Vitti, give me five to seven years, teachers I will fire you tomorrow if you do not perform

You know a lot of new teachers really aren’t given a fair shake. They often have to go to the toughest schools and the hardest classrooms because that’s where the jobs are and there many flounder. Then they get micromanaged and bombarded with paper work that often has little to do with teaching.  I have no doubt many would succeed if they were put into classrooms without the discipline problems and academic short comings and where parents were involved.

In short we don’t put them in positions where success is likely and then either they get burned out and leave or we don’t give them the time to develop into the great teachers they otherwise would be.

I mention above because in a conversation with the Times Union’s editors he said he may need 5 to 7 years to get Jacksonville to where it should be and I believe hm. In the past I would often write how the successor to Ed Pratt-Dannals would need years to dig us out from the hole he created and where I am also optimistic about Vitti my assesment hasn't changed. 

Vitti has also done some things that make me scratch my head and there seems to be a disconnect from his message that teachers are to be treated as valued colleagues by principals rather than as easily replaceable cogs but the short is he’s been there for less than a year and I am not ready to give up on him because like most young teachers don’t, he probably still doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.  

The thing is he is most likely going to get the time to learn and improve while many teachers won’t. In a recent article in the Times Union he said he was considering firing the principals and half the staffs at schools that don’t turn their schools around. He didn’t make it sound like they had 5 to 7 years either. One and done was the impression that the article gave.

http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2013/10/fear-teaching.html

Some of you might be thinking well if I go to work and don’t produce I can be let go at a moment’s notice and I concede that point but what if your job was building a bike while riding it…. In the rain… while blind folded, or what I like to call teaching, wouldn’t you hope for some leeway?

Teachers often working with limited resources and support aren’t always able to overcome the dehibilitating effects of poverty. They aren’t always able to overcome apathetic or absent parents or grumbling stomachs because kids are hungry or shaking legs because kids are scared. They aren’t always able to overcome a system which sets up so many for failure and sucks the joy of learning out of them with such an emphasis on high stakes testing.

The powers-that-be might chide them for this or call them failures and threaten their jobs but I thank them because I shudder when I think about where these kids, as behind as they are, would be without them.  

Then think about this who in their right mind would want to go to work at a school that had just fired half its staff?  Wouldn’t they constantly be thinking am I next? Who needs that? When the economy turns around nobody will.

I get it we want results and we want them now, but since he knows results despite hard work don't always show up over night I hope the super wouldn’t ask of teachers what he wouldn’t be willing to give up himself.