The Huffington Post has a new education editor, Rebecca Klein. She is clear-thinking and apparently sees through the reform narrative. Welcome, Rebecca.
In her latest post, she gives a recipe for “How to Create a Teacher Shortage,” using Kansas as an example. The ingredients of her recipe will not surprise readers of this blog. The same tactics have been adopted in most states.
Read the entire post. Here is the recipe:
The How To Create A Teacher Shortage Recipe
Ingredients:
1 cup of rhetoric against teachers
2 pounds of bills and programs that attempt to de-professionalize teaching (specifically, a proposed bill that would make it easier to jail teachers for teaching materials deemed offensive and a new program that lifts teacher licensure requirements in certain districts)
3 tablespoons of a lack of due process rights for teachers
½ cup of finely diced repeated budget cuts amid a state revenue crisis
1 stalk of a new school funding system that is currently being challenged in state court
2 grinds of growing child poverty throughout the state
3 tablespoons of low teacher pay
1/3 cup of large numbers of teacher retirements
Within a day, the most important newspaper in the nation, The Néw York Times, published a story by Motoko Rich about a national teacher shortage.
She writes:
“ROHNERT PARK, Calif. — In a stark about-face from just a few years ago, school districts have gone from handing out pink slips to scrambling to hire teachers.
“Across the country, districts are struggling with shortages of teachers, particularly in math, science and special education — a result of the layoffs of the recession years combined with an improving economy in which fewer people are training to be teachers.
“At the same time, a growing number of English-language learners are entering public schools, yet it is increasingly difficult to find bilingual teachers. So schools are looking for applicants everywhere they can — whether out of state or out of country — and wooing candidates earlier and quicker.
“Some are even asking prospective teachers to train on the job, hiring novices still studying for their teaching credentials, with little, if any, classroom experience.”
According to the latter story, the shortage is a matter of supply and demand, with barely a nod to the rhetoric of Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown, and Bill Gates about our “bad teachers” and “broken system.” Nothing about the states that banned collective bargaining. Nothing about the campaign to eliminate due process rights. Nothing about teachers’ disdain for test-based accountability. Nothing about the profound disrespect that reformers have showered on teachers, the false accusations of greed and laziness.
It is hard not to see the demoralization that has caused many veteran teachers to resign and caused a sharp decline in new enrollments in teacher prep programs.
Motoko Rich is a smart reporter. I am hoping she will talk to teachers who are leaving.
Here are some more views, from teacher bloggers. See Chaz here;
And see PerdidoStreetSchool blogger, who correctly says that the Times’ story says there is a teacher shortage without explaining why.
Perdido writes:
Yes, it’s true that a rebounding economy leads fewer people to go into teaching – there are more opportunities available for other kinds of work with “better pay and a more glamorous image.”
But unexplored in the Motoko Rich Times piece is one big reason why teaching isn’t a job with a glamorous image. – the consequences of 10+ years of corporate education reforms.
Every day you open the newspaper or turn on the TV, you see or hear some teacher-bashing crap, some politician like Christie saying he wants to punch teachers in the face, some rag like the Post blaming teachers for destroying the lives of children by using the Three Little Pigs as a DO NOW exercise to teach POV and bias.
Then there are the new “accountability rules” – the constant observations, the evaluation ratings tied to test scores (as high as 50%), the increased work load and stress for the same (or less) money, the decreased benefits, gutted pensions, and diminished work protections like tenure (Kansas is an emblem of this, but it’s happening nationwide too.)
I’d say if kids are looking around at the job landscape and saying “Hell, I can do better than be a teacher!”, they’re right – and smart for saying it.
I teach seniors and I tell the ones who say they want to be teachers to think twice about the major – that teacher bashing and odious accountability measures (most of which simply add more work to a teacher’s load without making them better teachers) make the job miserable these days.
I also tell them that teaching isn’t really a career anymore, that the politicians and educrats and oligarchs who fund education reform see it as a McJob that can be filled by untrained temps who do it for a couple of years and move on (or get moved on by accountability measures) to something else.
And this too:
Mission accomplished for education reformers – a cheap untrained temp workforce is soon going to be commonplace in schools, this will lead to an even bigger “teaching quality crisis” and allow reformers to promote privatization as the answer to the “education crisis.”
And more excellent news…http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/us/teacher-shortages-spur-a-nationwide-hiring-scramble-credentials-optional.html?_r=0
Because that will just improve education so much!!
Notice how the closest Motoko Rich came to revealing anything meaningful in the article was when a principal was quoted as saying, “This is the landscape we find ourselves in.”
There was no other allusion to how the APPR laws and high stakes testing have severely damaged teaching and learning. The Times is a scummy, dirty, biased supermarket rag that cares more about real estate articles than the truth about public education.
“Motoko Rich is a smart reporter.”
Smart enough, unfortunately, to know where her bread is buttered. Don’t look to her for any honest insight.
Wise up NY Times. Stop with the reform bias!
Not to take away from this review of worthy writings, but my analysis predates these.
http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/we-wont-get-better-teachers-by-treating-them-badly/
“So what’s going on here? For sure, those who say teachers have a cushy job – including blowhard pols like Christie – are to be ignored. But like what so often happens in the current education debate, contentious arguments get mired in detail while much bigger issues are allowed to lurk in the background unaddressed.
