A letter from a disgusted teacher:
I QUIT
Kris L. Nielsen
Monroe, NC 28110
Union County Public Schools
Human Resources Department
400 North Church Street
Monroe, NC 28112
October 25, 2012
To All it May Concern:
I’m doing something I thought I would never do—something that will make me a statistic and a caricature of the times. Some will support me, some will shake their heads and smirk condescendingly—and others will try to convince me that I’m part of the problem. Perhaps they’re right, but I don’t think so. All I know is that I’ve hit a wall, and in order to preserve my sanity, my family, and the forward movement of our lives, I have no other choice.
Before I go too much into my choice, I must say that I have the advantages and disadvantages of differentiated experience under my belt. I have seen the other side, where the grass was greener, and I unknowingly jumped the fence to where the foliage is either so tangled and dense that I can’t make sense of it, or the grass is wilted and dying (with no true custodian of its health). Are you lost? I’m talking about public K-12 education in North Carolina. I’m talking about my history as a successful teacher and leader in two states before moving here out of desperation.
In New Mexico, I led a team of underpaid teachers who were passionate about their jobs and who did amazing things. We were happy because our students were well-behaved, our community was supportive, and our jobs afforded us the luxuries of time, respect, and visionary leadership. Our district was huge, but we got things done because we were a team. I moved to Oregon because I was offered a fantastic job with a higher salary, a great math program, and superior benefits for my family. Again, I was given the autonomy I dreamed of, and I used it to find new and risky ways to introduce technology into the math curriculum. My peers looked forward to learning from me, the community gave me a lot of money to get my projects off the ground, and my students were amazing.
Then, the bottom fell out. I don’t know who to blame for the budget crisis in Oregon, but I know it decimated the educational coffers. I lost my job only due to my lack of seniority. I was devastated. My students and their parents were angry and sad. I told myself I would hang in there, find a temporary job, and wait for the recall. Neither the temporary job nor the recall happened. I tried very hard to keep my family in Oregon—applying for jobs in every district, college, private school, and even Toys R Us. Nothing happened after over 300 applications and 2 interviews.
The Internet told me that the West Coast was not hiring teachers anymore, but the East Coast was the go-to place. Charlotte, North Carolina couldn’t keep up with the demand! I applied with three schools, got three phone interviews, and was even hired over the phone. My very supportive and adventurous family and I packed quickly and moved across the country, just so I could keep teaching.
I had come from two very successful and fun teaching jobs to a new state where everything was different. During my orientation, I noticed immediately that these people weren’t happy to see us; they were much more interested in making sure we knew their rules. It was a one-hour lecture about what happens when teachers mess up. I had a bad feeling about teaching here from the start; but, we were here and we had to make the best of it.
Union County seemed to be the answer to all of my problems. The rumors and the press made it sound like UCPS was the place to be progressive, risky, and happy. So I transferred from CMS to UCPS. They made me feel more welcome, but it was still a mistake to come here.
Let me cut to the chase: I quit. I am resigning my position as a teacher in the state of North Carolina—permanently. I am quitting without notice (taking advantage of the “at will” employment policies of this state). I am quitting without remorse and without second thoughts. I quit. I quit. I quit!
Why?
Because…
I refuse to be led by a top-down hierarchy that is completely detached from the classrooms for which it is supposed to be responsible.
I will not spend another day under the expectations that I prepare every student for the increasing numbers of meaningless tests.
I refuse to be an unpaid administrator of field tests that take advantage of children for the sake of profit.
I will not spend another day wishing I had some time to plan my fantastic lessons because administration comes up with new and inventive ways to steal that time, under the guise of PLC meetings or whatever. I’ve seen successful PLC development. It doesn’t look like this.
I will not spend another day wondering what menial, administrative task I will hear that I forgot to do next. I’m far enough behind in my own work.
I will not spend another day wondering how I can have classes that are full inclusion, and where 50% of my students have IEPs, yet I’m given no support.
I will not spend another day in a district where my coworkers are both on autopilot and in survival mode. Misery loves company, but I will not be that company.
I refuse to subject students to every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is important. I refuse to have my higher-level and deep thinking lessons disrupted by meaningless assessments (like the EXPLORE test) that do little more than increase stress among children and teachers, and attempt to guide young adolescents into narrow choices.
I totally object and refuse to have my performance as an educator rely on “Standard 6.” It is unfair, biased, and does not reflect anything about the teaching practices of proven educators.
I refuse to hear again that it’s more important that I serve as a test administrator than a leader of my peers.
I refuse to watch my students being treated like prisoners. There are other ways. It’s a shame that we don’t have the vision to seek out those alternatives.
I refuse to watch my coworkers being treated like untrustworthy slackers through the overbearing policies of this state, although they are the hardest working and most overloaded people I know.
I refuse to watch my family struggle financially as I work in a job to which I have invested 6 long years of my life in preparation. I have a graduate degree and a track record of strong success, yet I’m paid less than many two-year degree holders. And forget benefits—they are effectively nonexistent for teachers in North Carolina.
I refuse to watch my district’s leadership tell us about the bad news and horrific changes coming towards us, then watch them shrug incompetently, and then tell us to work harder.
I refuse to listen to our highly regarded superintendent telling us that the charter school movement is at our doorstep (with a soon-to-be-elected governor in full support) and tell us not to worry about it, because we are applying for a grant from Race to the Top. There is no consistency here; there is no leadership here.
I refuse to watch my students slouch under the weight of a system that expects them to perform well on EOG tests, which do not measure their abilities other than memorization and application and therefore do not measure their readiness for the next grade level—much less life, career, or college.
I’m tired of watching my students produce amazing things, which show their true understanding of 21st century skills, only to see their looks of disappointment when they don’t meet the arbitrary expectations of low-level state and district tests that do not assess their skills.
I refuse to hear any more about how important it is to differentiate our instruction as we prepare our kids for tests that are anything but differentiated. This negates our hard work and makes us look bad.
I am tired of hearing about the miracles my peers are expected to perform, and watching the districts do next to nothing to support or develop them. I haven’t seen real professional development in either district since I got here. The development sessions I have seen are sloppy, shallow, and have no real means of evaluation or accountability.
I’m tired of my increasing and troublesome physical symptoms that come from all this frustration, stress, and sadness.
Finally, I’m tired of watching parents being tricked into believing that their children are being prepared for the complex world ahead, especially since their children’s teachers are being cowed into meeting expectations and standards that are not conducive to their children’s futures.
I’m truly angry that parents put so much stress, fear, and anticipation into their kids’ heads in preparation for the EOG tests and the new MSLs—neither of which are consequential to their future needs. As a parent of a high school student in Union County, I’m dismayed at the education that my child receives, as her teachers frantically prepare her for more tests. My toddler will not attend a North Carolina public school. I will do whatever it takes to keep that from happening.
I quit because I’m tired being part of the problem. It’s killing me and it’s not doing anyone else any good. Farewell.
CC: Dr. Mary Ellis
Dr. June Atkinson
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I know I have touched on the subject of what’s wrong with public schools many times on my own blog. As a Yankee who was once a long-term substitute, I find the differences between the North and Southern schools to be stark. In Charlotte, NC for example, each area or district has its own superintendent…in most Northern cites, there is one superintendent for most citiy school districts, with proxies. Southern schools seem to be very top-heavy with administration. In addition, there is very little choice. In Northern schools, children are free to move around to different schools within a district, without special permission from the top. The only restriction is not crossing city limits to another jurisdiction. In the South, once you are sent to a school, you seem to be committed there by the powers-that-be. Finally, school districts are held hostage by bad parents and their unruly children who make it hard to teach in class, and will sue at the drop of a hat if you “violate their children’s rights” (nevermind their children violating other’s rights to learn). Teachers get very little respect, smashed in a no-respect sandwich by disrespectful parents and detached and equally disrespectful administration!
LikeLike
Good for you! Its seems to be like this everywhere now. Its disgusting and there should be a class action suit put together to sue our government for all of the education that we paid for to become teachers. Between the tuition up to a masters level and the interest rates I owe out over $100,000 thousand here in NY. Its sick and we are treated the same way….Its a jail sentence…we all go to work sick to our stomachs everyday because we are lied to and treated like the enemy! This is sick and anyone who sends there kid to college to become a teacher in this day and age is a fool!!! You kid will be treated like crap!
LikeLike
The education field is more corrupt then our government! The nepotism that goes on with administrators is PROFOUND! You can be the best teacher , if they don’t like you for whatever reason you a gonna! Thats why teacher evaluations should be done by outside agencies of the state should send someone to the schools. The admins lie through there teeth 99% of them. If they need to get a friend on board of someone that they like you don’t have anyone to go to. No support what so ever! It needs to STOP! Its sick but true!
LikeLike
I too come from another state—Oklahoma. Unfortunately, it is not much better there with all the same standardized tests that only stress students and teachers alike. Oklahoma teachers, however, were still getting step raises yearly, which is more than I can say for NC. We constantly jump through hoops placed in front of us by those people in their “ivory towers” and know not what they do to the students and the teachers. How sad to realize that teaching has become less about students and more about test scores, money, and prestige. It’s even more sad to realize that the kids will suffer the
most as they will leave our “hallowed halls” lacking the tools we as educators so naively attempt to provide. We are thwarted at every moment as we are bombarded with more paperwork, meetings, and workshops that we are REQUIRED to attend without compensation, and we must get to the meetings and such with gas paid for with what little we are paid. Instead of teaching our students, we are doing training that, in many cases, is common sense and thereby a waste of our time and of the time we SHOULD be giving to our students.
My question? When do we teachers get to go back to what we decided to devote our lives—TEACHING?!
LikeLike
You know I have to say that I can totally understand the frustration. I too was a classroom teacher for Special Needs Children in Texas. I know God gave me this wonderful gift to HELP and provide insight to parents, teachers and children. It is very hard when such a noble profession is degraded and disrespected. This is why I have taken my gift into my own hands and started my own company here in Fuquay-Varina, NC. I have started Brighton Oaks Tutorial Services. Not, only do I help children and adults with “extra help” but I provide them tools through my Advocacy services, to help them through these hard times.
I honestly have to say as soon as I was told that “If you keep excelling these children, we will loose funding….” I WAS OUT! I got into education not to dumb down these children but to enlighten them and allow them to reach their full potential. If you are aware of anyone who can use my services, please point them in my direction.
http://brightonoakstutorialservices.yolasite.com
OR I also have formed a support group here in NC to help teachers, parents and students understand what is really going on in the system and to provide tools for academic success despite the circumstances. You can visit this site at: http://www.meetup.com/Education-Concerns-for-NC-Parents-and-Teachers/
Again, these are hard times, and even though we may not be in the classroom, I still feel we have a God given talent that we must use.
Cheryl Reed
LikeLike
I don’t know if wonderful should really be used here as a description concerning a system that is failing our youth and the future leaders, teachers and business people of this country, but this letter of resignation is wonderful!
I myself lived in Pennsylvania where I was subjected time and time again to the failure of the education system in supporting my children to be innovative and to excel not become robotic test takers. Curriculum was all based on standardized testing leaving handcuffs on wonderful teachers who really wanted to take learning to the next level.
I’ve left all of that behind and have moved west (2300 miles) not only for my family but to give my children the chance to have those opportunities. I have moved to an area where the guidance counselors are tailoring my son’s high school education to his goals, not the states; to the teachers who are innovative and create relationships with their students; to involved parents who don’t use school as a babysitting service and expect teachers to raise their children for them; to max 18 children per class to allow one on one teaching. This is what we need across the nation!
Kudos to you to stand up for what you believe in concerning yourself as an educator. I would love to see more teachers like you!
LikeLike
I began homeschooling my now 12 year old son last year after they didn’t care to resolve the reading issues and instead were just offering accommodations to pass testing. After just one year as a home-schooler and using an intensive remedial phonetic program for 3rd graders to adults, he has had amazing progress. With phonetic understanding both the reading and writing issues were solved! They gave him a computer that had word prediction software on it to help with writing and the first time he used it the vast it didn’t have the word he tried as his vocabulary is well above grade level. He never touched it again except to do the testing in the spring…. He now says “I didn’t have a learning disability, they had a teaching disability” I shudder to think where he would be if I had sent him on to middle school. I greatly admire your stand and getting the word out….
LikeLike
Tired of hearing about how bad teachers have it and how low they are paid. They get all holidays off spring break winter break summers off and off by 3 or 4? Then complain about having to take their work home with them? They would never survive in the private sector. When I have a deadline I work till I get it done. I get two weeks off a year plus 9 holidays. I’ve worked till 3 in the morning to make a deadline with NO recognition. it’s called life. The kids are the ones who suffer not the teachers. Get a job in private sector and see what hard work is like…until then, suck it up and do your job. I don’t get paid crap either but I’m thankful for what I have.
LikeLike
Not as tired as a lot of teachers are to hear that we’re supposed to roll over and accept poor working conditions (the shaft) blindly like too many people in this country.
It’s sad that so many Americans even wallow in this, like it’s some kind of a virtue these days to say you work long hours for little pay and recognition. I have this hobby of battling respondents on my local newspaper’s Web version and am always amazed at how they like to take this working man’s hero posture about employment in the private sector. I’m even more amazed at how the teaching profession has become vilified.
I spent five years on active duty in the navy, enlisting at 17. I worked in college writing parking tickets on campus. In fact, I was the highest paid student on the campus after I was promoted to supervisor. I spent nine months taking care of mentally retarded adults in an IFC. I spent three years running a shift in a textile mill (50+ hours a week) and then a year in consumer finance.
