hurts the most: you know that some of the things they say about teachers are true. You work with a teacher who knows less about his subject than some of the students in his class. You know the colleague who actually became a teacher because she didn't want to work in the summer. (And for those of you not in education, teachers don't have a "summer vacation." They are unemployed and unpaid for those weeks in June, July, and August.) You remember the words of the co-worker who belittled a weak student or bad-mouthed him in the teacher's lounge. You work across the hall from the one who cannot manage even the mildest group or whose students sit glassy-eyed through hour after hour of mind-numbing lecture. Every day you see the teacher who arrives at school seconds before the kids come to his class and runs to "beat the buses" out of the parking lot.
If you are a good teacher, it's sometimes difficult to know where to focus your anger and frustration. You became a teacher to change lives. Instead you find yourself saddled with absurd district and state policies, hounded by inept administrators, and crippled by a lack of resources. You spend hours planning creative, engaging lessons, only to be told that you must focus on a few narrow measures of student achievement - or that the subject you teach is unimportant. You're sometimes given directives by janitors with an 8th grade education who refuse to empty your trash daily or by cafeteria workers who seem angry at you for no discernible reason. You find yourself swimming in a sea of mystifying acronyms and submitting your lesson plans to the athletic director, yet no one comes to your class to see the joy of your students when they walk through the door. You sit through hours of something called "professional development" where your principal spends most of the time discussing the cell phone policy and reminding you where you can't park, yet you're denied leave to attend a day at a conference featuring a nationally-known speaker that you are sure will give you a renewed sense of excitement about the classroom.
If you are a good teacher, it is very difficult to not become angry and hurt when you read these reports. You know that you've spent as many hours learning your profession as your friends in law, accounting, or medicine, only to be paid a fraction of what they earn. You know that you work in one of the only fields where the practitioner is held entirely accountable for the performance of her client. (We do not hold the doctor accountable for the health of an overweight smoker, nor a lawyer for the deeds of the murderer he represents.) You know the hours you spent before and after school, offering extra help to students, assessing student work, talking to parents. You remember the sleepless nights you spent worried about the student who lives in a tent in a cousin's back yard, or the one who asked for extra food in the lunch line because she wouldn't get dinner that night. And you already beat up on yourself this week because you've tried everything you know to engage that one student, and he still stared at you blankly, looking at the clock above your head.
If you are a good teacher, here is what angers and hurts the most: you know that some of the things they say about teachers are true. You work with a teacher who knows less about his subject than some of the students in his class. You know the colleague who actually became a teacher because she didn't want to work in the summer. (And for those of you not in education, teachers don't have a "summer vacation." They are unemployed and unpaid for those weeks in June, July, and August.) You remember the words of the co-worker who belittled a weak student or bad-mouthed him in the teacher's lounge. You work across the hall from the one who cannot manage even the mildest group or whose students sit glassy-eyed through hour after hour of mind-numbing lecture. Every day you see the teacher who arrives at school seconds before the kids come to his class and runs to "beat the buses" out of the parking lot.
If you are a good teacher, it's sometimes difficult to know where to focus your anger and frustration. You became a teacher to change lives. Instead you find yourself saddled with absurd district and state policies, hounded by inept administrators, and crippled by a lack of resources. You spend hours planning creative, engaging lessons, only to be told that you must focus on a few narrow measures of student achievement - or that the subject you teach is unimportant. You're sometimes given directives by janitors with an 8th grade education who refuse to empty your trash daily or by cafeteria workers who seem angry at you for no discernible reason. You find yourself swimming in a sea of mystifying acronyms and submitting your lesson plans to the athletic director, yet no one comes to your class to see the joy of your students when they walk through the door. You sit through hours of something called "professional development" where your principal spends most of the time discussing the cell phone policy and reminding you where you can't park, yet you're denied leave to attend a day at a conference featuring a nationally-known speaker that you are sure will give you a renewed sense of excitement about the classroom.
Then you open up the paper and there is another one of these damn reports. You read it and you have a familiar feeling well up inside of you. You're angry at the multi-billion dollar foundation that sits around generating these reports. You're angry at the journalists and politicians who will use it to justify not paying you a decent salary. You're angry at the mindless bureaucracy that is at the root of so many of the problems. And you have a special anger for those teachers who provide so much of the warrant for reports like this.