Those much bigger, unaddressed issues affecting teachers’ work environments are the current love affair with economic efficiency and the cognitive dissonance among believers in the education ‘reform’ movement that although teachers are the ‘single most significant’ determiner of student academic outcomes, we need to make their jobs harder and less secure.”
I was completely taken aback by the absence of any mention of 10 years of education reform and it’s non-stop attack on teachers and the teaching profession. Thanks for this “landscape” goes in large part to President Obama, Secretary Duncan, in Denver former superintendent Michael Bennet, and the many “venture philanthropists.” Who would want to be subjected to such abuse and bullying? I can’t even find out how many teacher openings remain in Denver Public Schools at this time. Transparency? Not so much. Last year at this time there were 125 vacancies when school started.
“But educators say that during the recession and its aftermath prospective teachers became wary of accumulating debt or training for jobs that might not exist. As the economy has recovered, college graduates have more employment options with better pay and a more glamorous image, like in a rebounding technology sector.”
Okay, but, first, just a couple paragraphs above she noted that many states had laid off teachers during the recession – 82,000 just in California. What happened to those teachers? Why are they not returning to fill the vacancies now? Second, the mid-90s were a time of economic boom too, but I don’t recall there being massive nationwide teacher shortages.
Her failure to address either of those issues and instead just talk about “supply and demand” is just proof of her allegiance to the rephormster cause.
Again, don’t expect anything good from her.
Did “supply and demand” even apply in this case? There were just as many children attending school immediately prior to the collapse of the finance industry as after it (give or take).
If they cut staff it had nothing to do with “supply and demand”. The demand remained constant. The state of the economy has nothing to do with how many children show up at a public school. Something else changed, probably class sizes, I would guess.
Teachers who haven’t been able to get a job who graduated 7+ years ago either moved into other fields or are getting jobs in other states. Teachers who were untenured when let go don’t get automatically hired back when the position reopens (if).
Tenured teachers whose jobs reopen are offered the jobs before they can hire any new teachers. If 82000 jobs were lost then the supply increased 82000 on top of any new graduates. If the cuts are being made and 82000 out of work teachers are in line for the jobs, every year a new set of graduates are struggling for the few positions that come up. So to enroll in a teacher prep program you’re paying for a degree and the chances of finding a job are slim to none in many areas.
After reading this article I immediately thought about Susan Ohanian, and how she, in her inimitable way, exposes the reform bias and CCSS cheerleading of the New York Times reporting in this blog post:
http://www.susanohanian.org/core.php?id=835
It is startling to see how, in a year’s worth of excerpts, the NYT repeats the same reformist talking points over and over and how they ignore the truth, the facts, the research, and the voices of those who disagree with their preconceived position. No doubt they are deeply influenced and controlled by the moneyed backers of reform. Sad and shameful and the death knell for true journalism.
Susan’s takeaway:
“I haven’t seen any corrections on all their many many other Common Core misstatements. The New York Times’ meticulous correction when, say, they misspell someone’s name, is done to reassure readers of their precision, their devotion to accuracy. Get the small things right. Willfully and deliberately obfuscate,distort, and lie about what matters.”
The Grey Lady has no interest in reporting the truth about the national teacher shortage or the ravaging effects the reformist’s failed experiments in remaking the American public school system into a business enterprise where they can take their profits is destroying a generation of our children and a once-noble teaching profession.
CORPORATE REFORMERS’ / PRIVATIZERS’
SOLUTION TO THE TEACHER SHORTAGE
I just dug the following up from two years ago. It gives you a preview of how corporate reformers want to solve the teacher shortage.
In it, I wrote about a corporate reform think tanker—Connecticut Policy
Institute’s Ben Zimmer—claiming that there’s no teacher shortage, merely a monopoly on the pipeline of who is legally allowed to teach. According to this line of thinking, the State Education Department of Connecticut has been colluding with the teachers union to prevent “outstanding teachers”—with zero education, training, certification, etc.—-from being hired. This three-part axis of evil—State Ed. departments, teachers unions, administrators unions—have been selfishly doing this order to:
1) “keep the antiquated education administration departments of the state university system in business;”
and
2) “serve the economic interests of existing (K-12) teachers and (K-12) administrators by limiting competition for their jobs, while not advancing the goal of obtaining the highest quality teaching and administration possible.”
It’s all part of the union-dominated, failed status quo that puts adult interests ahead of children’s interests. By contrast, CEO’s of privately run charter schools / charter chains making $500,000-plus are the heroic “reformers” fighting against that failed status quo (made up, in large part, of teachers whose starting pay is $20,000 – 30,000.)
You got that?
For a little context, two years ago, some Connecticut citizens were suing to have Paul Vallas removed from his position as Bridgeport Schools Superintendent because he lacked the credential that were required by law to hold that office. I reference that in what follows:
———————————————
July 28, 2013 //
A reader (Jack) sent the following commentary
on reformers’ efforts to lower standards for
educators and to welcome people without
professional preparation and credentials to
teach in and administer the nation’s public
schools and charter schools. His response
was prompted by a post about teachers in
Arizona with online degrees.