I chose to be a teacher because I love children. Recognition? I don’t care about that. Getting paid on a level commensurate with my education and skills? You bet. Summers off and long vacations? I get paid for the days I WORK. I don’t get paid over the summer. I sacrificed ever making over 100K, a salary many people with masters degrees make, for teaching. Not everyone can teach, evident in the extremely high teacher turnover.
Master teachers like me know what’s really at stake right now. We’re seeing money, massive amounts of it, going into an agenda of privatization and policies not based in solid educational research. This is even tougher for teachers like my wife and I who teach in the “nitty gritty inner city.” Most of our students are on free and reduced lunch. We know how important our jobs are because we’re the ones who help give these children a shot at upward mobility.
LikeLike
Bravo! Well said.
LikeLike
You have no idea the hours we put in. Do you think elves come in the middle of the nght and prepare your child’s classroom for the next day? How long do you think it takes to set up a classroom before the children arrive for a new school year or to pack it up for summer cleaning? I have calculated the hours I spend outside of my contractual day to ensure that my students have the best educational experience possible. It turns out that I probably have two weeks vacation a year. That’s right, just two weeks. I may get 15 minutes a day to choke down my lunch, all the while answering the endless emails I get. I am tired of ignorant people telling me how easy my job is. My challenge to you: spend a day with a teacher or, better yet, an entire week. Then tell me we have cushy jobs.
LikeLike
Most minimum wage workers are entitled to more frequent breaks and access to the bathroom on a regular basis than teachers are. What you say about our vacation days and summers off just shows how little you understand the working conditions, pay rates and unpaid obligations most teachers experience. I don’t know anyone else who gets only 20 minutes to eat and go to the bathroom while having to supervise children. When you need to take a day off for illness or emergency, it’s almost not worth it because of the chaos that can result of you not being there. Your points are simply not informed.
LikeLike
Angela,
Many ignorant Americans think as you do about teachers and the teaching profession.
I taught in both sectors–private and public and worked longer, harder hours in teaching than most people in the US work unless they work two jobs.
After earning my BA, in the private sector I was paid a monthly salary, worked an average 12 hours a day sometimes six days a week but I did get days off and that two week paid vacation you mention was about all I got as a teacher–three weeks, two before the New Year and one in the Spring but I had to take work home to catch up. During the school year, even when half of the more than 200 students I taught in five/six classes turned in work, I’d spend hours correcting one half hour student assignment and new assignments were being turned in almost daily. My work weeks as a public school teacher were never less than 60 hours and often reached 80 or 100 because of the stacks of student work that I took home to correct and record in the grade book. On weekends, I corrected half a day Saturday and half a day Sunday. On weeknights when I arrived home before seven PM, I corrected until ten or later and sometimes fell asleep at the kitchen table.
Then there was the three years I worked days Monday to Friday teaching and nights and weekends as a maître d because my teaching pay was too low to pay the bills. I knew two teachers that taught history all day and students how to drive in the late afternoons, early evenings and weekends. Those years I survived on two or three hours sleep a day.
As a teacher, during the summers, there was no paycheck. The contract for most teachers is for ten months a year—not twelve and we are only paid during those ten months.
Most teachers had to save during the year or work another job during the summer. I often taught summer school. However, some summers, I installed sprinkler systems for homeowners. I knew one teacher that worked in a pickle factory in the summer. Another teacher worked at Disneyland each summer because he was good at crowd control.
When I taught summer school, the pay was much less because summers were not covered under our contract so we were paid by the hour and I earned maybe a third of what I earned during the school year for the same number of hours worked.
In the private sector when I worked in middle management for a large truck company, no one ever threatened to kill me but as a teacher I taught gang bangers that had killed rival gangsters in turf wars and I was threatened every year. I saw drive buy shooting from my classroom doorway. Sometimes some parent would show up or call on the phone and yell at me because his or her kid earned an F. It didn’t matter that I tried to call the parents at work, at home (several times) and sent home warning letters that the parents often claimed they never saw. For every contact attempt, we had to fill out paperwork to prove we were doing our job. For example: make twenty calls in one day and fill out twenty forms.
I’m a former US Marine and I fought in Vietnam. I’ve been shot at with bullets, mortars and rockets and that was easier than teaching in America’s public schools. At last in combat, I had support from my fellow Marines and I carried a weapon to defend myself.
I retired from teaching after thirty years and if for some reason, the teacher’s retirement fund, that I paid 8% of my salary to for thirty years, went broke and I had to go back to work, I’d rather fight in Afghanistan than go back into the classroom and have to deal with kids that don’t want to learn and ignorant parents that think it is the teacher’s fault when his or her child will not read, study, do homework or behave in class so the teacher can teach.
Oh, lest I forget, when I retired, I took a forty-five percent pay cut—after thirty years—and most teachers do not retire with health care if he or she retires before age 65 as I did. Most have to wait to qualify for Medicare before they are covered again or pay for a very expensive COBRA health plan that may eat up a third or half of whatever the monthly retirement payment is. I was fortunate. Because I had a combat related disability, I was qualified for the VA medical system.
After I went into teaching, the hours increased. There were days I’d arrive at the high school where I taught when the front gate was unlocked at six in the morning and at 11 PM seventeen hours later, a custodian would come to the door and tell us we had to leave, the alarms were being turned on.
What I want to do is take people that think as you do and make them teach in the average American classroom fifth grade to ninth and see how long any of them would survive before they went screaming back to the private sector where work is usually much easier. About 50% of new teachers leave the profession in the first three to five years and never return to education. I know of one new teacher that didn’t even last one day. On his first day, with two classes left to teach, he walked into the principal’s office at lunch and tossed his room keys on the desk and said he was quitting because the students would not treat him with respect and cooperate while he was teaching.
I worked more than ten years in the private sector. I stared working 30 hour weeks washing dishes at age 15. I attended high school days. At nineteen, after I graduated from high school, I joined the US Marines. A few years later I was honorably discharged from the Marines and went to college on the GI Bill while working part time nights and weekends. From college, I went to work in the private sector.
I went into teaching at age 30 in 1975. My job was to maintain control and teach. It was up to the students to learn. If a kid doesn’t understand something, he is supposed to ask questions. Most students don’t ask questions. In the same classroom, I had students that learned nothing because that was his or her choice, and others that earned good grades because they read, worked and studied and then went on to Cal Tech, Stanford, Berkeley, USC, UCLA, etc. Same teacher. Different students. Different parents. The average American student has 42 or more teachers K -12 but only has one father and mother if he or she is fortunate to have both parents.
LikeLike
Buy a clue woman. Show me one private profession with such a high attrition rate as the teaching profession, then maybe, just maybe, your points can be taken seriously. This is not just one teacher leaving out of distress from a job that others simply do without stress and do well for years. This is a job that a teacher quit, in which 50% of his coworkers will also quit in 5 years, and that is in good school districts – move to an urban district and almost the whole teaching faculty will be gone in 5 years.
The difference between Kris is that he went public, and Diane Ravitch publicized his story. His story is the story of a vast bunch that goes untold.
Now name another profession in which professionals with multiple degrees leave to the extent of teachers. Show me.
LikeLike
That’s interesting, because my husband is a Civics teacher who works 9 hours a day, then comes home to an evening job because God knows he doesn’t get paid nearly what he deserves. He works on the Holiday team, therefore gets no real holidays off, and will work all summer. He gets no lunch break and no planning period but is expected to be prepared for an observation at a moments notice. I am also a teacher. I work with special needs students. I also get no lunch and no planning period, and also have two part time jobs to supplement our income. Funny that people like you forget where you got the education to be doing your private sector job.
LikeLike
I’m an educator and I have responded to this post a few times. I have seen a few people (who obviously know nothing about the teaching “profession”) make blanket statements about how we have summers off and holidays off. Private sector? The private sector makes enough money to DEFINE their arrogance and cockiness. Who put them in that position? A TEACHER! A person who dedicated their lives to a job that mandates and dictates how they act, who they marry, where they live, what they put in their grocery buggy, etc. Yes, we have to take our work home with us and now, we even have to put up with the fast pace of principals who want to “look good” in their counties and communities. Older teachers don’t stand a chance. WE CARE and are trying our best to teach former methods that used to guarantee learning. You simply cannot do that as the bureaucrats and moneymakers continually change teaching methods that absolutely NO one can pass and eventually ALL CHILDREN ARE LEFT BEHIND. It’s become a survival of the fittest in school. If your child is sharp enough to understand a concept quickly, he/she will be fine. If they have ANY developmental delays, then they won’t see success in the public school system because we aren’t allowed to provide patience, love, and concern anymore.
Trust me. I’m the nurturing teacher type and I’m hated by most in my school. I’ve actually HAD teachers express that I must be giving my kids candy or some other bribes. It’s a reversed form of bullying.
With all of that said, I feel damned if I do and damned if I don’t. The general public dislikes me because I’m a “whining teacher” and my colleagues don’t like me because the students “appreciate” me. I feel like I’m less than a mother because I can’t afford to keep my bills paid and am a step away from applying for some type of welfare, food stamps, or being homeless in general.
At 40, can I change my career and get a job in this private sector that someone mentioned? I don’t know but I know I have numerous degrees and a plethora of graduate credits. I can’t stay on this educational rollercoaster much longer. I can’t afford the physical, mental, emotional, and social anguish it has provided. My insurance (because I’m also overweight) won’t cover it. Oh yeah, did I mention that smokers and folks whose body mass is over a certain number were automatically regulated to a 70/30 coverage? Private sector indeed?! I say we all become entertainers or athletes and just earn millions of dollars from the masses who love to splurge on ignorant propaganda schemes. The day the Kardashians have enough money to buy respect and a teacher does not is the day we ALL need to STRIKE, PROTEST, or QUIT.
Signed,
Almost Out the Door!
LikeLike
That’s what I said, too! Teachers provide the foundation for EVERY occupation in the world yet we get treated like used car salesmen and they end up making MORE money than us. It’s a sad tale.
LikeLike
Actually, most teachers end up working at least one, usually two (and sometimes even three) part time jobs in summer. If you call in sick, money isn’t taken out of your paycheck to pay a sub. Teachers may leave the school building at 3 or 4, but many arrive at 7 a.m. (or sometimes earlier). They also take work home with them to grade and set up lesson plans. In addition, they respond to parents’ e-mails. Oh, and don’t forget open houses and parent/teacher conferences (that a lot of parents seem to avoid like the plague). Ms. Quintero, I think you truly fail to understand the life a teacher. Perhaps you should teach for a couple of years and then tell us if it really is as easy as you seem to think it is.
LikeLike
Amen!
LikeLike
I worked in the private sector for most of my career and did very well owning and running a small business. When I decided to become an elementary teacher in the mid 90’s I had to go back to college for a year with no pay (actually I had to pay). Then I worked in a Catholic school in 1996 and 1997 for $14,900.00/year. Unable to survive on this, I left and subbed in the public system to “get my foot in the door for $60.00/day and finally landed a job in Providence in 1999. My starting pay there was app. $28,000.00 and I was in heaven.
It took 10 years to work my way up the step scale to what I was making when I quit a month ago. My “RI Teacher Says I Quit!” YouTube video explains why.
By the way, I never did work my way back to my 1980’s pay level…
LikeLike
Amen!
LikeLike
Teacher do not get paid vacations. Teachers sign annual contracts with school districts to work a certain number of days per year. I work 190 days in my contract. I am paid for 190 days. I also work many more than 8 hours per day. I usually work 10 or more hours so if you add up all the extra hours, I work many more than 190 days for which I do not get paid. I do get 2 days of paid personal days per year. Most people I know in other jobs get 2 weeks of paid leave per year. When I was in the insurance business, b4 I became a teacher I worked up to 3 weeks of paid vacation a year. If I do not use the 2 personal days they do not accrue or roll over to the next year. IOW use them or lose them as we are told. I also get sick days, but if I call in sick I have to spend usually 2 hours getting my classroom ready for a sub with written lesson plans (usually 2-3 pages typed) with activities ready and available for the substitute. So I can’t just pick up the phone and “call in sick” as many people in other jobs can do.
I do not get paid for summer breaks, holiday breaks or spring break. I get 12 paychecks a year and I get paid on the 15th of each month. Therefore, money that I earn in May is not paid to me until August because they spread 9 months work of work over 12 months of paychecks. What other job holds onto your salary for 3 months before paying it to you? Most people get paid their salary within 2 weeks or one month of when they work.
People who have a misconceived notion that teachers are paid for summers and holidays are strictly ignorant of these facts. Please educate yourself about teacher contracts and please stop misrepresenting what you believe is true but which is actually false, misleading and incorrect.
