An open letter to Mickey Kaus, in response to his blog entry of this morning:
Matthew Yglesias displays the strenuous casuistry loyal Democrats will employ to avoid the need for any confrontation with teachers' unions on the question Steve Jobs recently raised--firing lousy teachers.
Summary: Yglesias argues that there aren't enough highly qualified teachers to fill positions in underperforming schools, because high-performing schools have hoovered them up. Kaus counters that you don't know until you get rid of bad teachers and see who applies for the newly open positions. My response to Kaus below the cut.
According to Yglesias the issue isn't firing bad teacher but attracting good ones:
... the reason politicians rarely push for it is that the actual payoff is very, very low. The issue is that there isn't this vast pool of highly effective potential hires out there. The schools with serious teacher-quality problems tend to have them because the better teachers, by and large, don't want to work there and schools have problems filling all the slots with minimally qualified people. The real action (also disliked by teacher unions, if pissing off unions is your goal) is in the certification process, who counts as a qualified teacher, and what counts as an effective teacher (here's where the accountability comes in). If in the future that created a situation where there were tons of people looking to break into the teaching field then it might make sense to expend political capital on making it easier to fire people. [E.A.]
Response:
a) It's easier to hire good teachers if you can fire bad ones. Competent people want to work for competent organizations. Which offer would you be more likely to take: "Come work for our school district. We weed out the deadwood and we're doing a great job preparing our kids," Or "Come work for our district and spend your life beating your head against a bureaucratic wall." Yes, teachers should be paid more--but it's weird that an idealistic liberal would think good candidates are only motivated by money. (And if you could fire bad and mediocre teachers then school districts wouldn't have to spend a big chunk of any pay raise boosting the salaries of ... bad and mediocre teachers).
b) You obviously want to do both-- weed out bad old teachers and expand the pool of potential good new teachers by allowing certification of people who haven't met the mindless credential requirements fiercely defended by the unions. Yglesias conveniently pretends you can only do the former after the latter--"if" in the "future," after a couple of more generations have sloughed through mediocre or criminally lousy schools, we've managed to amass a huge pool of "tons" of people trying to break into teaching, then it "might" make sense to take on the union protection of incompetents. "Might." That's good of him!
As background, I'm a former editor who went back to school a few years ago to get a master of education degree and teaching certification. I taught full-time in an affluent suburban district, my job was eliminated, I took a new position in an urban public school, and I resigned that job after a month and a half because it was propelling me toward burnout. (Both districts are unionized.) Now I'm on the hunt for a new full-time teaching position.
Yglesias has it half right: "The schools with serious teacher-quality problems tend to have them because the better teachers, by and large, don't want to work there and schools have problems filling all the slots with minimally qualified people." Where he's wrong is when he denies the existence of a "vast pool of highly effective potential hires out there." We're out here, all right. This past summer, 18,000 teachers competed for just 2,000 open positions in the Chicago Public Schools.
But here, if you'll forgive my bluntness, is where you're wrong: Realistically speaking, most of those 18,000 teacher candidates, including myself, were really competing for only 400 or 500 openings. The rest are ones we wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. And it's not because we're snobs, and it's not because we don't care about the kids, and it's not even that they don't pay enough (they actually pay better than many suburban districts). But before I explain what it is, let me tell you about a friend of mine, a fellow member of my master's cohort. I interviewed at an inner-city school that was looking for more male teachers; I gave the principal my friend's name as well. I was ambivalent about the school and opted not to take a position there. He wasn't ambivalent at all -- it was exactly what he wanted. He was hired. That was just a couple of years ago. Today, he plans to leave that school as soon as he's able and is seriously considering leaving teaching altogether. This man is not an incompetent teacher. He's as intelligent, capable, creative, determined and passionate as anyone you'll find out there. His No. 1 beef is the No Child Left Behind Act, which he sums up thus: "It gets harder until you fail, and then it gets worse until you quit."
Here's how NCLB looks from inside an underperforming school: You're given a group of kids who, in all likelihood, are underexposed to literate habits and resources at home and have been all their lives. The message they've been given for most of their time in school is not to be analytical, independent or creative or even to just get the right answer -- it's to follow directions, to obey. That means that unless they're told exactly what to do at all times, and I mean all times, they're not that good at choosing on their own the right thing to do. The only way they know how to resolve conflicts is through taunting and fighting, and their lives are one conflict after another. These conflicts between students are going to disrupt the flow of class approximately every four minutes, and the standard ladder of disciplinary measures (warnings, detentions, parent conferences, suspensions) doesn't make them better behaved, just more resentful and defiant -- it breeds an outlaw mentality, and gradually the cycle of misbehavior and punishment becomes part of their identity, if it isn't already. These kids may come to you four grades behind where they're supposed to be; if, through hard work, creative teaching and more patience than most non-teachers can fathom, you manage to raise their performance by three grade levels, you've failed -- because you didn't raise them four. If your troublemakers get suspended, you may enjoy a bit more calm and continuity in your classroom, but now you risk failing because you're not meeting your attendance benchmarks. Even though the most traditional teaching methods demonstrably do not work with these students you're given, NCLB prohibits you from taking a chance on anything new, even if it's a form of teaching advocated by all the professional organizations and leading lights in your content area. In fact, at certain grade levels, you may never get to really teach at all, because the stakes attached to standardized tests are so high, everything else is subordinated to preparation for them -- a total perversion of their purpose, which is to measure whether the regular classroom teaching is helping them meet academic goals. Passing the tests becomes the goal. The needs of successful students and the lowest-achieving students have to take a backseat to those who are just short of passing and can possibly be moved across the line. Suppose, miraculously, that you do manage to make Adequate Yearly Progress with this group of students you've been given; next year, they're gone, you have to start all over from scratch with a new group of students with all the same issues, and this time more of them have to pass, and if they don't, it's all your fault.