He first quotes from a comment
written by “Arizona Teacher”,
then comments:
————————–
“ARIZONA TEACHER: ‘I have seen staffs
comprised of high school graduate
teachers who bought their degrees
online and took not one college level
course.’ ”
——————————–
JACK:To the “Arizona Teacher”…
here’s a newsflash:
destroying the profession of teaching
and filling it with unqualified faux
teachers is not a “bug” in the privatizers’
“reform” model, it is a “feature.”
I just found this from the Connecticut Policy
Institute—a “think tank” and “a non-partisan
research institute on Connecticut economic
policy and education reform” that fronts for
for-profit business interests that are trying to
profit from the privatization of education.
To do this, they put out bogus “studies” and
“policy papers” in support of these business
interests’ practices and approaches to privatize
education:
http://www.ctmirror.org/op-ed/2013/06/30/vallas-certification-debacle-reveals-shortcomings-education-reform-efforts
In this op-ed, Connecticut Policy
Institute’s Ben Zimmer defends Vallas’
lack of credentialing, but goes one further.
Not only should there be no credential
requirement for Superintendents, THERE
SHOULD BE NO CREDENTIALING OR
EDUCATION REQUIREMENT OF
TEACHERS (???!!!) as well as
ADMINISTRATORS.
————————————————————–
BEN ZIMMER: “With a few exceptions, Connecticut
law requires teachers to have a degree in education,
meaning many talented people who didn’t decide
to become teachers until after completing their
educations have difficulty doing so.
“This serves the economic interests of existing
teachers and administrators by limiting
competition for their jobs, but does not
advance the goal of obtaining the highest
quality teaching and administration possible.” ————————————————————
Don’t you get it? If the government entity in charge
of education requires thing like ohhh… bachelor’s
degrees, or even 2-year community college associate
degrees… or even one single college course… well,
you’re just “serving the economic interest of existing
teachers and administrators by limiting competition
for their jobs.”
Those teachers who’ve actually achieved these
“worthless degrees” will bring along with them
accompanying demands for a decent salary,
health benefits, retirement, etc…. AND WHO
NEEDS THAT when you’re trying to make a
profit… err… excuse me… make
“transformational change” in education?
Oh, you don’t believe this? Well, Connecticut
Policy Institute’s “studies and papers” have
“proven” all of this to be true… that you
need nothing more than a high school diploma
to teach in K-12 schools.
Zimmer goes on:
————————————————————
BEN ZIMMER: “As the Connecticut Policy Institute
has discussed in our papers on education reform,
there is no evidence linking certification regimes
to teachers’ or administrators’ effectiveness in
increasing student achievement. They simply
serve to limit the recruitment pipeline of
outstanding educators and keep the antiquated
education administration departments of the
state university system in business.”
————————————————————–
An organization fronting for business interests
that want to profit from the privatization of
education—some of them charter school chain
CEO”s making $500,000/year or more
(Geoffrey Canada, Eve Moskowitz, etc.)—
has its spokesman going on-line to attack
education departments—some of them Ivy League
universities… most of them having turning out
quality teachers for 100-150 years or more—as
only being “in business” to advance the selfish
financial interests of their administrators and
professors that work in them. They are
deliberately blocking “outstanding educators”
from entering the field because they are out
for themselves, and not students.
In turn, this serves the interest of teachers
and administrators unions—with whom the
Connecticut Department of Ed. is colluding—
as such policies “serve the economic
interests of existing (K-12) teachers and
(K-12) administrators by limiting competition
for their jobs, while not advancing the goal of
obtaining the highest quality teaching and
administration possible.”
Wow! I’m so glad someone’s finally blowing
the lid off this!
But then look at this assclown Zimmer’s bio
at Connecticut Policy Institute:
http://ctpolicyinstitute.org/about/bio/ben-zimmer/leadership
He proudly touts his own education credentials:
———————————————————————-
“Ben received a J.D. from Yale Law School,
where he specialized in business law and economic
policy, and a B.A., magna cum laude with highest
honors in history, from Harvard College.”
———————————————————————-
But Ben, I thought those high-falutin’ things like
degrees didn’t matter. Aren’t those “J.D.’s” and
“B.A.s” and “magna cum laude’s” just worthless
pieces of paper spit out by “antiquated” entities
that are only trying to keep themselves “in business”
to pay the undeserved salaries of the hacks who
work in them?
No, no, no… you see in Ben’s world, rigid
requirements like… oh… years of post-secondary
education, or even passing a certification test….
those things only matter in OTHER careers or
professions. They don’t matter in the realm of
K-12 education… as his noble “kids first”
organization, Connecticut Policy Institute, has
produced “studies and papers” have “proven” that.
No, according to Ben, teaching is like working the
fry machine at McDonald’s… just let anyone in the
door—education and credentials be damned—to
have at it and compete for the job, then just keep
the ones who do it best. And THAT is how you
end up with a staff full of what Ben describes as
“outstanding educators.”
Got that?
You see the way to get better teachers in front of
kids is just simple… so simple that those antiquated
ed departments full of money-motivated hacks have
been missing it for over 150 years—deliberately so,
actually… as they’re conspiring with teachers unions
and administrators union in the process.
The way to fill our country’s schools with “outstanding
educators” is to lower the bar of teacher qualifications
to freakin’ China, or even eliminate any standards
and requirements for becoming a teacher.