LikeLike
Come to Nebraska. A state led by a common sense dept. of education and a smart, reasonable teachers’ union. We don’t rush to jump on every new educational bandwagon (Nope, we didn’t get any Race to the Top money and the verdict’s still out on Common Core–we’re one of the few ‘wait and see’ hold out states) and try to comply with mandatory standards while doing the least amount of damage to our kids. We aren’t averse to change–indeed, we’re always looking to be on that cutting edge, however, if we’re going to spend hard earned tax dollars, it had better be worth it. I’m a high school special education teacher and co-teach algebra and geometry. I work with a tough population and my school isn’t perfect. Lots of hard work. But the difference is that public education is supported in our state. We have no charter schools. I feel appreciated by my students, my co-workers, parents and administration just about every single day. Now, it’s not a Shangra-la…I DO work with teenagers, many with behavior dsorders, and don’t always agree with administration or co-workers. Our state legislature passed a law and implented a state-wide test many educators aren’t crazy about. We are under the same gun to improve test scores as any other state and that can be stressful. However, we are encouraged and celebrated whenever we infuse creativity, active learning, and technology into our classrooms. In a nutshell, we’re held accountable, the state testing is a pain and possibly a waste of time, but overall I feel the higher ups try to stay out of our way as best as they can. The biggest threat to our educational system here is out of state money with an agenda to privatize education and run it like a business–a fate experienced by other states. I only hope we can fight them off and maintain what we have.
LikeLike
I teach in Nebraska also, but I do not have quite as rosy a picture as you do. I work with high risk ELA students and I feel extreme pressure from admin to get these “language-deficient” students up to par. In our district everything revolves around test scores and it is becoming very competitive between each school. Admin micro-mangages our every move, we have endless and meaningless meetings and SIP (school improvement) obligations. We now have cameras in most of the classrooms watching us. While our teacher association tries hard to work on our behalf, they are virtually powerless in this right-to-work state. I feel like we are under the careful watch of Big Brother and authoritarian eyes. Our voices are not heard by admin and we are typically patronized and told to be “team players” and have a positive attitude. I want to retire as soon as I possibly can. I feel bad for the students who are burning out at such a young age. I used to love to teacher and no longer feel that way. College professors I know in NE tell me that kids are coming to college with fewer and fewer skills, interest and motivation. I think our public schools are moving in a dangerous direction.
LikeLike
@Sunflower: You are SPOT ON in all of your responses to these other writers. The private sector person ticked me off, too, but your retort answered the accusation just fine. We DON’T get paid vacations PLUS we DO have to work more than any other profession in the world. Even the brain surgeon can operate and then take days off afterwards. Think about it: when we need surgery, we have to get the ok from the surgeon for us to plan around HIS schedule. What school system allows us that freedom?! None! When the parents say ‘conference’, we have to give them one. When the parents come in ‘unexpectedly’, we have to drop what we are doing and give them an audience. When the principal says ‘staff meeting’, we have to do it no matter how much of a rest we need, a break. Unfortunately, now, when you need to take a ‘mental health’ day (just to get away from it all), you have to provide a medical note.
To piggyback on what Sunflower said, ‘please research the information about what a teacher has to do’ before you make such ignorant, blanket statements about how “good” we have it.
I have one birth daughter and twin teenage boys that I’ve “adopted” and guess what? My single teacher salary with all of the deducted taxes and insurances and loans and regular cost of living WITHOUT luxuries are not enough for me to properly feed them, clothe them, and/or give them heat in winter and air in summer.
The solution: Pay us what you pay doctors and lawyers and engineers and we’ll have no choice but to take more pride in what we do. I don’t believe that teachers start off ineffective but after being harassed and unsupported and living paycheck to paycheck, they get burned out. If I’m physically unwell, I am of NO benefit to ANY child.
Signed,
Burned Out, Fed Up, and Needs a New Career.
LikeLike
Teachers, I’m sorry you have awful jobs, 60, 80, 100+ hours a week, have to pay for ‘teaching supplies’ with your own money, get nasty objections from parents, get contempt from your bureaucracies, seriously object to standardized tests, are barely paid enough even to keep your car running to commute to the school, and are subject to dismissal for nearly anything or nothing at all. Bummer.
I’m supposed to know something about ‘education’: In the words of the movie ‘Pretty Woman’, I “went all the way in school” and got a technical Ph.D. from a world class research university. I never had any instruction of any kind in ‘educational’ techniques, methods, or theories. The usual advice in teaching was just “start writing in the upper left corner of the board”. But I’ve taught both undergraduate and graduate courses at three well known research universities, as graduate associate, lecturer, and professor.
I never for even one milli, micro, nano, pico, femto second had any academic aspirations at all, and still don’t. Instead I went to school to learn material that would help me make money, the green kind, as needed to buy food, clothing, shelter, etc.
For teaching, it was fun and easy, but I always felt that I was going on a detour guaranteed to keep me from being financially responsible.
My technique of teaching and learning are the same and simple: Take a good text, study it, work the exercises, and get ready for the test. Teaching? Can help the students learn from the text. Done.
Just what is it about that technique the K-12 teachers on this thread have so much trouble understanding? What the heck are you doing to make the work so difficult? Why?
Out of school, my career has been in technology, basically applied math and computing, initially for problems of US national security and now for the ‘consumer Internet’. Gotta tell you, in this work all along it’s been just crucial to be able to find, study, learn, and apply technical material new to me, and at times it’s been crucial for me to do original work, i.e., ‘research’ as in “new, correct, and significant” and publishable in an appropriate peer-reviewed journal of original research. In this work and learning, never was the situation as good as “Take a good text …”, because there didn’t exist a good text. So, the learning technique “Take a good text, study it, work the exercises, and get ready for the test.” is, on balance, considering the real world outside K-12, not too difficult but the EASY way.
That’s my view of ‘education’. Now for the view of the teachers on this thread:
One teacher posted here about how much effort she had to do to get the classroom ready for the fall semester. Gads! Here’s how that worked at the K-12 school I went to: At the end of the school year, the janitors picked up the trash, dusted the room, washed the black boards, and decreed and declared the rooms ready for the fall semester. Done.
Yes, since then I’ve seen some pictures of grade school classrooms with the walls covered with colorful, enticing, enthralling, exciting whatever, about leaves, bugs, stories, dogs, cats, space flight, etc. When I voted this week, the polling place was in a grade school, and just in the halls it was clear that the teachers were posting all kinds of student ‘work’ in ‘crafts’ of displays of leaves of various tree species. There was a nice poster of the stringed instruments in a classical orchestra, with the names of, I assume, four music teachers. WOW — one grade school with FOUR music teachers. Enough for a string quartet! The school looked like a just super nice, fun place with all the students awash, surrounded, and infused in positive emotional social and learning experiences. Amazing. Where can I apply to be a first grade student again? Maybe if I look sad some REALLY cute, sweet, sensitive, empathetic, emotionally insightful, highly concerned, responsive, dedicated, and professional teacher’s assistant will notice and provide sympathy and ‘comfort’! The she’d have to stay up all night writing up the event in my personal ‘assessment’, have long consultations with some school clinical psychologist about my ‘case’, etc. Gads. Her being cute would be PLENTY!
Then the teachers in this thread keep describing individual student ‘assessments’ and ‘portfolios’. You GOTTA be kidding! Or have you teachers been smoking funny stuff? I never saw any such thing. Now I’m beginning to understand how the 100+ hours a week are used. WHERE did US K-12 education get the idea of individual student ‘assessments’ and ‘portfolios’? Sounds like, when a student can’t do the desired work, then the teacher finds some other work the student can do and describes the student’s progress in that work in some individual assessment and portfolio. Is that it? Why? Who wants that in K-12?
When I was in school, K-college, although much of graduate school was different, the ‘assessment’ was simple — take a test. Then somewhere sometimes there was a standardized test. For me, in K-8, I didn’t care about any of it. In 9 on, I cared about exactly two subjects — math and physics, and I always wanted much, Much, MUCH more of both than I ever could get in K-college. And in 9-12, in math I did MUCH better on the standardized tests than those of the teachers. In the end, my school sent me to one state competitive exam in math and one NSF summer program in math and physics. Apparently someone in my school, likely the principal, looked at the state tests and did an ‘assessment’ for me. But that ‘assessment’ for me was never much work for the staff of my school: I just took a standardized test and the school got my score and entered it on a form somewhere.
To me just a simple state test, say, sampled once every other year just in, say, the really important subjects, i.e., math, physics, reading comprehension, and English grammar, should be quite sufficient. Else, just give the SAT and CEEB tests. E.g., in college they give the GRE tests: When I got out of college, it was clear that I knew some math — I got 800 on the GRE test in math knowledge.
Net, it seems to be that testing and ‘assessment’ are simple, really simple, just dirt simple. So, I don’t understand the objections to testing or the role of individual student ‘assessments’ and ‘portfolios’. I don’t understand why your teaching work is so difficult or why or how the US K-12 system is making the teaching so difficult. What’s going on here? Why take something simple, easy, and fun and make it difficult?
So, so far, I see the goals and work of K-12 as fairly simple with no need for anything over 40 hours a week for nine months a year. For all that other stuff, I suggest that somehow it be left on the cutting room floor.
Then there is the issue of ‘inner city schools’, ‘disadvantaged children’, classrooms full of ‘disruptive’ children. For the teachers, don’t teach in such a school. Do anything else instead.
I suggest: For the students, the third time a student does something disruptive in class, they should be transfered to a ‘reform’ school. There many of the teachers are former US Marines, and the first time a student gets out of line he gets ‘correction’ as US Marines are fully able to provide. A student who thinks he’s a ‘tough guy’ has yet to meet a US Marine. The first time he challenges a Marine, he leaves class in tears from excruciating pains, crawling on all fours. The second time he’s carried out on a stretcher. The third time, he’s carried to a cell with bars where his food comes in through a small slot. Gotta stop that stuff.
What’s the problem?
LikeLike
Norm, a U.S. marine wouldn’t last 2 seconds in a public K-12 school. Much of your analysis is spot on – I have always advocated for alternative schools that are indeed ‘no excuses’. I advocate for alternative schools to be nard-nosed, raking leaves, and cleaning toilets – a place that is dreaded. But there are detractors from such an approach, and some of the arguments are good ones, but I do agree with you here.
Other than that sir, I would also tell you that YOU wouldn’t last 2 seconds in a K-12 public school. With your attitude (which I’m not saying is all that bad), a principal would help you out of the profession quicker than you can blink. With your extreme views (some of which I agree – I did go to a private, military school after all), you would stick out like a sore thumb. You would be ushered to the door.
I am very much like you in that all I need is a book, some quizzes, and a test. I skipped many science classes while I was in college because with the book, I could do my thing, walk in and pass the test. I only attended my physics courses to take the tests – the professor was Chinese, and I could barely make out what he was saying. He had no attendance policy and there were about 200 kids in the class. But science was my thing. I could not do such things in other subject areas.
I have taught K-12 public ed. for 15 years and coached for about the same. It is not as simple as you think. There are lots of rules, meetings, and red tape. For this I think some level-headed reform measures would do public K-12 some good without having to institute charters to make the teaching profession even less appealing for would-be teachers.
The bottom line is this – something is wrong in public education when teachers leave their schools and the profession in such high numbers. This is not make believe – the attrition rates are soaring, and there is data to prove it. Nearly 50% of teachers leave within 5 years in suburbia, and that rate is much higher in urban areas.
Yes, the kids are tough, and the parents aren’t much better, even in suburbia, but more than anything, I think K-12 teachers are tired of being beat up like no other profession. The ones who planned on making this a life-long profession and obsession are even more upset. We’ve been mocked, demoralized, deskilled, and now we are getting fired because test scores are low.
This is all the result of politicians and profiteers engaging in a decade and a half smear campaign since the NCLB Act in 2001. All reforms are set up to see to it that we fail. The RttT initiative is even more so designed with such an end in mind, but rather than show schools as failures, and close them down (aim of the NCLB Act), now RttT seeks to label teachers as failures and fire them.
This promotion of blaming teachers and schools has hit the perfect storm of conservatives, who have historically hated public K-12, and neoliberal democrats that are out to make money by turning public K12 into a marketplace.
Another piece adding fuel to this fire is the inability of our kids to be academic because of the issues surrounding their poverty at home. About 25% of our kids come to school from deplorable conditions at home, and many of them come to eat free breakfast, lunch, and in some cases, dinner. There are places where kids steal ketchup packets to make tomato soup at home for dinner.
But the politicians don’t care. This is the perfect opportunity to blame teachers and schools, break unions, and steal money from the public sector in order to prop up the private sector during this strange economic time. Aggregate teacher salaries are perfect pillaging material, and so are teacher pension plans. They want it, and they want that money badly.
They will stop at nothing to get it, including making our lives a living hell by holding our jobs over our head, and hiring TFA scabs to take our places when we decide “enough is enough”.
Politicians want churn in teacher employment, where they can pay entry level robots to accept they are failures, but to layover until a better job comes along. This keeps costs low.
LikeLike
“Norm, a U.S. marine wouldn’t last 2 seconds in a public K-12 school.”
I was a former U.S. Marine and I taught in the K-12 schools for thirty years, and I know army and navy vets that taught in the same schools with no problem. In fact, I never heard of a vet that quit in the first 3 to 5 years.
In fact, I doubt if most teachers in the US would survive in the barrio, gang infested schools where we taught near Los Angeles.
LikeLike
You could say I exaggerated a bit – trying to make a point.
I would also like to mention that I stated some statistics wrong in the above post – its about 50% of all NEW teachers that don’t make it in suburbia and a rate even higher for NEW teachers in urban schools.
The same point applies.
LikeLike
[…] A North Carolina Teacher Quits. […]
LikeLike
Okay, maybe I’m beginning to ‘get it’: Gotta tell you, for some well educated teachers, you are a bit inarticulate and obscure. Maybe you are just being politically correct.