Many of the best educators I know here in West Virginia would agree with most of the following:
- It's much too hard to fire bad teachers simply for being bad teachers.
- It has become increasingly difficult to attract and retain good teachers.
- There are large groups of teachers entering the field who are under-prepared.
My opinion on this has not changed since I was in the classroom. Far too many teachers lack the content knowledge and skills to be successful in the classroom. I won't begin to speculate on a number or percentage or anything like that, but it's more than it should be.
In my career as an arts teacher and in my current gig I have met a large number of teachers who do not have a basic grasp of the art form they teach. They have not mastered the rudiments of their craft and cannot begin to understand the nature of art and its role in human culture. Because of this, they cannot, of course, help students master these skills themselves or gain deep understandings.
As a music teacher, I looked at our West Virginia standards and saw some rigorous content. I was expected to help my students learn to improvise, compose, and arrange music. Yet many of my colleagues lack these basic abilities themselves. How is it possible for a music teacher to guide a student through the compositional process if she has never composed herself? How can he create an environment where students are comfortable improvising if he cannot improvise? Too many of my peers could not even be bothered to master their primary instruments.
My own professional preparation was fairly extensive. I was a reasonably good music student in high school and entered as a double major in performance and education at WVU. Because of this (and because I just really liked class), I completed 190 undergraduate hours. I then went on to complete a masters degree in applied music, and have taken many, many hours since that time. I can honestly tell you that in my entire academic career I have not taken one class that did not prove valuable to my work as a teacher. That isn't to say that they were all stellar classes. But none of them were fluff. When I entered the music classroom I realized that there were still additional skills that I would have to master.
At least in the arts, I can honestly say that many teacher preparation programs are far from rigorous. In most instances, this reflects the economic nature of our institutions of higher learning, not the abilities of the faculty in those colleges and universities. These schools are forced to compete for student dollars, and schools that are extremely rigorous only attract students who are already motivated to perform. The problem is that graduating high school seniors who are looking for a place to coast for four years can be sure they will find someone who'll take their money.
In West Virginia we're now faced with a Higher Education Policy Commission that wants to reduce the number of required hours for teacher preparation programs to 120. (This will not apply to our state's two largest institutions, Marshall and WVU.) The reason is simple economics: if a student cannot be guaranteed that he can complete college in four years, he'll spend his money elsewhere. I firmly believe that you cannot get the skills necessary to become a successful teacher (or at least a successful arts teacher) in 120 credit hours. I find this alarming and I'm surprised that more people don't.
The issue of teacher accountability is a thornier problem. I honestly don't know of a single good educator who believes that teachers shouldn't be held accountable. But it begs the question, "Accountable for what?" Our federal government now requires that all teacher accountability be tied in some measure to tests that assess a narrow set of skills in literacy and numeracy. If I am a teacher of dance, why would I be held accountable for student math scores? And how can we hold teachers accountable for scores on a single test when we cannot demonstrate that students themselves have made a reasonable effort to perform well?
West Virginia's new proposed teacher evaluation system tries to minimize that requirement to 5% of the teacher accountability picture. Having spent part of the last two weeks looking at it, I can honestly say that I think it's a relatively good system and that good teachers will welcome it. The bulk of it is tied to our Professional Teaching Standards, which describe the skills a teacher must have to be successful in the classroom.
My friend Dave believes that teaching is an innate human skill that everyone possesses. Dave's a smart guy and I love him to death, but he is completely wrong, of course. If teaching were something that anyone could do, we wouldn't be having national conversations about teacher quality. You could simply hire anyone and let him do the job. Teaching is a difficult profession that requires a unique set of skills and a great deal of professional preparation. In addition, it requires individual commitment to the field, to the subject, and to the students one teaches.
I firmly believe we need to raise the bar for teachers in our state, but we need to make sure it is a meaningful bar tied to the skills and dispositions that embody great teaching. While we are raising that bar, we also need to raise their salaries and provide the resources they need to be successful. Paying a bad teacher more will not make him better. No one believes that raising someone's salary will result in additional skills, which is why meaningful teacher evaluation is important. What we do know is that we are having increasing difficulty in attracting and retaining great teachers, as many of them leave our state or seek work in another field. More importantly, we know that it's the right thing to do.
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