That’s it!!!! Why hasn’t anyone thought of that until now?
What’s that, you say? The highest achieving nations like
Finland and South Korea don’t operate that way? In those
countries, becoming a teacher is as difficult and
demanding as becoming a doctor—both there and in
in the United States?
Well, that may lead to countries like those to have the best
education systems in the world, but that would never
work here in the United States.
In case you’re interested, Ben Zimmer privately emailed Dr. Ravitch, who printed his response in its entirety here: (he “likes teachers”)
My favorite reply (in the comments section below) responding to Zimmer’s response was from a “1st grade teacher” named “Chris.”
==================
CHRIS:
“My undergrad degree is in English with a History minor. I have an MA in English and a second MA in Teaching and Learning.
“By Mr. Zimmer’s reckoning, I should apply for a medical license because I have shown talent in putting Band-Aids on 1st graders’ boo-boos.
“Or maybe I should apply to take the Bar Exam, since I have shown great talent in arguing with people in blog comments over points of law.
“Maybe I could get a pilot’s license, since my nephew flies fighter jets for the Air Force, and I’ve flown many times myself and I have a clear talent at taking off and landing without incident (so far).
“Electricians make a lot of money. I could get an electrician’s license since I’ve successfully used electricity for over 50 years without having a single electrocution incident.
“Since Mr. Zimmer relies on economists to define teacher value, I think we should also consider relying on archeologists to define the value of computer programmers. Or we could ask biologists to determine the value of musicians.
“However you spin it, Mr. Zimmer, your argument that professions only require specialized training and licensure in order to avoid competition is about the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Professions have historically controlled entry to their ranks because it’s common sense that people who are experts oversee the training and work of those aspirants who want to join them. It is a very reliable and efficient system of weeding out most of the unqualified (if not all of those with bad intent), and being held accountable by one’s peers keeps most people honest and diligent.
“Licensure and certification may be thorns in the side of libertarian thinkers, but they serve a very real purpose of protecting the general population and ensuring a standard of excellence and expertise that market-based accountability is incapable of reproducing.
“If I go to an uncertified ‘expert’ doctor and he accidentally removes my liver instead of my appendix, then I can’t shop around for the best doctor the market indicates because I’m dead.
“If I hire an uncertified ‘expert’ lawyer with, say a background in pharmacology, and she puts up no defense, then I can’t shop around for another lawyer in the free market because I’m in jail for 20 years.
“And that lawyer who is an unlicensed ‘expert’ in pharmacology just poisoned me and I’m dead, so I can’t shop the free market for another ‘better’ pharmacist, can I?
“Why are you asking parents to risk the education and the future of their precious children with uncertified and unlicensed ‘experts’ who receive a special dispensation because they have been successful at something else?
“I teach first grade. Tell me who qualifies for alternative certification and licensure to teach a 6 year old how to read and write and add and subtract?
“It -is- rocket science, as Lousia Moats so famously argued, and no outsider, now matter how rich, how lauded, or how successful in business has the skills I have or the ability to do it well without being trained as I was (and am still), and by putting in the years I have to gain the expertise to do it properly.
“If I want to teach undergrad classes in Physics, then I would need to pay my dues and earn credentials in Physics.
“Why do you think experts in other fields should receive a pass when it would never be asked or expected if the movement were reversed?
“Which profession is waving their licensure and certification to welcome teachers into their fold without learning the field, paying the dues, and passing the exams?
“I totally and unequivocally reject your arguments against licensure and certification by traditional means, and through traditional schools of education because it makes no sense, would not work, and destroys the very profession of education, no matter how many times you claim to like and respect teachers. I’m not fooled.”
Thanks Jack! That was me on one of my more argumentative days, LOL.
Bravo! When it comes to ed. policy, you should be that “argumentative” every day.
Rich’s conclusions hold up if you can suspend reality, but we know that most of conservative ideology today is based on selective manufactured crises, the devout worship of Wall St. and the Bible. There seems to be no limit to the overwhelming evidence that can be ignored or tweaked to suit their devious agendas.
Reblogged this on MEAMatters and commented:
The NYT runs a piece on the national teacher shortage over the weekend, but doesn’t address why. Here’s why: it’s because the right has made the teaching profession so demoralizing.
That recipe: catastrophe waiting to to boil over. The failure of the public school systems and the shortage of teachers is by governmental design. We have watched this decline for decades now. Republican White House. Democratic White House. On the other hand, private schools, charter schools, magnet schools, community school, home schools and all others that on the rise nationally are not facing these issues, because they play by more independent rules. –E.E. ♥
I take issue with the characterization that it is ‘the right’ that is doing this to teaching. The rightwing politicians were never able to do what the Obama administration has done with the full support of more than a few democratic governors and legislators. They may be neoliberals but they are not of ‘the right’.
This is beyond party affiliation and the attacks will not end if ‘the right’ falls into oblivion after the next election, which it may well do if Donald Trump remains their most popular candidate, LOL.
You’re right. There are plenty of destructive forces on both side of the aisle. Both sides have drunk the privatization Kool Aid, even if the motives may be somewhat different.
