The suggestion has been made that the best teachers at Stanton and Paxon should be placed in the lowest performing schools and what a terrible suggestion it is.
Mr. Littelpage presupposes that our best teachers are at Paxon and Stanton since they are two of the best schools in the nation. It’s exactly this low order thinking that has seen the rise of ideas like merit pay, virtual schools and a teachers experience and education don’t matter. They might sound reasonable or good and all but the facts show the opposite.
I have no doubt the halls of Stanton and Paxon are filled with brilliant teachers but I likewise have no doubt that the intervening schools have brilliant teachers as well.
If all we did was switch the staff at Stanton with one of the staffs at Ribault, Jackson or Raines, at the end of the year Stanton would still be one of the best schools and the other would still be struggling.
We need real solutions, not just ones that sound good.
Let's not forget some of the other factors that make this a non-solution. First, teachers are not cogs in a school machine. Teachers at both Stanton and Ribault, or any other school, have spent years developing specialized skills that serve the interests of their student populations. That is why there would be no miracle turn-around. It would be foolish from a human resources standpoint to waste some of our precious training dollars to retrain people at any school in AP, IB, or AICE curricula, not to mention the state-mandated instructional delivery methods prescribed to the turn-around schools. Second, the school system already attempted to entice teachers from all schools to come to the turn-around schools with promises of more money. Few teachers wanted to be lured in for a few more dollars and much less autonomy. Let's face it, many teachers would be flattered to be asked to teach at a turn-around school if you were being brought in to do "your thing" with the understanding that you are a professional with real teaching skills and you won't be castigated or fired for not solving a decades-long problem in one year. Instead, no self-respecting teacher with some experience wants to be brought over to parrot some canned curriculum that is being dictated to you. Real autonomy is what it will take to get teachers excited about tackling this issue. Finally, I understand the notion that teachers work for a system and not a particular school, but I think that this philosophy as practiced in our county has contributed to the problem. No principals have been really invested in making substantive changes because they are told those are not "their" schools. These are not the "teacher's" schools. Well, who's school is it then? A sense of real ownership, beginning with the principal, will also create a more positive environment. Right now, if you don't make gains...oh well...we'll bring in a new regime and some more new teachers. I know you don't want to keep a failing option in place for too long, but right now no one owns any of these options long enough to derive a real satisfaction from solving some of the problems. Anyway, I just think that you risk destroying a school's sense of community for some schools that may have lost their's already with this misguided policy solution.
ReplyDeleteThis was my reply to Ron. He gave me a response but without his permission I won't publish it here as it was private correspondence:
ReplyDeleteRon:
Email letters tend to dashed off with brevity. As was my previous letter. When I said the the "stude...nts were worse" I of course didn't mean they were worse as people or less deserving.
The the two schools I mentioned (Raines and Stanton) have very, very different student populations. It's easier to excel as a teacher when every student brings book, paper and pencil to class. It's easy to excel as a teacher when all the students are well behaved and bring a great attitude to class. It's easy to excel as a teacher when all the students want to achieve and work diligently to do so. It's easier to excel when the majority of your students come from an affluent background. Given the above conditions it's almost like getting free money to work as a teacher.
On the other hand, a school where many, many students show up in class without book, paper or pencil (because they could care less) makes it much harder to excel as a teacher. Or when many students are disruptive in class and there are no consequences for bad behavior makes it harder to excel as a teacher. Or when students could really care less and play and text and skip classes it becomes difficult to excel as a teacher. When students come from a poor and impoverished background it becomes much more difficult to excel as a teacher when judged by a single test score alone (FCAT).
I have personally chosen to work at an inner city school. I get great personal and professional satisfaction from doing so. But if I'm to be judged by one test score alone, I'm going to use my senority to transfer out and work somewhere "easy" where a single test score will "show" what a great job I've done and I'll be lauded as a "best teacher".
At one school it's almost as if you're getting free money to have fun at work (Stanton). At another school (Raines, Jackson, et al) it's the opposite and you get dragged down publicly as "not as good".
As a teacher, kids who want to learn are easier to teach and more times then not, create less disciplinary issues.
ReplyDeleteSure, but do we, as the public, really have a good sense of what occurs at any of these schools day to day? Can we really tell from the data if these kids are uninterested in learning, incapable of learning, frustrated with their pace of learning, or just not responding to the current instructional techniques? Do we really know what impact disciplinary issues play since Chris has mentioned many times that schools have many incentives to unerreport discipline problems? We need to make fewer assumptions about these schools and start looking at the reality of the situation. For example, how many kids are really left at these schools? How many new ideas have been thrown at the current group of seniors in their four years at school? What has been the teacher attrition rate during this time? Also, where are the bright spots? What is working? Is there a sense that there are students at these schools that are not responding to any intervention? How many kids?
ReplyDelete