So, apparently here’s what’s been going on: Long US K-8 or K-12 education was to teach the 3Rs. Even in a one room school house, say, in Indiana or Iowa, that worked fine. Maybe the situation was as in ‘Little House on the Prairie’ or ‘Anne of Green Gables’ or some such. That Anne was CUTE!
Alas, there was a ‘dark side’: There were poor people, especially poor Blacks in the South and later in some of the inner cities. There long the approach was just to f’get about their education, regard their school as just something to keep them off the streets, give them ‘social promotion’, pass them through, and let them out.
Then results included ‘high school graduates’ who communicated in just different inflections of just one phrase of just two words, the first of which was ‘mother’. They couldn’t read or write, and only the very best could do simple arithmetic ensured, on penalty of death, by their drug wholesaler.
Eventually a lot of communities concluded that this part of education was turning out young adults who were very expensive for society. So we ended up with a major fraction of the males in jail at more cost per person-year than a scholarship to Harvard and a major fraction of the women single mothers on ‘aid to dependent children’ repeating the situation for the next generation.
So, major parts of US government, if only to save money, decided to have major parts of US education do something about this horrible situation, and the result was to set up some minimum standards for learning and, then, make absolutely, positively certain, week by week, day by day, even hour by hour, that the material was being taught and learned. Everything else was secondary. Period. It was a ‘forced march’, all in ‘lock step’.
So the material to be learned was developed by the school district, along with the ‘lesson plans’ and ‘learning materials’, and then the results were tested not just annually but at least weekly and maybe daily or even more frequently. And the test scores were communicated up the bureaucracy. Then, even one hour lost on the ‘forced march’ was easy to observe in the principle’s office and the school district.
I can understand this! It’s nothing like how I learned, but it’s apparently close to something I heard about! My father wanted to be a school teacher. At the time, in the 1930s, the hot subjects, as hot as computing and the Internet are now, were, broadly, the ‘industrial arts’ with wood working, metal working, printing, strength of materials, welding, casting, forging, heat treating, electricity, etc. So he got his Bachelor’s in industrial arts. Then he got his Master’s in education and started teaching in high school. Soon WWII started; he submitted an application; and soon the US Navy had a job for him: The Navy needed to train people to maintain airplanes — work in electricity, electronics, hydraulics, mechanics, and sheet metal — and set up some schools. Dad became the head ‘educational theorist’. He knew about the Gaussian distribution and test construction with ‘difficulty index’ (likely expected value) and ‘separation index’ (likely standard deviation).
Eventually his schools were teaching 40,000 young men at a time and became one of the most important sources of technical education for all of the US and the world.
He had those schools very well organized: He had a staff of people who developed the teaching materials and then, graphics departments that made films, slides, and printed manuals. In each course, the learning objectives, lesson plans, teaching materials, teaching, teaching techniques, and testing were all very precise. He explained to me that he could walk to any course, note the day and the time, and then within minutes describe what was going on in the class. It appears that this ‘lock step’ approach to ‘training’ is much of what the school districts want now and the teachers here are objecting to.
So, with this system, everything was carefully specified, measured, and evaluated — students, lesson plans, teaching materials, and the teachers.
Classroom ‘discipline’ problems? You GOTTA be kidding! On a US military base, awash with MPs and Marines?
Poor students? Not much chance: There were ‘entrance exams’ that ensured that the entering students had to be relatively bright.
So, net, the schools worked, very well. The US Navy got people to maintain the aircraft; the US taxpayers got good value for their money; and the US economy got a lot of well trained ‘technologists’. Since now one Navy airplane can cost $50 million, with the cost increasing rapidly, bad maintenance from bad training is expensive.
Curiously, at home, Dad’s view of my education was very different: He wanted me to be curious and interested and learn based on that. He emphasized that I understand the material and never once discussed my grades or report card. In the fifth grade, a teacher had some personal problems which she took out on me, and Dad defended me and took her apart for her incompetence into tiny little, quivering pieces. I had no more trouble with her. He was proud of my high SAT and CEEB scores.
In the fourth grade, as usual in K-8, I didn’t do homework. So, the teacher sent a note home saying that if I didn’t complete the arithmetic workbook in time, then she would fail me. So, Dad checked that I understood arithmetic well; I did — took him about 90 seconds. Then the next night he brought home his office calculator, and we finished the workbook together.
Apparently as is standard for boys through middle school, my handwriting was just awful — somehow over the years it became decent on its own. So, through the eighth grade, when I did arithmetic, I didn’t keep the columns aligned and only occasionally got correct answers. So, in the eighth grade, my arithmetic teacher gave me a D and warmly advised me never to take any math again and in 9-12 take only ‘high school arithmetic’. BS. Dad laughed! Eventually a physics professor told me in clear terms that I had to work carefully enough to get correct results, and from then on I did. Simple lesson.
Dad was correct: I got math SAT 752 one time and 768 another time, was one of the best math students in my relatively good high school, was a math major in college and got ‘Honors in Math’ from a paper on group representation theory (as used in molecular spectroscopy and elsewhere in quantum mechanics and physics). My Ph.D. dissertation was in the mathematics of stochastic optimal control. Net, the eighth grade teacher was badly wrong, and Dad was correct.
It sounds like NC is tired of their high schools graduating students who can’t read, write, or do arithmetic, males who become drug dealers and go to jail and females who become single mothers on aid to dependent children. So, the NC idea is to have K-12 do a ‘forced march’ in ‘lock step’.
But, then, the rest of education is neglected. So, what to do about that? Should be simple enough: For the better students, see what they are interested in and give them some appropriate materials and guidance. Maybe want the 9th grade biology students using software to analyze DNA sequences and 9th grade math and computer students writing software applying ‘machine learning’ to ‘big data’.
There are some world class people at UNC and Duke — connect with those. My last paper was reviewed by an EE prof at Duke, Editor in Chief of ‘Information Sciences’ — not your father’s electronic engineering! My favorite prof in graduate school, very bright guy, is now at UNC.
Still, warning: If want good results, especially from math, physics, and engineering, especially for the ‘future’, then it stands to be just crucial actually to learn the basic material. That is, can’t just do ‘projects’ and, instead, need good grounding in the prerequisites. E.g., if are going to use martingales in mathematical finance, then need actually to understand martingales and, thus, the Radon-Nikodym theorem and measure theory. If are going to follow Stanford prof Ng’s applications of maximum likelihood estimation and steepest descent to ‘machine learning’, need actually to understand much of, say, Fleming’s ‘Functions of Several Variables’. Sorry ’bout that.
In simple terms, in math, get through first and second year algebra, plane and solid geometry (more fun than eating popcorn watching a James Bond movie except in the case of watching with a pretty girl!), trigonometry, analytic geometry, college calculus (never but never do anything in calculus from high school, e.g., the AP materials — just do college calculus from any of the many highly polished texts), linear algebra (from any good, first text, e.g., Noble, maybe Strang), then some good text in abstract algebra comparable with the classic Birkhoff and MacLane, Halmos, ‘Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces’, Rudin, ‘Principles of Mathematical Analysis’, Fleming, ‘Functions of Several Variables’ (these last three apparently do well covering Harvard’s Math 55, claimed to be the hardest undergrad math course in the country, which is not really true!), Coddington, ‘An Introduction to Ordinary Differential Equations’ and from there on to topology, measure theory, functional analysis, probability, stochastic processes, mathematical statistics, optimization, etc. Then a grand gourmet desert buffet is Luenberger’s ‘Optimization by Vector Space Techniques’ or how to have fun and make money from the Hahn-Banach theorem. This list has an applied emphasis toward engineering for the next 100 years; past, say, functional analysis, pure math is a bit different although still with major connections.
Fun stuff: Of course, tough not to have seen the movie ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’. There Klatu is discussing an infinite series solution to an initial value problem in ordinary differential equations and mentions “variation of parameters”. Well, can see a really pretty presentation in Coddington! Once I generalized it to difference equations! And, may have seen ‘Sneakers’; well the white board actually has some good abstract algebra, and the speaker, a bit overwrought, mentions ‘splitting fields’ which can learn about in abstract algebra, uh, which is also a nice place to learn a little number theory sufficient for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) public key cryptography! Also with abstract algebra can learn about group representation theory for molecular spectroscopy and finite field theory for error correcting codes — e.g., much of why CDs, DVDs, hard disks, satellite communications, and the Internet actually work! With some Fourier theory can have great fun with Shannon’s information theory — it boils down just to how many little balls will fit in a big ball. With a good background in linear algebra, can tap lightly and knock off linear programming and network linear programming, an application of spanning trees, and introduce integer linear programming and the unsolved problem of P versus NP. With Fleming, can tap lightly and knock off the Kuhn-Tucker conditions and much of mathematical economics. So, can ‘inspire’ your good students!
In simple terms, the material on this short, simple list covers a large fraction of what there is for some of the top, center crown jewels of civilization. As the owner of a restaurant which got five stars from Mobil for at least 14 years in a row mentioned to me while pouring a Morey St. Denis, “you won’t find better”!
For most of this work, can do quite well, close to best possible, just by starting with a good text, studying the material, and working the exercises, hopefully but not necessarily with some supervision and guidance from a good teacher. Some Internet video clips might help, if they were up to the good texts which so far as far as I can tell they very much are not; some on-line fora, like StackOverflow, might help. Many of the best texts were written by the best guys; tough to compete with them.
But there is no royal road to understanding math, and it is not a spectator sport. With such math, can do the physics in the footnotes (most of that math is actually very close to mathematical physics — e.g., Halmos is really giving a baby version of Hilbert space theory, directly from von Neumann, as used in quantum mechanics and my startup!, and the inverse and implicit function theorems in Fleming are the main prerequisites for manifold theory for general relativity), and it is like ice cream and cake dessert!
Look, guys, von Neumann was doing such math as a teenager in Hungary nearly 100 years ago; we should be able to have students doing simpler versions of it in the US now!
Still, in all of this, I’m failing to see just why the teaching has to be such a painful job.
LikeLike
Norm,
You know what it is truly painful…reading your posts. I have tons of grading and I just don’t have the time. Anyway to be more concise….that is a useful skill.
LikeLike
Norm, I would suggest you apply for a K-12 job. You would wind up another statistic.
You wouldn’t even make it in a private school.
Number one rule – relate to your students, and understand they could hardly care about you are anything you have to say, especially in an urban school.
All of your blathering means zilch. I’ve seen some Einsteins come in and go right back out. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. What matters is how well you play the game (in order to keep your position), and ultimately the rewards from teaching comes from helping kids overcome serious obstacles at home and at school. The material to be taught is secondary to kids. Kids care more about facebook and Halo than anything you have to say. And these kids come from backgrounds with NO support. They don’t have the Daddy that you and I had. More than likely they have a single mother at home fighting to put food on the table.
Please apply to your local K-12 public school system.
LikeLike
“ultimately the rewards from teaching comes from helping kids overcome serious obstacles at home and at school.”
Yes, that says it all. Even if we teach two hundred and only help a handfull in one school year, that is still an utlimate reward.
LikeLike
@ME “All of your blathering means zilch. I’ve seen some Einsteins come in and go right back out. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. What matters is how well you play the game (in order to keep your position), and ultimately the rewards from teaching comes from helping kids overcome serious obstacles at home and at school. The material to be taught is secondary to kids. Kids care more about facebook and Halo than anything you have to say. And these kids come from backgrounds with NO support. They don’t have the Daddy that you and I had. More than likely they have a single mother at home fighting to put food on the table.”
That is one of the most accurate analysis of contemporary teaching I have heard in a very long time. Excellent!
LikeLike
Bla, bla, bla, Norm. Your stream of examples reveals how ignorant you are of the history of the evolution of education in the US.
There has never been a golden age of education in the US. If one exists, it is happening now!
If you go to the bottom of this comment and click on the link, scroll down to Figure 3, and you will discover that in 1950, 37% of white females and 34% of white males age 25 or older had completed 4 years of high school. For Black Americans and other races, the female completion rate was 15% and for males 10%.
Forty-one years later, in 1991, the high school completion rate had soared to 78% for whites and 68% for blacks and other races. The America’s public education system increased high school completion rates 35.5% for whites and 55.5% for blacks and other races.
Scroll down to “Illiteracy” and discover: “For the major part of this century, the illiteracy rates have been relatively low, registering only about 4 percent as early as 1930. However, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, illiteracy was very common.”
In 1870, 20 percent of the entire adult population was illiterate, and 80 percent of the black population was illiterate. By 1900, the situation had improved somewhat, but still 44 percent of blacks remained illiterate. The statistical data show significant improvements for black and other races in the early portion of the 20th century …”
The illiteracy rate today is less than 1%.
Lots of good information from this government study showing the successful historical evolution of public education in the US despite the challenges that walk in classroom each year for the dedicated public school teachers that do not run away when the going gets tough and it is tough every day for most public school teachers. For some, it’s more challenging than for others.
However, the critics and enemies of public education will keep painting a picture of a glass almost empty instead of closer to being 80% full because these people with a political/religious agenda are willing to cherry pick the facts, exaggerate and lie to destroy an education system they cannot control.
Norm, are you one of these critics? Are you another enemy of a democratic public education system that is not controlled by a dictator, autocrats, corporate CEO’s, religions, etc? If you want to control how people think, then you have to control the schools and keep people as ignorant as possible.
Click to access 93442.pdf
LikeLike
> Your stream of examples reveals how ignorant you are of the history of the evolution of education in the US.