Well said Chris and it is the absolute truth. However, since most teachers identify themselves as Democrats the viewpoints on this blog tend to only point the finger at those “evil conservatives”. I’ve got news for you folks the more you identify yourself as either Republican or Democrat the further you are driving the steak through your very own heart. I do not let myself to be labeled or identified as right wing or left wing. I tend to look at the issues as what’s right versus what’s wrong instead of being beholden to a predetermined ideology based solely on a political affiliation.
Here’s a great video of former UTLA president,
Warren Flecther.
This is from his PART FOUR of Fletcher’s
first address in 2011 to the membership at
UTLA’s annual Leadership Conference. The attendees
are comprised of hundreds of Chapter Chairs from
each individual school site in LAUSD.
(btw, this year’s conference finished a week ago.)
In this speech from four years ago, Fletcher calls
out people like Ben Zimmer, and organizations
like the Connecticut Policy Institute:
go to 7:07
FLETCHER:
“The goal of the phony ‘reform’ movement
isn’t to CHANGE your job; it’s to ELIMINATE
your job.
“Their goal isn’t to CHANGE the teaching profession;
it’s to ABOLISH the idea of teaching AS A PROFESSION.”
————————–
Out of respect for UTLA’s current president, Alex
Caputo-Pearl, here’s his speech from a week
ago Sunday: (it’s great, too 😉 )
On the issue of the de-professionalization of teaching, please note that the Department of Education in New York City is rolling out its Universal Pre-K for All initiative. Parochial schools, charters (!), and storefront child care centers are hiring “Pre-K” teachers. The DOE is demanding mandatory attendance at summer sessions (this week at Brooklyn College, next week at Queens College) to teachers who are entering through these schools. You are to teach DOE/Core Curriculum, with observation notes, accountability, strict use of time and preparation for on-site visits. But the temps (a lot of TFA temps are getting a rubber-stamped certifications) are not hired at DOE rates. Why are these schools mandated to teach DOE/Common Core, when they are not DOE schools? The schools have not received funds yet, and have to dip into their budget for desks, and other requirements. And this system creates a “bed” of franchises and fast food workers in the future- first Pre-K, then kindergarten, first grade, etc. Where is the AFT/UFT in all of this? There is no protection or due process when the on-site visitor comes calling to check on your teaching.
This destruction of middle class jobs, not just in teaching, but in many other government related jobs that were previously on federal or state payrolls is contributing to the flat wages we keep hearing about. The new privatized jobs pay well for a few players at the top, but everyone else is poorly paid with lousy or no benefits, and the pension is no longer defined. It is paid from the workers’ meager wages. The corporations make out like bandits, and they use the taxpayers to cover any gaps like food stamps or subsidies for the ACA. Walmart and other cheap corporations have been doing this for years. This is how they plunder the middle class, and move them down the economic ladder.
Absolutely. And the young TFA temps, who perhaps only previously worked at summer jobs folding garments at the Gap, don’t know about working in a profession. I wonder if the day care centers in NYC are providing health care to the new Pre-K hires? I guess they can tell them to apply for food stamps and the ACA. I’m curious to see how this shakes down. Some one should investigate this.
After working for many years in the inner city, I feel compassion for those new teachers. I have watched teachers been abused in different ways. I have seen students hit them. I have often seen them been falsely accused. I have seen them cry as if they were in the funeral of a loved one. While the Gates and the Broads among others are laughingly preparing to attend to the funeral of at the funeral death of the great American public education. I remember my friend telling me, “Mr. Flores, if I had a daughter, I would rather have her work as a prostitute than work as a teacher.”
This is why I will probably be forced to retire come September or soon after. We in the public schools here in NY City are caught between the tests and the Danielson-framework 15 minute walk through observations. After 40 years in this country, almost all of it spent teaching for a living (beginning as a teaching assistant in physics in grad school) I feel I made a mistake in coming to this country and in spending so many years of my life in teaching.
The 23 or so years I have put in as a full-time teacher in the NY city high schools should be multiplied by a factor of two to include the 3-4 hours I had to put in Mon-Fri and the 8 or more hours on weekends on grading and preparation, plus the time spent during holidays, including even summers, trying to catch up or get ready.
I never had imagined, for instance, that by taking up teaching, I would also find myself in what has been, effectively, a text-book authoring and publishing business, including in subjects not in my license area–and all of this on the go, while teaching my daily five classes, usually in two or more different subjects.
The skillset I developed as a result, teaching students with multiple and constantly changing deficiencies (including not only basic math but even, in my later years little or no knowledge of English, forcing me to rewrite and translate my earlier materials) is considerable, but never will be acknowledged even as pertinent by the new breed of administrators who escaped the classroom with just a few years of teaching. They are not here to support and help teachers, especially new ones, as would be expected of a “principal teacher” or an “assistant principal teacher”. They come into classrooms and give us grades of 1-4 on a checklist of Danielson-rubric topics, typing in hurried notes to justify these scores.
After NY State Governor Andrew Cuomo barked about teachers getting overly high evaluations, NY City Schools Chancellor apparently issued orders to lower our scores, and sure enough, my scores (and that of many other teachers in my school) dropped from the 3’s and 4’s we had received last year to 2’s (almost exclusively in my case) and even (for some experienced teachers) 1’s. Meanwhile, I have been working harder than ever, for a number of reasons not connected with the scoring, but to no avail.
