Want to get our best teachers to our struggling schools? Read here

How to attract veteran teachers to our struggling schools.

The recent audit of our schools pointed out that our struggling schools typically had more inexperienced teachers than our other schools. They also noticed that monetary incentives offered to our experienced teachers had not been working, to which I reply, well duh.

First teachers did not become teachers to become rich, they did so to make a difference but the powers that be with their two to five thousand dollar bribes to get experienced teachers to come to struggling schools and proponents of merit pay don’t understand this. They don’t appreciate that teachers don’t think like they do. Since for the most part, relatively small sums of extra money don’t matter, the system has nothing else in place to attract our best and veteran teachers to the struggling schools. Those running things need to realize a few bucks is not going to get our best teachers to leave their safe and successful environments.

Invariably the schools that need the most help are located in high poverty neighborhoods and poverty is the number one indicator how a student does in school. Kids in poverty as a group perform a lot worse than those that don’t live in it and to give you some scale over a fifth of our kids live in poverty and another fifth just above it. Great teachers go to struggling schools and all of a sudden they seem to become mediocre and studies about merit pay and how it doesn’t work bear this out.

Furthermore why would a great teacher want to go to a struggling school and instantly be micromanaged? Most of the truly great teachers employ creativity and pray to the altar of flexibility, two more things that the powers-that-be do not understand. They think every teacher should be able to teach the same thing at the same pace in the same way. In Jacksonville its struggling schools are always being visited by the state and the board police to make sure their agendas, word walls and standards are posted in the precise manner and if they are not teachers are called to the woodshed. It’s become a sad day when good instruction has become secondary to how a teacher’s board looks but that is the system that has been handed to teachers.

Then there are the phone book sized data notebooks that teachers are required to create and constantly update. The reality is these books are created for admins to leaf through and they give the great teacher, heck the good and average teacher as well, the same information they get from working with the children for a few days. Then don’t get me started about the two page lesson plans. When I started teaching you could put two weeks of lesson plans on two pages. Now if a teacher tried to pass that off they would find themselves on a one way ticket to a success plan.

With everything that is put upon the teachers at the struggling schools I don’t understand how they get the teachers they do and if the economy turns around they won’t be able to get anybody. It was just four years ago that schools were recruiting in foreign countries and in the business world begging people to give teaching a chance. The powers-that-be have taken advantage of people’s desperation for a job, any job.

Then there is discipline. It’s not a stretch to say behavior worsens without parental involvement and when kids fall behind and many of our kids start way behind. Whether it is just a perception or not our struggling schools have the reputation of being undisciplined and no teacher wants to walk into that situation. Teaching is hard enough without constantly having to worry about how little Johnny or Suzie is going to disrupt class and make teaching impossible.

Add it all up and it means almost nobody wants to go the struggling schools and most of the people already there are planning their exit strategies.

The powers-that-be have no idea what good teaching looks like or what is needed to see that it happens and that’s why they can’t figure out how improve our schools and to get our best teachers to our worse students, however I know and do.

You want the best teachers to pair up with our most struggling students in our failing schools, well it’s easy and it could be done without spending an extra nickel. Guarantee the teachers that they can be as creative and flexible as they need to be and that they will be trusted to get the material to the children in the matter that they see fit. Furthermore tell them not to worry about the FCAT while teaching, that their instruction alone will be fine.

Get rid of all the superfluous tasks that the modern teacher is required to do. No more data notebooks, two page lesson plans and make word walls optional. All they should need is a streamlined daily agenda that takes minutes not hours to create. Instead have the teachers spend their precious time getting parents involved and figuring out how to creatively reach their children. Ask them to give just one extra hour a day not the three or four the struggling schools require just so teachers don’t fall to far behind.

Then back the teachers up. If a kid is acting up make sure they get real consequences for their behavior. This is going to require admins to understand that behavior often worsens before it gets better and this is magnified when trying to discipline kids who have never had any. Sadly since so many students have been pushed along without real consequences for their behavior for so long this means we may lose some students.

Then there are a few other things too. Make sure teachers have enough planning time and the school has resource/elective classes that the kids enjoy. If we make school more enjoyable for the students then that would greatly assist instruction. Then don't assighn a percentage to the amount of kids that a teacher can fail and get rid of grade recovery, it has made instruction all but meaningless.

The powers-that-be think they can throw money at the problem and that will solve the problem and that’s just not the case. The year my school went from a two thousand dollar bonus to a five thousand dollar bonus, the amount of extra work teachers were required to do went up and the school grade went down. No, it is incentives other than money that would attract our great teachers to work with our struggling students at our struggling schools and until the people in Tallahassee and Washington D.C. understand that, our most struggling schools will continue to have our most inexperienced teachers.

Barring all that they could try an extra 25k, that may be enough to get some teachers shifting but no amount of money is going to improve the system if we keep doing things the same way.