God help you if, on top of all this, you have a principal who isn't behind you 100 percent. Or if some of your students don't speak English. Or if your school is dodging its special education responsibilities. Or, because of overcrowding and a low budget for teacher salaries, you have 40 students in your classroom (which my friend did, when he was a student teacher).
There's a state legislator who has proposed giving teachers $50,000 hiring bonuses to teach in inner-city schools. That kind of money would pay off my student loan debt and then some, but you know what? It wouldn't even begin to tempt me into a situation like the one I described above. Neither would merit pay. Teachers need more than money: They need professional respect, they need the power and flexibility to fulfill their many responsibilities, and while this may sound foofy to you, they need reassurance that their efforts are appreciated by their principals, their students, families and the community. What NCLB gives inner-city teachers is an almost unbearable burden of blame.
Teachers, even unionized teachers, don't get tenure until they've been in a district for four years continuously. Before that, they can be fired for any reason at all, and many of them are, and then the school gets to replace them with the best teachers it can find. But why would any self-respecting teacher willingly subject himself or herself to a situation like the one I describe, in which you have no autonomy, no support, no flexibility; in which you're expected to achieve more than your high-scoring suburban counterparts with fewer resources, less prepared students, less supportive parents, and less freedom to adapt and differentiate your curriculum; in which no success, however great, earns you anything, but any failure, however small, can lose you everything? How can such a school expect to attract the best teaching talent available? How can it avoid compromising?
Inner-city schools do not lack good teachers because all their positions are taken up by bad ones who can't be fired. Inner-city schools lack good teachers because they're terrible environments to be a teacher in. Going to work at one is like walking every day into a room where you're bludgeoned with cricket bats for seven continuous hours, then told on your way out that you didn't take it right. The miracle is that so many good teachers are so committed to providing their services where they're needed most, they take these jobs anyway.
I talk about the inner city, but I'm sure these things I'm saying are true in many other districts across the country where highly qualified teachers are supposedly in short supply, even though they're not. What's really in short supply are positions that highly qualified teachers are willing to accept. NCLB is just one of a variety of things that makes certain schools and certain districts frustrating and unpleasant to work in; I wouldn't want to be a science teacher in Kansas or a literature teacher in Florida, or any kind of teacher anywhere football is taken more seriously than academics. Lack of mobility is also a factor -- it's easier for me to get certified to teach in New Zealand than in any state other than the one I got my degree in.
As for affluent districts, they have nothing to worry about -- yet. Most of them have no trouble at all attracting highly qualified teachers: they have more cooperative students and parents, their discipline policies are less rigid, they allow teachers the power and flexibility to apply their professional knowledge fully, and they honor them for a job well done. In a few years, though, the mathematics of NCLB are going to catch up with them, and even the most acclaimed school districts are suddenly going to find themselves failing. It's my belief that at that point or shortly before it, parent outrage will crest, and NCLB will finally be undone. Until then, though, you'd have to be either crazy or saintly to willingly stand beneath its shadow.
The teachers' unions? They're bystanders to all this. They can't make a principal let you teach writing in a workshop rather than from a grammar and vocabulary textbook. They can't decide that Adequate Yearly Progress should be measured longitudinally, tracking one group of students through their time in school, rather than as successive snapshots of one diverse and unique class of students, then another, then another. They can't teach students to catch themselves before throwing a wad of paper or answering a taunt with a punch, or give them rides to school when their parents' cars break down. They can't wave a wand and clone every special education teacher, so that students with exceptional needs get the diagnoses and assistance that the law requires them to get (but that they often don't). They can't force a district to increase its budget for nurses, counselors and social workers so that they can be present in a school more than one day a week. All they can really do is negotiate compensation contracts ensuring that school districts can't take greater undue advantage of teachers' self-sacrificing natures than they already do, and protect the occasional maverick teacher from being retaliated against because of his or her unpopularity (which, surprisingly often, is motivated by his or her success). For these two things, I'm thankful.
The answer to "criminally lousy schools" isn't to punish them further for failing at an impossible job. It's to give them the freedom and resources they need to make the job possible. If there's a deadwood crisis, it's not among teachers or even among principals. It's among the lawmakers who gave us the socioeconomically stratified American public school school system and would rather intensify its inequalities than iron them out.