Without warning, students were de-annualized at the start of the spring term, forcing me to call those students I had lost (over 80% of my fall roster) repeatedly to get back my text books, which I assign homework from, in addition to classwork and homework from my daily handouts, which have dates and page numbers and are hole-punched by me daily, so students can put them in their binders and use them like a book.
This is just one example of the many things, often quite unreasonable or impossible, that teachers are expected to do, and how they are treated.
After 40 years spent mostly on teaching, and 23 full years of that in the city schools, I feel, unfortunately, like a total incompetent. This is not something I have experienced in fields in which I have put in just a tiny fraction of the time and effort I have put into teaching. While I do still get some acknowledgement for my efforts from my more sincere students, and I still get some satisfaction from seeing, from their classwork, homework and tests and what I see and hear going on in class, that even the minimally diligent are able understand the concepts and do the work, I know that if I continue I will end up with an ineffective rating soon enough.
As a reader of this blog, you must know that senior teachers appear to targeted in Los Angeles. I don’t know if New York is following this misguided plan,or not. The preoccupation with test scores and the latitude governors have to construct nonsensical VAM formulae are making evaluating teachers a twisted, mercurial mind game. Try not to let it get you down, and seek support from others on the staff that seem to be behind the eight ball as well. Try to hang until retirement. If the stress becomes overwhelming, vest your pension, and find a position where you can keep your sanity. Above all, do what is best for you. I am sorry so many hard working teachers find themselves in such unjust circumstances.
My greatest wish before I die is to see the greatest teacher shortage in American history. I want to see districts begging for teachers. I want to see teachers granted decent salaries and professional autonomy (i.e. Teachers should be running the schools and making professional decisions regarding personnel, curriculum and instruction.)
Teacher shortages are an important first step in creating a cheap teaching workforce for the profiteers of the reform movement. The reformsters have been working hard since the 1980s to cultivate the notion that our schools are failing. Given that now widespread belief, it is unlikely that the public would ever go for the idea of eliminating teacher certification. It’s ludicrous to think that a failing system could get better with less qualified practitioners. So they find themselves in a kind of trap: How to require a highly educated worker, but pay her the salary of someone with much lower qualifications?
The answer? Create teacher shortages. Or the illusion of teacher shortages. Whichever is easier–both will work to the same end. With this desperation in place, obviously we will have to do something, so eliminate licensing.
Once that hurdle is cleared, drop the teacher shortage illusion and then turn to “the market” to show that teachers don’t need to be paid well, especially since (bonus!) they now no longer need credentials.
Exactly. I know plenty of out of work teachers, most with advanced degrees and several years of experience, who are having a hard time finding work.
The “shortage” is of cheap, short-term laborers who can be plugged into teaching positions recently vacated by jettisoned, expensive professionals. Better get those alternate routes to certification programs going full tilt.
Ah, yes… the district in which I am employed must give a limited amount of excellent rankings to teachers regardless of the fact that the district is one of the best in the state… so then the “locals” harp about how there are just as many excellent teachers in less renowned districts so we must be paid too much & be undeserving of our pensions! you can’t make this up & you can’t win in this “stacked” system!
Love your post. Teachers would add many other things. We now have to upload 25 or more pieces of evidence to prove that we are good teachers or we are deemed poor or terrible teachers. Tenure and seniority mean virtually nothing even in Illinois. Govenor Quinn and Rauner have cut retirements and now threaten to shut down the government to severely cut retirement and union input. We have been given little training on the things we need to upload to prove we are good teachers, so presumed guilty not innocent We have had no training on how to upload these items and no extra time to do so. We also must let students take tests, grades 3 and above sometimes 9 weeks per year with some tests taking 90 minutes, even for 8 year olds. Other duties such as taking an inventory of the entire classroom, including left over paper and outdated materials that may have come with 10 books, cd’s etc for each subject, filling out common core checklists every week and being penalized for taking earned sick days are just some of the stressors. Many of us work 8 am, or earlier, and usually stay until at least 5 pm, some of us hours later and grading 7 or more tests every week. We must teach with what the administration considers best practice, yet there is no training for best practice. Whatever is the newest wave of teaching methodology becomes the way we must teach, yet if test scores are not raised after working 10-14 hours a day, weekends and summers, we will be fired. There is no mystery to any teacher that must give tests, that we have a teacher shortage. College instructors are now under the same scrutiny and are being evaluated without the evaluator staying for entire lesson. Then they cite that lessons miss elements on evaluations. Thank you for everything you do!!! I am off to work, my 3rd week of unpaid summer work without any computer access at work while our administration have computers and have pushed us to use electronics for everything that we do. That doesn’t work well when we have no access to the internet or printers until we are in meetings for the start of school next week. The rest of the summer is spent at classes, reading curriculum, evaluation, or methodology materials and searching for online materials since budgets no longer allow for books for students or teachers, or trying to let our brains re-energize. It is no mystery that we have a shortage as duties are increased while budgets, support and training are decreased. Kathleen
This is an identical copy straight out of the Florida play book. Hell, they don’t even change the terminology. It’s just recycled and implemented without any evidence to back up the effectiveness of such preposterous plans.
How to Create a Teacher Shortage
1) Terrorize veteran teachers.
2) Bring in TFA.