No, you are arguing with things I didn’t say. Looks like you are good at reading between the lines. Maybe you are an English literature teacher!!! 🙂
That literacy has gone up as you say, I can believe that.
But my father went to a one room school house, and so did my wife’s father. Both graduated from college and wanted to be school teachers, and my father got a Master’s. Both were fully ‘literate’.
My point about one room school houses is that they were able to provide educations that remain competitive. E.g., my father learned plane geometry in his one room school house, and at times I had to work a little, bring my better game, to compete with him in the subject! When I read ‘Brave New World’ for fun, he gave me a really nice Socratic dialog on the contents. When my brother was trying to understand psychometrics in college, my father gave him nice lessons. I, of course, would argue with the role he assumed for the Gaussian distribution!
More generally, a point is that effective K-12 teaching, of children from reasonably good families, should be easy and fun without anything like the angst described here.
For kids who at school need a surrogate parent more than a teacher, I’d advise the teacher to go to a school in a better neighborhood. I wouldn’t try to teach in such a school. I never even wanted to teach; for parenting someone else’s children, no way.
But in my post I outlined a candidate way, borrowing from what my father did for the technical schools for the Navy, for teaching effectively without angst in such schools, and the frequent standardized ‘testing’ being objected to here suggests that techniques similar to what my father instituted are being tried in schools in poor neighborhoods. Still, where my father was, the results were high and the turnover and angst were low.
For the frequent standardized tests, sounds good to me! When I was teaching, by far the most work was preparing the tests, grading the papers, and at the end determining the grades. If I was just handed the tests, the grading was by some optical machine, and I was given the scores, say, via e-mail, then the work would have been reduced.
I say again, and there is no good chance of any serious contradictions for some years, likely decades: (1) For subjects in math, physical science, and technology from, say, grade 9 on, learning is not a spectator sport and there is no royal road to it. (2) Nearly sufficient and nearly necessary are for the student, working mostly alone, to take a well written text, study the material, and work the exercises. So far other teaching materials are from tangential down to just distractions. Tests with high reliability and validity can measure the learning. (3) The role of a teacher can be reduced to some issues of guidance and answering questions.
My education in grades 9-12 and in the first two years of college would have been much better in a one room school house: Just give me the texts and let me sit alone or nearly so in the back of the class and do the work. Nearly all the time the teachers were talking just interrupted the needed work or my attempts at taking naps. A few minutes once a week from a teacher would have been quite sufficient; similarly for the CEEB tests.
Let me put it to you this way: It’s not the teachers who need to do the work; it’s the students. Understand now?
Net, such teaching should be easy and fun without all this angst.
LikeLike
Thank you for your arm-chair insights about education. You’d be better off fully advocating teachers and giving them the power to control what happens in their classroom, which you’ve advocated to some extent.
Let us take care of things – as Loyd had pointed out – we have done a great job thus far.
LikeLike
> Thank you for your arm-chair insights about education.
“Arm-chair? Look, I’ve written a lot on this thread. Maybe a community college could give you some remedial lessons in reading comprehension. I taught, mostly calculus, as a graduate associate for two years in one research university, as a lecturer in computer science for two years at another, and as a professor, applied math and computing, for five years at another. And I never wanted to be a teacher and still don’t. And I hold a technical Ph.D. from one of the world’s best research universities. I learned some about education from my father who was essentially ‘academic dean’ of a technical school with 40,000 students, and both my wife and brother got Ph.D. degrees in the social sciences from research universities.
So, I’m not an “arm-chair” commenter on education.
> Let us take care of things – as Loyd had pointed out – we have done a great job thus far.
Apparently many school districts have been highly concerned about both costs and results for the “job thus far” and, thus, have instituted a lot of standardized testing to measure progress and results and insist that the results be better.
Then as in this thread, teachers are screaming in agony with angst about how horrible their jobs are when to me teaching was easy and fun and didn’t seem much worse for the teachers I had in K-12 who got results competitive across the US — e.g., graduating nearly everyone, sending over 97% of the graduates to college, and sending a nice sampling of the best graduates to the best colleges — Princeton, MIT, Purdue, Vanderbilt. Not so bad for a public school in the Old South. E.g., supposedly now China is working really hard on education and insisting that their students work their little fingers to the bone. So, recently I saw a challenging problem from one of their math tests. The problem was a little exercise in solid geometry. I took that as a high school senior, decades before, and the problem was easy enough for me. Looks like China will have to up their game! To heck with the PISA tests — have them take the SAT and CEEB, and I’ll match their scores for money, marbles, or chalk anytime from anywhere. When the US does it really well, we get a Charlie Fefferman or Eric Lander.
When a discussion keeps going on and on without any clear resolution, it looks like there is a hidden agenda. Okay, it now appears that what’s going on on this thread is a teachers union and their members screaming for more money, worse results, more job security, and less evaluation. So, it’s Obama, union politics. Sorry, guys — you won’t win that battle. Except possibly for teachers in schools in poor neighborhoods, it sounds like the angst, suffering, and screaming are mostly just made up politics.
LikeLike
Hi, Norm. My name is Christine and I’ve been teaching for 28 years. Teaching was not my first profession. I graduated from college in 1982 with a Bachelor’s degree in Medical Technology. I was a good medical technologist, but I felt unfulfilled in that profession and, because teenagers were (and are!) my passion, I returned to school in 1984 to earn my teaching credentials. I started teaching 8th grade general science in 1985 and earned my Master’s in Secondary Science Education in 1988 while working full-time as a teacher. My comments that follow will be brief and to the point– well at least by your standard posts! Here it goes…..
….Just because you stand in front of a bunch of college or grad students and give a lecture, assign them to read a series of chapters in a text, and then give them a test, DOES NOT make you a teacher. You haven’t the first clue about what it means to TEACH. Let me tell you what TEACHING is. Teaching means getting inside a kid’s head and heart and leading them on a journey of discovery that they didn’t even think was possible for them. Teaching means understanding that each child is unique and comes with gifts and challenges unlike ANY other child. You don’t understand the first thing about being a REAL teacher. You simply talk, assign, test, and grade. Like YOU said: What you do is SIMPLE. What a REAL teacher does is complex and challenging and tiring and REWARDING.
I can sum up ALL of your posts in this thread in a very SIMPLE way. It comes from scripture — which was probably taught in that one-room school house you are so fond of mentioning:
“A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions.” (Proverbs 18:2)
LikeLike
Uh, for your comments on my comment, you need to
improve your reading comprehension of my comments!
What you are calling ‘teaching’ is nice; I’m not
sure I ever had any except less than an hour from
my father; your version of teaching is asking too
much of the teacher; my suggestion, clear in this
thread, is, don’t teach in a school that needs such
teaching. If you want to teach that way, go ahead.
You may do some extra good, but you will suffer and
not get much sympathy from me.
Some people commenting here have claimed I would not
last in K-12. They might be correct. Fine with me;
here I have emphasized how to learn and only
indirectly how to teach; I never wanted to be a
teacher, certainly not in K-12. Still, what I wrote
about what is nearly both necessary and sufficient
for learning, especially from, say, the 8th grade
on, remains true.
Here’s some of what is likely to happen: We will
have a ‘three tier’ system of (1) home schooling
following some well respected curriculum, e.g.,
International Baccalaureate, assisted with some
professional tutoring and carefully evaluated with
standardized tests, (2) good public schools, (3)
poor public schools. By far the best education will
be from (1). (3) will just keep the kids off the
streets. You are welcome to try to convert (3) into
(2) if you want, but I’d suggest you find some much
more promising line of work. There are stories
about such work, about pushing some rock up a hill
or some such.
LikeLike
Norm, You really are clueless. And arrogant. Bye-bye now! Oh, but before I go, here’s that scripture verse again. Maybe you should try taking it to heart: “A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions.” (Proverbs 18:2)
LikeLike
Okay, Christine, you just totally lost your argument:
Why?
You are only name calling. You learned that from some nasty student in, what, the third grade?
So that even you can ‘get it’, I was talking about how to learn and gave a lot of evidence from some impressive learning of mine and others. Clearly, then, I’m qualified to report on how to learn. For how to teach, I addressed that only indirectly via how to learn.
Again, yet again, if you want to teach in ways highly particular to each student, go ahead.
For your “A fool finds no pleasure in understanding”, anyone with even a small fraction of the learning I’ve done just MUST find great pleasure in “understanding” and, thus, by your quote, must not be a “fool”. So, apparently, twice now, you failed to understand your own quote.
For my points, you addressed none of them: “Clueless” and “arrogant” are not evidence, rebuttals, or arguments.
You’re getting low marks in cognition, reading comprehension, communications, and socialization. Not good.
You lose.
LikeLike
Sorry, Norm. Your posts bounce around a lot. I get lost in the anecdotes. Plenty of us had sharp ancestors. I have a grandfather that dropped out of school at 12 and at the height of his career owned a weaving mill. But this really doesn’t deal with the issues of education today. I think that the teachers who actively follow this blog are some of the few in the know. And it’s painful. I would gladly stick my head in the sand like many teachers I know. The problem is that you can’t “unsee” what you’ve seen. And, trust me, I feel like a conspiracy theory crackpot.
LikeLike
Since you are an English teacher, I’ll assume that you are a really, Really nice person and fully sincere and try to reply constructively. I.e., you are not some thug for a teachers union.
Of course, maybe somewhere in there you might tell your students:
“A good definition of ‘art’ is ‘the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion’. So, art is about emotions people feel.
“Now those emotions are rarely connected with rationality and/or science; that is, the emotions are usually not just rational. And the communications of those emotions is not very precise or scientific, and the resulting effects are still less so. It’s all so ambiguous that it’s difficult to know what really is art and when art is effective, good, or ‘great’, assuming that there is any such.
“Still, people really like parts of art, and it’s fair to say that not just Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Henry James created art but that nearly all of media from radio and TV to movies, newspapers, magazines, fashion rags, and scandal sheets are to communicate emotions of one kind or another. Indeed, it is fair to say that much of journalism is about stories with drama using the techniques of formula fiction discovered by the ancient Greeks and heavily used all the way to recent Hollywood blockbuster summer movies.
“And, then there’s music: Tough to say what it means or that it means anything, yet it has millions of fans, some of them very serious. Beethoven, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, to Beyonce (yes awful alliteration, yes, self-referential irony, since I’m writing for an English teacher) have many fans. Besides, Britney, at 16, was an astoundingly pretty young woman, beyond belief.
“So, we will get some understanding of some of the more ‘important’ examples, parts, and techniques of English literature, that is, a literary art. Mostly the subject is people, and at times people have concluded that English literature is a good way to learn about people, about love, obtained or denied, honesty, integrity, faithfulness, loyalty, responsibility, determination, deception, duplicity, manipulation, superstition, irresponsibility, laziness, drunkenness, greed, conspiracy, collusion, murder, things like that. Yes, there is plenty of all of those in there, but, really, the lessons on those topics in English literature are simple, easily understood, and not deep. Alas, for better understanding of people, I’d suggest the more recent literature on, say, clinical psychology or psychiatry. Don’t ask Shakespeare to compete with the DSM.
“So, net, call English literature vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment. In particular, it should be fun.”
Such a description would have saved me all those times I heard “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” and thought, then let’s f’get about it and move on to physics, and had to resist an upchuck.
Instead, the English literature teachers I had, for six years of pure agony, at least for me, kept telling me their subject was “great” when I could see it was no such thing and year by year I wanted more and more to wring their necks. It’s not “great”, not at all, but it’s light entertainment. Or, can learn something about people from the fact that people like such vicarious experiences so much.
Took me a while to figure all that out.
> But this really doesn’t deal with the issues of education today. I think that the teachers who actively follow this blog are some of the few in the know. And it’s painful. I would gladly stick my head in the sand like many teachers I know. The problem is that you can’t “unsee” what you’ve seen. And, trust me, I feel like a conspiracy theory crackpot.
I am trying to take most of the screams of agony from angst at face value. For teaching in schools in the bad neighborhoods, I did suggest some ‘forced march’ rigid ‘lock step’ techniques something like my father organized for technical training for part of the US military. Other than that, I’d say, give up on such schools and do anything else.
However, from all I can see, teaching K-12 in a school in a common US middle class neighborhood should be fun and easy. And if the tests were already developed and graded electronically, then so much the better, especially for the great reduction in work of grading papers.
If the district superintendent and principal are making the teaching a horrible job, spending way too much in resources on middle management, meetings, consultants, etc., then the results should be higher costs for the school district and, especially, worse results for the education, and the parents, tax payers, and school board should explain some simple facts of life to the superintendent and principal.
From all this angst, it looks to me like school boards should be eager, and eagerly competing, for superintendents and principals who can get better educational results at lower costs. So, want high graduation rates, high rates of acceptance into good colleges, high SAT and CEEB scores, with also some good senior class plays, some good science fair projects, students with lab assistant summer jobs in local research universities, etc.
Let’s add in one heck of a district competition playing the Bach unaccompanied pieces for violin and cello — doing as well as Heifetz and Rostropovich should keep some students plenty busy in the afternoons for some years!
Here is some best of Heifetz, right, on the ‘Chaconne’:
Due apparently to length limitations at YouTube, the whole piece is here in two parts. They broke at the right place: The second part here stars with the D major section, and the end of that section with that performance is my candidate for the best bars of music ever realized. You will hear the end of that section because just after it is some ‘cathartic confusion’.