3) Eliminate teacher autonomy in the classroom.
4) Bust unions and eliminate job protections.
5) Evaluate teachers based on bogus, opaque formulas.
6) Make teachers pay increasing contributions for health benefits and pensions.
7) Explore options to deprive teachers of their pensions.
I see at the last governor’s meeting they shared this recipe with each other and all decided to try it out at home…sometime recipes are better left unmade.
Here’s a great article on the teacher shortage by David Greene. As usual, he gets it right. https://dcgmentor.wordpress.com/2015/08/10/thats-rich-across-country-a-scramble-is-on-to-find-teachers-nyt-81015/
More teachers must speak out!
My entire extended family are recently retired teachers. My daughter just resigned….. After 5 years; grades 7 – 12 with Mathmatics Cum Laude BS & Masters Special Ed Cum Laude she is a great example of teacher who received little if any coaching or encouragement and was CONSUMED by politics and in my humble option – incompetent direct supervision who didn’t give a crap about non-tenured teachers.
You would be doing a disservice if didn’t interview teachers who resigned, teachers who were forced to resign, teachers who were fired – THEN analyze the remedial supervision plans Adminisrarors used to DEVELOP NEW TEACHERS WITH UNDER 5 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
I’m a retired Director of Operations and in 40 years in management I have never seen an industry like Educatiom more incompetantly mismanaged and abused than Education starting at the TOP and drilled right down to the bottom of the supervisory food chain. Teachers are thrown to the minions and left to self-develop? Guaranteed Failure.
I think it would make a great documentary. What happened to all the fired or discouraged teachers as a result of the teacher wars.
Thank you. I entered teaching as a second career. When I left my business jobs, I was asked why. When I left teaching, no one asked.
Great article from our friends at The Onion. Could this be another reason for the teacher shortage???
http://www.theonion.com/article/new-statewide-education-standards-require-teachers-51038
This is micro-managing of idiotic proportions!
It’s the Onion. It’s satire.
“We are a republic whereof one man is as good as another before the law. Under such a form of government it is of the greatest importance that all should be possessed of education and intelligence enough to cast a vote with a right understanding of its meaning. A large association of ignorant men can not for any considerable period oppose a successful resistance to tyranny and oppression from the educated few, but will inevitably sink into acquiescence to the will of intelligence, whether directed by the demagogue or by priestcraft. Hence the education of the masses becomes of the first necessity for the preservation of our institutions. They are worth preserving, because they have secured the greatest good to the greatest proportion of the population of any form of government yet devised. All other forms of government approach it just in proportion to the general diffusion of education and independence of thought and action. As the primary step, therefore, to our advancement in all that has marked our progress in the past century, I suggest for your earnest consideration, and most earnestly recommend it, that a constitutional amendment be submitted to the legislatures of the several States for ratification, making it the duty of each of the several States to establish and forever maintain free public schools adequate to the education of all the children in the rudimentary branches within their respective limits, irrespective of sex, color, birthplace, or religions; forbidding the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets; and prohibiting the granting of any school funds or school taxes, or any part thereof, either by legislative, municipal, or other authority, for the benefit or in aid, directly or indirectly, of any religious sect or denomination, or in aid or for the benefit of any other object of any nature or kind whatever.”
President Grant had it right in his State of the Union address in 1875. How far, backwards, we have come since then. Thanks to the deformers we will soon be that nation of “ignorant men” (and women) he feared, lacking teachers and lacking public education and losing our freedom. Is there any politician out there today who has even half the grasp of the issue that Grant did and is willing and able to express it on the stump? Or have our leaders become so ignorant, corrupted and lacking in common sense that they can’t even speak such an obvious truth to the voters?
This is a wonderful idea, but now that we are an oligarchy this ideal seems out of reach.
Until recently, I encouraged by students to go into teaching. Not anymore, and very few express any interest in the career. Just this past weekend I attended my daughters graduation from her masters program. When the school president asked students graduating with education degrees to please stand, three students stood.
As an aside, my daughter graduated with her Masters in Occupational Therapy. She will be starting her new career making about 25k more than her father with 25 years of teaching experience. She is 25 years old.
Wow~! That much more at the start of her career? Good for her, but yikes!
I assembled some greatest hits about teacher bashing a while back:
DR. RAVITCH: Some people love to teach. They want to make a career of teaching. They see teaching not as a job but as their life’s work, their mission.
Other people don’t understand why anyone would want to make a professional commitment to teaching. It’s a poorly paid profession, it is hard work, and a teacher must often deal with recalcitrant children who don’t want to be there.
But despite the obstacles and burdens, there are still people who love to teach, and their critics find it possible to know why.
Reader Jack Covey has collected a few choice quotes on this subject. As I read his comment, it seemed to me that someone could write a book collecting similar quotes disparaging teachers and teaching. Not only the infamous Newsweek cover story noted below, but also several TIME cover stories, including the recent one called “Rotten Apples,” about how Silicon Valley execs decided to “fix” education by eliminating tenure. No plan from Silucon Valley execs about how to reduce poverty or directly address the needs of children, just a plan to make it easier to fire teachers.