Sometimes that music is played on guitar, and before a concert a guitarist was sitting next to composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco, known to be a man of few words. To make conversation the guitarist said: “The Bach ‘Chaconne’ sure is difficult to play.”
The composer said nothing until the end of the concert where he said, “The Bach ‘Chaconne’ is the greatest piece of music ever written”. I agree, but, since we are considering art, I can’t prove it is the “greatest” or even “great”!
Or, in words that have meaning only for people people who already have the meaning, parts of that music the Bach ‘Chaconne’, especially as Heifetz plays it there, ‘speaks to me about major parts of my life’ in ways that are ‘compelling and astounding’. Bach must have known that; he was a bright guy.
Almost entirely self taught in violin, but with pictures and recordings of Heifetz and the excellent
Ivan Galamian, ‘Principles of Violin Playing & Teaching’, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1962.
starting too late, practicing too little, with too little talent, I made it through about half of the ‘Chaconne’ but all of the D major section. Working through that thing, one bar at a time, often just one chord at a time, I couldn’t put my violin down until I was exhausted. In that D major section, especially with the Heifetz performance, the many triplets drive ‘insistently’ toward the end of the section with the many four string chords, several melodic lines played in parallel, etc.
To think I worked for years to learn to play that music, I REALLY like that music, and no one ever introduced it to me or ‘explained’ it, and Bach likely wrote it all in just a few hours. As a result, for more in music, I want to compose and have software do the performance. Ah, I’d likely be at best just a really bad imitation of Richard Wagner or Richard Strauss!
For the cello music, of course there is the Rostropovich
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndCjqD2Kv2c
in my opinion, another top, center crown jewel of civilization. The first part is easy to like, popular, and famous, is also fun to play on violin, and it ends with a long ascending chromatic passage that is — in my opinion — a grand moment in all of music.
But the whole piece has enormous variety with some parts orchestral, enigmatic, lyrical, irresistibly joyous, etc. Bach was really something!
In that performance Rostropovich is not as precise in his technique as he was when he first recorded in the West, but his interpretative insight and realization are grand. Look at the score — it’s just black marks on white paper and seems to give no hint of the art that is really there.
Yet, as much as I like (an understatement) such music, my short view of all of English literature from Chaucer on, and especially Shakespeare, is that I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise it, not to put too fine a point on it. Point: Not all students will like all the material; some students can like some material a lot, be quite good in some other material, but just upchuck at the rest.
And I’d like to see some students doing well taking correspondence courses in freshman and sophomore college courses.
Starting with some good math talent in the eighth grade, a good high school math department should be able to get some students through Harvard’s Math 55, sometimes regarded as the most difficult college math course in the country. Walking into the Harvard or Princeton math department as a freshman ready to take an oral exam on Math 55 could be impressive! Then in two years, take Ph.D. qualifying exams, and then in two more years submit a Ph.D. dissertation. Now get on with the rest of life. I would have loved to have had such guidance and that opportunity!
Look, guys, K-12 teaching should be easy and fun, and if it’s not then the taxpayers and school boards need to get on the case, have the superintendents and principals cut out the nonsense and seize the day.
Back to Bach and writing software.
LikeLike
Norm,
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you use your parents as an example because they attended school in a one-room school house, etc, etc, etc. leading to success, and your reasoning is that the rest of the country should copy that model because it worked for them and maybe the same model worked for you. Or maybe it is some other model of education you admire.
However, one size does not fit all.
In addition, the US has more than 14,000 public school districts and each of those districts has an elected school board. Then each state has its own department of education. Each state decides the educational policies so the US had fifty different road maps for achieving educational goals and objectives.
Below the state level, each school district refines the state road map and this has led to different results from state to state and even from school district to school district in the same state. Each state also decides how to measure what success looks like when someone graduates from high school. In California the standards were set very high (about 9th grade) but in Texas they were set very low while G. W. Bush was governor there. That way he could brag about the high success rate in Texas of reaching those standards set at about a 4th grade level.
The New York Times ran a piece on June 2, 2010 that reported, “Across United States public schools, just 74.9 percent of students who were freshmen in the fall of 2004 graduated from high school on time in 2008, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics.”
That is very misleading and does not tell the whole picture of public education in the US, because results vary between racial/ethnic groups, socio-economic groups, children of illegal aliens, rural and urban areas and from state to state.
The dropout rate for Latino children of illegal alien parents is three for four times higher than the dropout rate for Latino children with legal parents that are natural born citizens of the US.
That 74.9% graduation rate for the United States is just the average of all the students lumped into one number in addition to the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
For example: in 2008, the high school graduation rate for Nevada’s public schools was 51.3%, but in Vermont it was 89.3%.
Source: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/datasets/public-high-school-averaged-freshm/versions/1.txt
In addition, the teachers’ unions have nothing to do with curriculum standards set by each state education department. Teachers’ unions are not the reason some kids fail. If that were true, then the public schools in Finland would all be failing horribly because in Finland the public school teachers union is very strong and about 99% of the teachers belong to the union, but Finland has one of the best public school systems in the world because that country turned the teaching over to the teachers and let the teachers decide what is best for students on a school by school basis. And in Finland, most parents do not wait until a child enters school to start learning to read. In Finland most parents start teaching children to read at age 3 and they do not start school until age 7. When those seven year olds start school, they can already read. They are already literate.
LikeLike
Sorry, I can’t give you high marks!
For one room schools, my point is simple: They are an existence proof that, with children from middle class US families, K-12 education competitive with what is average in the US now can be done in a one room school. Application: The problem of low average student performance in US education is not due to low school funding; instead, with the real problem solved, we could do quite well even with just one room schools. Anne of Green Gables could do fine — besides, she was GORGEOUS!
You moved on to many of the really grim realities of education on average across the US with the average made to look just awful by schools with students from families that are poor in money, culture, or whatever.
E.g., you mentioned graduation rates: Again in the K-12 public school I went to, in the Old South, essentially everyone graduated, and over 97% went to college. I was not one of the best students, was only roughly competitive with the other students, was one of the best students in the school in math and physics, and, from SAT and CEEB scores, was essentially competitive with some of the best nationally.
Heck, I took senior physics as a junior, mostly had my head down resting in class, was one of the best students, and three guys from the class one year ahead of me, and likely one or more in my physics class, went to Princeton.
And I didn’t see in the faculty the agony and angst reported on this thread.
Point: Given just a decent middle class neighborhood, it’s quite reasonable and straightforward to run a quite competitive K-12 school without agony or angst.
For the poor students, I explained that my city had a ‘solution’: In the really poor areas the students only went to school half a day, and everyone who stayed around ‘graduated’, although don’t expect many to have learned plane geometry or French.
Sad, ugly, and cruel but real. Look, in a nutshell, that’s a very old story in the US, back to Alexis de Tocqueville, and I see no good solution. Bluntly put, if we deliberately work to have a lower class, then, presto, wonder of wonders, we get a lower class, with all the attributes we wanted and didn’t want with such a lower class.
And don’t give me that ‘melting pot’ nonsense; some of that input doesn’t ‘melt’. Sorry ’bout that. We’re not talking Jascha Heifetz, fresh off a boat from Kiev via Moscow and Leopold Auer, on October 27, 1916 or some such, at Carnegie Hall playing the first chord of the Vitali ‘Chaconne’ and a violinist in the audience saying “Isn’t it a little hot in here?” and getting the answer “Not for pianists”.
We’re not talking John von Neumann, right to the Institute for Advanced Study from Hungary via Goettingen and David Hilbert. We’re not talking Richard Courant, straight from Goettingen to Courant Institute at NYU. And we’re not even talking the guy my mother’s church sponsored from Latvia — he’d been a banker; I wasn’t learning French, and he knew more European languages than I knew words in French. We’re not talking the couple my father in law imported from Latvia — good people, bright, hard working, learned English right away. We’re not talking the guy who first put a violin under my left chin, from Kiev via Israel and high school in France, knew Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, French, some Spanish and Italian, and learned English in the US essentially instantly. He did a great job sight reading the Vieuxtemps 5th concerto! We’re not talking two guys from two families fresh from the Soviet Union quickly becoming worth about $15 billion each — right, Page and Brin at Google.
Instead, we’re talking students who communicate in just different inflections of exactly one phrase of exactly two words the first of which is ‘mother’. I have a friend who went to such a school; he got PBK at SUNY and Ph.D. at Courant; but his family was Jewish. In one of the early grades, he was home sick with the flu, and his mother noticed that he couldn’t read so taught him in two weeks. The problem wasn’t the school.
Mayor Bloomberg can blow a lot of the money he gets from Wall Street trying to get redemption from his ‘white guilt’ if he wants, but he’s on a hopeless task trying to push a rock up a hill. Same for Michelle Rhee in DC — from Congress, $25,000 a year per student in a hopeless attempt to push a rock up a hill.
In particular, I would hope not a single good teacher would suffer or even attempt for a single minute to undo that situation. If that lower class wants to ‘melt’ and join the US, fine. Else I want to be rid of that problem as much as I can. We should offer some one way boat tickets with $10,000 attached. Heck, we could afford $100,000 and make huge amounts of money. That lower class is NOT cheap.
I will have no, zip, zilch, zero, sympathy for turning more of this country over to pushing that rock up that hill. Trying to ‘spread homeownership around’ we already blew a financial asset bubble and put us in close to a second Great Depression — enormously destructive, enough no doubt to have killed lots of people. Enough is ENOUGH. No more. Not a chance. Done with.
I did outline how one might use the ‘forced march’ ‘lock step’ educational techniques my father directed for technical training for part of the US military. If some school district wants to try that, fine with me, as long as I’m a long way away.
So, for the grim cases you report, I give up. You can push that rock if you want, but I’m not interested and will vote not to pay for it. And for the angst it causes the teachers, I say, leave that school. Give it up.
Instead I’m concerned with something that has some potential. There, my experience is rock solid and totally convincing: Running a quite successful public school starting with just middle class students, and, I confess, some wealthy students and most of the Jewish students in town, and getting essentially world class results has not changed in at least 40 years, is not difficult, and needs no agony, angst, or big bucks. Again, it’s the students who need to do the work, not the teachers.
Then you mentioned Finland. Now you start to lower your grade: I want to see the students in Finland compared with the students of Finnish, and even other Scandinavian descent, in Minnesota. So, as is very well understood in ‘educational statistics’, I want to ‘control’ on country of ancestors. Now what do you think? You want to bet that the students in Finland will blow away the students of Finnish descent in Minnesota? Don’t bet more than you can afford to lose!
Or, I want to see the students in Finland whose parents were fresh from, say, West Africa compared with the students in the US. Are those students going to blow away US students? Again, don’t bet more than you can afford to lose.
I’ll give the schools in Finland one standing ovation: Due to, say, Jan Sibelius, Finland has, for its population, one of the best musical traditions in the world.
I’ll give you one: Look at the ‘Appendix’ to the McKinsey study and there see that Jewish students in the US do better than students in Israel! Why? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader! And as I recall, that Appendix also showed that US Blacks do better than students of an African country. Bet US students of Chinese descent do better than students in China, even the ones in Singapore. Heck, Berkeley could fill their whole freshman class with just excellent Chinese students near Berkeley.
Or, if ‘control on country of origin’, then the US schools do just fine. For some elementary ‘educational statistics’, that’s important.
So, the ’cause’ of the poor US average PISA performance just ain’t the schools but the countries of origin. Are we learning yet? Just what is it about the importance of country of origin you are having such a difficult time understanding? I mean, you do actually think a little about education? It’s not looking like it.
Are we seeing how not to waste tens of billions a dollars a year and ruin our schools, with all the angst here, hopelessly trying to push some rock up a hill?
Or, here’s a slightly more advanced point: Take a measure, nearly any measure. Apply the measure to lots of countries. Then rank the countries on the country averages on the measure. Right, like the PISA test says they do. For what to measure, you can pick sight singing, knowledge of calculus, running a marathon, knowledge of physics, whatever you want.
Then, may I have the envelope, please (drum roll)? Here it is: The countries at the top of the ranking are nearly all quite culturally homogeneous. The same for the countries at the bottom of the ranking. The ‘diverse’ countries are all in the middle. Net, the PISA scores do NOT say that US schools are inferior to the schools in the homogeneous countries at the top of the PISA rankings. And homogeneous countries are not always better; the countries at the bottom of the rankings are also homogeneous. I’ll let you pick some reasonable mathematical assumptions and then get this result as a theorem. Hint: Review the proof of Jensen’s inequality in Rudin, ‘Real and Complex Analysis’.
And we should not bankrupt our country trying to push that rock up that hill to change that situation, no matter how much the US teachers unions want to bleed US taxpayers white and bankrupt the US to build a huge industry to this end using this absurd excuse.
Again, running a world class US K-12 school for students from middle class families should be easy and fun and not very expensive. A one room school house can still be sufficient. E.g., in good cases home schooling totally blows away the US public schools.
I say again: US public schools as currently organized are highly vulnerable to losing nearly all their money and good students and public support and becoming something really ugly by just home schooling or very small schools, educational materials from the Internet or Amazon, checking progress via frequent standardized tests over the Internet, and certification tests from, say, the Educational Testing Service. Then $25,000 a year per student for really bad results will be less popular than a case of the Black Death.
You mentioned that in the US schools are supposed to be run at the local level. GOOD. Of course there are strong efforts to change this, but I agree with your suggestion that local control is just crucial. My father in law was on his school board. So, his brilliant daughter got one on one tutoring from two teachers in her senior year! Yes, she was Valedictorian, PBK, Ph.D., etc. and my wife.
But, from all I can see, too often the local voters, taxpayers, school boards, superintendents, principals, and teachers fail to take advantage of this terrific situation of local control. Else schools could pick good textbooks instead of the junk the textbook machine gets passed by Texas or some such nonsense. E.g., we’d get rid of AP calculus and just teach from a good calculus book, Thomas, Protter and Morrey, etc.
If my business works, then maybe I will take an interest in my local schools. I’ll shamelessly use my business success and Ph.D. as sources of credibility. And if my business is successful, then I will be able to have influence by using my checkbook. Then maybe we can get some progress — real local control, terrific results, teaching that is easy and fun, and cut out the nonsense from the US Department of Education, etc. And we could have some nice prizes for students who make over 700 on an SAT or CEEB test! I would mention a score of 800 except I doubt that the tests are reliable or valid at three deviations above the mean.
But for leaving the schools up to the teachers unions, no thanks. Apparently the teachers unions want to bleed the taxpayers white and bankrupt the country making a huge industry out of hopelessly pushing a rock up a hill. No thanks. Not interested. No sale.
Lots of people want to put out a lot of publicity nonsense and bleed the taxpayers white and bankrupt the country creating an industry where they can get money. So, a recent biggie is to use photographs of polar bears as measures of Arctic temperature and push a morality play about human sin, complete with the trilogy of transgression, retribution, and redemption, to talk the US into electric power at 60 cents per KWh instead of less than 3 cents from coal and less than 2 cents from nuclear fission.
In the last four years that ripoff effort wasted $92 billion dollars and with its “war on coal” has deliberately tried to sabotage the US economy and do more damage to us than Tojo, Hitler, and Stalin combined.
Right, semi-, pseudo-, quasi-great idea: “Bankrupt” and shutdown our coal plants for no reason at all, 49% of our electric power and 23% of all our energy, and see our electric rates “skyrocket”. We’re talking sabotage, ripoffs, payoffs, shakedowns, kickbacks, political machine building, and grounds for impeachment. No thanks to that, and no thanks to letting the teachers unions have their way either.
It’s all back to ‘The Music Man’ using some “pool table in town” as an excuse have a morality play and get into “boodle bags” except worse. No thanks.
The answer’s no. Just what is it about “No” the teachers unions have such a difficult time understanding?
Be smart: Find something else to do. You might as well start now because the path you are on is hopeless, a long walk on a short pier. Leave education now and avoid the big rush!
LikeLike
Norm said, “Look, guys, K-12 teaching should be easy and fun.”
No!!
A thousand times No!
This thinking was the engine that drove the self esteem movement in the 1960s until that mental virus swallowed the average parent. Kids should feel good, feel beautiful, feel successful, and have fun. The work should be easy. To make this happen, parents put pressure on school boards, principals and teachers until “easy and fun” was driving the school bus.
That’s why rote learning was tossed in the education trash heap because rote learning is boring and most if not all kids do not have fun memorizing the names and capitals of the fifty US states, the names of the presidents, math and science facts, important events and dates in history.
Instead, teachers are encouraged to be a comedian, n academy award winning actor and to sing and dance to make sure learning is “easy and fun.”
That’s also what happened to grammar and spelling. To learn how to spell correctly and the rules of grammar require rote learning and it isn’t easy or fun. That is why in the 1980s the Whole Language concept to teaching reading, spelling and grammar swept the schools and English teachers were forced to dump those boring grammar books in the trash — or else.
The Whole Language approach was based on kids reading at school and at home and by reading books, magazines and newspapers every day at home for at least a half hour or more, they would absorb the rules of grammar and spelling naturally and have fun doing it. A decade later, California plunged from near first place for academic achievement in the public high schools to almost last place and the Whole Language approach to teaching was quietly allowed to go into the dust bin of other failed “easy and fun” magic pill programs that have haunted public education in the US for decades.
It doesn’t matter if the teacher or the subject or the textbooks are easy or fun. The classroom is not a circus, it is not Saturday Night Live, it is not an improve comic club.
Thank god that most universities haven’t followed public education down this rabbit hole. I spent nine years total in college earning a BA in journalism, a life teaching credential and an MFA in writing and most of it was not fun or easy. It was work. There is nothing wrong with the word “WORK” and “WORK” for most of us is not easy or fun and it is often boring and tedious.
American must get out of this self-esteem driven Disneyland, theme park mentality that kids must be happy all the time, feel beautiful, successful and that everything for kids should be easy and fun.
When our daughter was in grade school, I told her that it didn’t matter if the teacher was boring or incompetent; she was the one responsible to learn. From 3rd grade to graduation from high school, she worked hard and earned straight A’s—nothing less, and she graduated with a 4.65 GPA and was accepted to Stanford, the only one from her high school. When she came home from school, the TV was left off (M – F and on weekends the entire family watched about two hours of TV together), she had no TV or Internet connection in her room, there were no video games in the house, she didn’t get a cell phone until she was in high school and even then it was only for emergency purposes and not chatting with friends. There was no text messaging. The only thing she was allowed to do for fun after all the WORK (studying, yard work, washing dishes–we shared the daily chores–homework, studying for tests, etc), she could read a book. In fact, we visited the library once a week.
We ate dinner as a family with no TV or radio on. Dinner was where we as a family talked. We took walks together. Often the only people outside the house and not glued in front of a TV or social networking on the Internet. It was as if we lived in a ghost city.
On the other hand, your “easy and fun” suggestion has led to this: The average parent in America talks to his or her child less than five minutes a day and the average child spends about 10 hours a day dividing his or her time between TV (the average is three hours for this one), listening to music, playing video games, talking on the phone to friends, hanging out with friends in a mall or downtown, social networking on the Internet, send endless text messages, etc.
Heaven forbid that any parent should make a kid feel that life is hard and not fun. That has led to the average child being allowed to stay up as late as he or she wants often sleeping less than six hours a day when studies show that children and teens need to sleep about 10 hours a day because that is when the brain and body does most of its developing and growth. Not getting enough sleep retards mental and brain development. For that reason, we required that our daughter be in bed by 10:00 PM every day, and this caused no end of angst because her friends rubbed it in her face that they were allowed to often stay up until 3:00 AM enjoying the easy life having fun on Facebook chatting nonsense.
LikeLike
At least most of your description of how to help your child learn sounds good.
And with your remarks on sleep, you’ve explained some of why in class in grades 9-12 I often had my head down resting! The best time was in eighth grade general science. The teacher had just explained atmospheric pressure and a traditional farm lift pump. At home I’d been paying a lot of attention to mechanical things so understood the pump just by a glance at the diagram — just one piston and two valves.
So, during the teacher’s explanation I had my head down resting. So, apparently trying to embarrass me, say, like Mellon got embarrassed by the English teacher in ‘The Great Gatsby’ in ‘Back to School’, the teacher asked me to explain the workings of the pump. To be nice, I did sit up and open my eyes, although neither was necessary, and to push back at the teacher gave an excessively detailed description of all the pressure differences and flows that opened and closed the valves, etc. He never bothered me again! Silly, trivial course! WHAT a waste of time. At least I got to rest!
A good, standard way to handle TV is just to turn it to face the wall. I finally just canceled my TV service — now the house is quieter and it is easier to concentrate with less temptation to procrastinate. And I don’t feel like a fool flipping through the same dozen or so channels without finding anything worthwhile to watch, say, while eating dinner.
I did discover that my cable TV company then offered me TV service for free. I still declined it!
Instead, of TV, slowly I’ve found some Internet video clips to watch, e.g., where Prof Ng at Stanford fumbles crudely with maximum likelihood estimation and steepest descent for what is crudely done applied statistics and curve fitting and what he wants to call ‘machine learning’. So far he has omitted any justification for maximum likelihood estimation! It’s not a very good course!
At Stanford I’d expect much better content from, say, Royden, Chung, Diaconis, or Luenberger! Still better from Breiman, Brillinger, or Freedman at Berkeley! Still better from Cinlar at Princeton or Dynkin at Cornell!
Prof Ng needs to learn how to write on a black board and how to pronounce English clearly, and the camera crew needs to get better lighting and zoom in enough so that the black board is legible. So far what he has done through the first few lectures is so simple I can guess at the content. If he gets to some significant material, then the bad pronunciation and video will hurt. Maybe the PDF notes are good.
But your interpretation of my statement that K-12 teaching should be “easy and fun” was completely wrong. In no way was I suggesting anything like what you described. When I was teaching calculus and applied math, the work for me was easy and fun, but the students still had to do a lot of work.
As you can see from much of what I have written here, I have proposed that, students who can should do much more than nearly any K-12 students do now, e.g., get through the content of Harvard’s Math 55 and play the Bach unaccompanied pieces on violin or cello trying to do as well as Heifetz or Rostropovich. Such work is world class stuff and not “easy”. Still, when I was trying to play the Bach ‘Chaconne’ on violin, the work was great fun.
Look, ‘easy and fun’ still has a role even for the student: When I was taking plane geometry, I refused to pay much attention to the teacher and in class usually had my head down resting. If she had just shut up, then I could have gotten out the text and gotten to work.
But alone, I made sure to work all the non-trivial problems in the text, and for me that work was easy and fun except for the one problem that took me all weekend which was still fun.
For encouraging learning, I would make one point of caution: Don’t push too hard on the students. In fact, I’d say, don’t ‘push’ at all. If you want to shower praise and approval when they do well, okay, but don’t deny attention or affection otherwise.
At the core, don’t create a lot of ‘anxiety’ in the student. That is, don’t get high performance by having the student just terrified — with stomach problems, loss of weight and sleep, various other sad symptoms — of loss of affection, security, acceptance, praise, and approval from anything less than an A. Don’t do that. In an auto analogy, such a motivational technique is like running a car at 80 MPH and 8000 RPM in first gear — high performance but soon a ruined engine and no performance at all and maybe a dead car and student. Literally. I exaggerate not.
Instead, the learning should also be fun for the student, including when they are doing world class work working through the materials of Harvard’s Math 55.
Usually as people go farther in school, they find the work more and more difficult. The effort to write a Ph.D. dissertation can be life threatening; similarly for getting papers published. But, the farther I went in school, the better I did.
E.g., while I have had no desire to publish research, I have published several papers, two where I was the sole author (both in good journals) and several more with some coauthors, mostly in conference proceedings. I’ve never had a paper rejected or needing more than trivial revisions. So, that’s considered doing unusually well. And for my Ph.D. dissertation, I did that work quickly — it was easy and fun — independently on a problem I brought to graduate school. Since the dissertation is commonly a big struggle for students, especially ones well adapted to pleasing teachers and making As in K-12 and college, that I found the dissertation easy and fun was also unusually good.
But, since I did better later in school, I did worse earlier in school so that there was some question if I would get out of high school, the eighth grade, or the sixth grade at all!
I’d say, having a student making straight As in high school is a questionable goal: Mostly the high school material is not worth that much work. Also straight As can have a dark side of being from too much anxiety. E.g., the guy who made “Most Academic” in my high school, whom I beat by a few points on the math SAT, went to MIT and soon blew his fuses — that is, had a ‘mental breakdown’ from ‘clinical depression’ from too much stress.
My father knew all this stuff and, thus, never once mentioned my K-12 grades at all and just encouraged my interests and said that it was important for me to understand the material — which in nearly all the courses I did.
I’d say, if a student in middle school or high school wants some good academic progress, then mostly try to f’get about high school work and ASAP get on to college work. For still more, the main theme in academics is to stop learning and just do research; that is, the high end of academics doesn’t care if you can carry the library between your ears and, instead, wants to know what that is good you can create. And outside of academics, the goal is even simpler — just make money. For that goal, if some academic material helps, terrific, but the goal is still just to make money.
But for girls and cell phones, one might look at, say,
Deborah Tannen, ‘You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation’, William Morrow and Company, New York, ISBN 0-688-07822-2, 1990.
Tannen has been a prof at Georgetown and was essentially a student of the author of
Erving Goffman, ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1959.
when she was trying to understand why her first marriage failed. I’m not sure she ever fully understood! The song about ‘be feminine’ in the Hayley Mills movie ‘Summer Magic’ likely has a better explanation!
But, back to Tannen’s book, she makes clear that girls like to gossip. Why? Because for their feelings of security they want to be members of a group, typically a group of other girls, with acceptance and approval, and a key to group membership is ‘sharing’ via gossip. So, that’s why each girl has a cell phone attached to the side of her head — gossip! 24 x 7 gossip! But you were correct: If you want her to go to Stanford, then in high school she should keep down the gossip, Internet social media, etc.!
LikeLike
“A letter from a disgusted teacher:” and the comments it has generated are more than a little sobering. Thinking of what they mean to students makes them even more disturbing. I’m a Canadian teacher who has experienced much of what the letters and comments tell and I see the solution in parents and teachers coming together to demand a fundamentally different approach to public education.
During one of the most uncomfortable times in my career I read Alfie Kohn’s article titled Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide (September 1993, Phi Delta Kappan). A Kappan editor who provided an introduction to the article said, “The key to transforming student apathy into student engagement, Mr. Kohn suggests, may be as simple as allowing students to make decisions about their learning.”
Alfie approached the topic through burnout, and if, “hypothetically speaking”, students too suffered it, “How would they talk and act?” he asked.