Here is Jack Covey’s comment:
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“Let’s start with anti-corporate reformer Leonie Haimson:
http://www.eduwonk.com/2010/08/unmasking-the-blame-the-teacher-crowd.html
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LEONIIE HAIMSON: Scapegoating teachers has become the mantra of the so-called reformers. From Katie Haycock claiming (with no evidence) that the problems of low-performing schools are primarily due to poor teaching, to the recent cover of Newsweek, proclaiming that the ” Key to saving American education” is to “fire bad teachers,” with these words repeated over and over on the blackboard, this simplistic notion notion infects nearly every blog, magazine, and DC think tank, including this one.
In what other sphere would we make this claim? Is the key to reforming our inequitable health care system firing bad doctors? Or the key to reducing inner city crime firing bad cops? No. But somehow this inherently destructive perspective is the delivered wisdom among the privateers who populate and dominate thinking in this country.
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From corporate reformer Kati Haycock: (originally at NEWSWEEK—since deleted by NEWSWEEK) but still available at
http://www.eduwonk.com/2010/08/unmasking-the-blame-the-teacher-crowd.html
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KATI HAYCOCK: But what we need to do is change the idea that education is the only career that needs to be done for life. There are a lot of smart people who change careers every six or seven years, while education ends up with a bunch of people on the low end of the pile who don’t want to compete in the job market. Kati Haycock, President of Education Trust, (Newsweek, 9/1/08)
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From Corporate Reformer & hedge fund guru Whitney Tilson:
http://www.eduwonk.com/2010/08/unmasking-the-blame-the-teacher-crowd.html
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WHITNEY TILSON : (Public school teachers are) gutless weasels and completely disgraced themselves in siding with the unions against meaningful reforms of a public school system that systematically, all over the country, gives black and Latino students the very worst teachers and schools, thereby trapping black and Latino communities in multi-generational cycles of poverty, violence and despair. (July 30, 2011 blog post)
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And finally… From Michelle Rhee
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/crusader-of-the-classrooms/307080/
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ATLANTIC MONTHLY: One of the other concerns I’ve heard voiced about alternative selection models is that the teachers aren’t making a thirty-year, or even a ten-year commitment.
MICHELLE RHEE: Nobody makes a thirty-year or ten-year commitment to a single profession. Name one profession where the assumption is that when you go in, right out of graduating college, that the majority of people are going to stay in that profession. It’s not the reality anymore, maybe with the exception of medicine. But short of that, people don’t go into jobs and stay there forever anymore.
ATLANTIC MONTHLY: So you feel like teachers can be effective even within a short term?
MICHELLE RHEE: Absolutely, and I’d rather have a really effective teacher for two years than a mediocre or ineffective one for twenty years.
ATLANTIC MONTHLY: One thing that I’ve encountered personally in talking to a lot of veteran teachers is this idea that programs like Teach for America or the D.C. Teaching Fellows de-professionalize education. They see it as a kind of glorified internship.
MICHELLE RHEE: I’ll tell you what de-professionalizes education. It’s when we have people sitting in the classrooms—whether they’re certified or not, whether they’ve taught for two months or 22 years—that are not teaching kids. And whom we cannot remove from the classroom, and whom parents know are not good. Those are the things that de-professionalize the teaching corp. Not Teach for America, not D.C. Teaching Fellows. That, I think, is a ridiculous argument.
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Put yourself in the shoes of a university student. Are you going to spend and/or incur debt in a range of $100,000 – 300,000 for tuition/room & board/other expenses, then face all of that?
See
http://lawmarketing.com/theodore-roosevelts-20-key-elements-of-leadership/
The way to ensure that one has a great team is to find people smarter than one’s self and then get the heck out of their way. That was the Teddy Roosevelt philosophy of management.
Micromanaging is the surest way to drive capable people away.
Years ago, I had the great good fortune to work as an editor under Bill Grace, a brilliant, inspiring man who once told his assembled team, in my presence, “I’ve been very successful, and I’m going to let you in on my secret. I find people smarter than I am and get the heck out of their way so they can do their jobs.”
Add to all said, how difficult the state makes it for the ESL/ELL future teachers to pass the formal Basic Skills Test, now called TAP, especially people like me whose first language is not English. I currently have a bachelors degree and a masters in library science, but I have not been able to pass the test.
I just been offered a job as a TA earning $12.00 an hour as an ELL TA
I have years of experience, first, as a Spanish Instrutor and as bilingual TA
How I’m I supposed to survive and pay my student loans on this salary?
Can someone help me and many other people in the same situation?
I think the question “Why is there teacher shortage?” can be asked in two ways. The first is what people address here: “What is the cause of teacher shortage?”.
The other way to ask is “What is the purpose of teacher shortage?”. The answer to this is to transition to online education, and hence eliminate the need for teachers.
This will happen in stages, of course, so that we won’t rise up against publishers, software makers. Here is the first stage in a real life example: For our university, we got less funding for graduate students from the governor. So we now don’t have graders.
Since profs (as most teachers) hate grading, we started to employ online grading systems such as Webassign. Of course, webassign offers to make up the home works and tests for you. Siince an online grading system can only check whether an answer is correct or not, we get used to not look at students work. So we set ourselves and the students up to get used to giving and evaluatings tests that are suitable for online grading—and the whole testing/grading process is done online.
To indicate what the next stage of getting rid of teachers is, note that webassign has videos where teachers explain various topics.