In answer to the question he said, “Teachers around the country to whom I have put this question immediately suggest such symptoms as disengagement and apathy – or, conversely, thoughtlessness and aggression. Either tuning out or acting out might signal that a student was burning out. In both cases, he or she would presumably just go through the motions of learning, handing in uninspired work and counting the minutes or days until freedom. The fact is that students act this way every day.”
From research and experience in the workplace, the best predictor of burnout he said “is not too much work, too little time, or too little compensation. Rather, it is powerlessness – a lack of control over what one is doing.” He concluded by saying, “these ideas are unlikely to make much difference so long as students are controlled and silenced.”
More recently Daniel Pink wrote Drive in which he promotes the idea that people would be more engaged if given more autonomy. A quote from the book that I particularly like is: “Perhaps it’s time to toss the very word ‘management’ into the linguistic ash heap alongside ‘icebox’ and ‘horseless carriage.’ This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction”.
I believe that the problem with public education is that both students and teachers are far too controlled and silenced. Teachers who quit are like the students who act out, and those who are merely going through the motions are like the ones who tune out, but I don’t think the battle can be won if it is fought from the teacher perspective. I think it needs to be fought in the form of a children’s rights movement.
Stan Shapiro in Classrooms that Work spoke of equality for children and had this to say. “All the great events and movements of the last 100 years: the victory of the democracies over fascism in World War II, universal suffrage, the civil rights and feminist movements; and the drive for equal treatment for the physically and mentally challenged, are all about the shift from authoritarian rule to democratic ideals and social equality. The only identifiable group in our culture that has yet to be fully included in this concept of equality is our children.”
Teachers will not like what Steven Horwich has to say about them, but for those who can look beyond his teacher bashing he makes a great contribution to the cause of better education with his “Children’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” (http://www.connectthethoughts.net/childrens-bill-of-rights.php).
The democratic learning model respects the rights of children and promises the diversity needed to properly support each child. It provides the autonomy for teachers to adequately address the needs of each of their students, and this leads to teaching being restored as “the most honorable of professions”.
For the uninitiated who want to learn more about the democratic learning model, two organizations promoting it are the International Democratic Education Network (http://www.idenetwork.org) and the European Democratic Education Community (http://www.eudec.org). Googling “democratic education” will also help.
LikeLike
This system has some fundamental flaws in terms of child development. It assumes that young people will act like responsible adults. Even adults don’t act responsibly. I’ve been teaching for eighteen years now and can tell you that although I’ve taught plenty of young high school students who could rise to any occasion, I’ve taught plenty who couldn’t.
Besides, buzzwords like “diversity” shoot up red flags with me.
We have to be careful treating children like adults. They are not. This is why I am against trying them as adults, even for the most heinous of crimes.
LikeLike
Dear English teacher,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. You express what is probably the biggest objection people have to the democratic learning model, but my view is that it isn’t valid. I have had the advantage of running a conservative mainstream democratic learning program in a high school. It gave students more control over their learning and it proved to be workable and beneficial to both those who initially appeared to have good self-directed learning skills and to those who were thought to lack those skills.
There are students who will succeed whether they are in a democratic or an autocratic program. We know also that there are students who are failing in the autocratic system. The students who people worry will fail in a democratic system are, ironically, often the ones who are already failing in the autocratic system. Autocratic schools try to deal with under-performing or troublesome students by tightening controls over them, and if that doesn’t keep the lid on then these students might end up in programs designed for potential dropouts. The success of these retention programs often boils down to students having more control over their learning in more personalized surroundings. This suggests that students who are seen as the least responsible and most likely to fail in a democratic school are actually the ones who could gain the most from being in one. They have demonstrated time and again that they can succeed with something different and it is a blotch on the record of the educational establishment that these students are still being demeaned and driven to retention programs before they get more of what they need. A student’s disengagement or misbehavior, more often than not, is about a failing system than it is a difficult student.
I am not suggesting that angry, rebellious, or disengaged students are going to suddenly become model students. Most of them will need an adjustment period during which they learn to trust their teachers and acquire the basic skills of self-direction. Black people were once said to be incapable of managing their own affairs. Women were once thought to be incapable of operating in the boardrooms of big business. They appeared to be incapable, but when they were given the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills they proved themselves capable. We don’t want to keep making the same mistake with children. Let’s provide what they need to acquire the skills to be responsible, self-directed, contributing members of a democratic learning community. I’m not advocating a massive flip-flop that ends in such disarray that everybody seeks shelter in the old way of doing things. I want to see the democratic model investigated as intelligently and thoroughly as possible with parents, students and teachers who opt to be part of the investigation.
Marshall McLuhan said we don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish. The Copernican Revolution speaks to this. We can be so accustomed to one way of seeing things, and so believing in an illusion that we can’t see how things can be different. Shifting from the autocratic to the democratic model in education will be as difficult as was getting people to accept the heliocentric view of the universe over the geocentric one. The democratic learning model is not new, but public educators have failed to properly investigate it. The more they procrastinate doing so the more we will descend down the road to charter schools and privatization – the road that leads to the demise of public education.
“Paradigm shift” was such a buzz phrase at one time that the editor of a respected journal said she wouldn’t publish anymore submissions that used it. Words and terms can get over-used and then people try to avoid them despite their usefulness. “Uniformity” and “conformity” are buzzwords that have been used to discount the autocratic school system, but I won’t stop using them. They’re too applicable. “Diversity” is likewise a word I feel compelled to keep using. The diversity characteristic of the democratic model is what makes it so promising. Diversified schools are needed to better meet the individual needs and interests of students. Trying to describe the meaning of diversity using other words is likely to just convolute discussions. It would be more constructive to accept the use of it, to consider the great potential it, and to test out visions of how it can be applied to public education.
A poem by Dorothy Nolte (now expanded into a book) is titled: Children Learn What They Live. If we want children to understand equality, they need to grow up knowing what it is to be equal. If we want them to be good democratic citizens, they need to live in an environment that could be described as a participatory democracy. Autocratic school systems that train children to be dutiful subjects work against the values of equality and democracy that we claim to cherish.
LikeLike
Thank you for lumping me into the category of closed minded bigot. And I thought I was a realist…
It’s just that I know snake oil when I see it.
LikeLike
I just want one simple thing. I want adequate time for planning in elementary school. I am so tired of knowing that high school and middle school get 90 minutes a day (in many places) and for some reason, districts think that 45 minutes, 2 times a week, is adequate for elementary school. Planning time is not meeting time. I am not demanding more money, I just want enough time to do a good job. It used to be that PLC’s focused on learning one thing well in a year. Now it is a catch-all for every idea from the district on down to the principal. Give me a 90 minute planning period and I will spend half of it at the required meetings and half preparing to be a successful teacher. Since you extended the school day and we now teach as many hours as high school and middle school, we need the same amount of planning time. I cannot devote anymore of my family time.
LikeLike
I would like a lunch break! Sounds silly I know but, it would be nice. I do not even have a place to sit during lunch, instead i walk around my kids table and make sure they are behaving while I attempt to eat my yogurt.
LikeLike
very well said. I think teachers all over the country are feeling the same way. Somehow, it is ALWAYS the teacher’s fault. Never enough planning time, never enough paper work that teachers are responsible for, never supported by administrators… never… never.. never… Teaching is one of the toughest jobs out there, I don’t care what anyone says. After a long day at work, I come home exhausted, with little energy to do anything which is unfair – I have a husband and a two year old who need my attention. Many times, I do not have the energy to play with my two year old. No one realizes how difficult and exhausting it is and it’s NEVER enough!
Thank you for this post!
LikeLike
I’ve been an art techer in OH for 19 years and I feel lucky to have a job when so many districts have removed art from their schools. Art is always on the back burner because there isn’t a standardized test yet. Sad truth is that it is coming down in the near future.
I just want to just teach but feel the stress of proving that I am a “highly qualified” teacher. There are so many hoops to jump through now I feel like I have two jobs! They have nothing to do with creating a better program for my students. Creativity is going to be tested?? Really! I hope I’m gone by the time that happens!
LikeLike
I am a first year teacher in North Carolina. I am already feeling burned out and stressed beyond belief. I knew that the first year would be difficult but I never imagined this. My students are unbelievably disrespectful and know that their parents and the administration will not do anything about it. I feel as though I am drowning in a sea of paper work (much of it I am told to do it but, not how to do it). I have little to no support as a first year teacher. Professional development is a joke. Most of it focuses on issues that are not important. I am living in constant hope that things will get better, “Today will be better” has become my daily mantra. I hope that things change, I feel like I am being smothered instead of being offered a chance to soar!
LikeLike
Sadly, almost no teacher education programs truly prepare you for what you face as a first year teacher. And no school gives new teacher the on the job training, the safety net of at least a few weeks that even a fast-food employee is given. Without an iron class discipline plan (full-proof, not iron-fisted) no one can hope to teach anything. So goes the saying, “Don’t smile until Christmas.” Students won’t learn from you unless they respect you and that respect must be earned by articulating a plan and then sticking to it. You will reap the rewards in full and can enjoy a long career, but that bridge must be crossed. Never-mind an administration and colleagues who are deaf to your woes, invisible and happy to see you stumble, fall and become a cautionary tale.
LikeLike
First things first…get the classroom management down. Teaching expertise will come later.
Learn how to develop meaningful relationships with your students while maintaining professionalism.
I am a successful teacher, not because I am a great teacher of the content, but because I can prod and influence kids to do what they otherwise would not do for anyone else.
LikeLike
Welcome to the south? I assure you that Tennessee is in worse shape than nc by far, yet people constantly migrate in this direction to look for work. As horrible as this may sound. Good riddance! Another westie that couldn’ t hack it over here…nothing new to us. Meanwhile, those who have chosen to live their lives here, have seven generations of family in the area, and have tens of thousands of dollars invested in obtaining a teaching certificate cannot find work because the boards are hoping that a fresh new face from another part of the country would work out better. Please do everyone a favor before dreaming of all of the available jobs in the South…research where you are going. It is not only the schools that are having trouble. The everyday norm here would likely be referred to as child neglect, extreme poverty, or uncivilized by most outsiders. If you really want to succeed as a teacher in ” these parts” you have to leave your whine box where you came from, your feelings at the house, and your shame checked at the front door of the school. Seriously people, why did you think there were so many open positions? It is not because of lack of qualified candidates….it is because everyone quits after a couple of years.
LikeLike
I think you have made a great point or at least inadvertently focused a spotlight on an important fact. Turnover in a school or school district may be a red flag—a strong warning sign— that the school board/administration/students are not the easiest to work with or work for [another word to describe this situation would be “dysfunctional’].
This could even be extended to an entire state since each state has its own department of education that sets policy in that state as directed by the elected politicians from the governor of a state on down. Religious and/or political agendas tend to rule in such organizations and the winds may change direction at any time.
For example, I friend sent me this in an e-mail about the current situation in the high school in Southern California where he teaches:
My friend said,
“-112 scheduling changes in the first three weeks
“-75% of the administrative team is new; a lot of chaos
“-50% of the counselors are new; a lot of chaos
“-we lost our department chairs, so there is no communication between the teachers and administration
[this high school, he says] “once had a top-notch academic program; however, we are falling apart at the seams; our test scores have flat-lined and they will continue to flat-line because there are just too many new faces at our school; two of our Vice Principals have never been a VP before; they’re nice people, but we have to wade through their learning curve.”
I was a public school teacher from 1975 – 2005 and we worked together at another high school before poor administration drove him to quit and find a job in another district that at the time was a better place to work. Beware the grass is greener. During my thirty years in the classroom, I worked under nine different principals. Some were great, some good and some horrible. The horrible ones drove teachers, counselors and VPs out of the schools where they ruled Nazi style.
LikeLike
I had the privilege of attending K-12 in the CMS system. I could have worked harder to get ahead but I always felt so defeated and drained that I just didn’t care. I got very lucky in high school. Independence High had an Academy of International Studies. So I kind of got a private school experience in public school but still it was always very “us against CMS.” I really hope things change before I have kids.
LikeLike
I praise this letter because I know that someone is feeling the changes in our education system in this country.
This is my first year teaching as a full-time special educator in NYC. This year, the common core alignment has made its way into my classroom. With the new expectations, I am feeling burnt out and I am ready to quit. Here are the reasons why: I have been lesson planning, differentiating worksheets for six of my students, modifying and adapting trade books, implementing the ABLLS assessment, trying to meet my student’s IEP, taking data for FBA/BIP, taking data for IEPs, going to workshops, meeting up with my APs during my prep periods, writing in parent’s communication notebook, sending lessons plans to my APs to review with me for the following week, and etc. This LIST goes ON AND ON AND ON. All of this workload does not end for me on weekdays, weeknights, and weekends. There haven’t been a day when I feel like I am really “teaching” my students anymore. All I have been doing is making sure that I am helping the administration meet the district’s expectation so there is budgeting in the education system in NYC.
I am really sick of helping the administration when there haven’t been any support for me as a new teacher. I am getting really fed up with this education system. It really seems like this is happening all over the states, not just NY. I am definitely not going back to the DOE in NYC with this lack of faith in teachers to do real teaching anymore.
LikeLike
RI Teacher – I QUIT,TOO! Below you will find my
resignation, which I presented to the Providence schoolboard last
night: Stephen Round Foster, Rhode Island Human Resources
Department Providence Public Schools 797 Westminster Street,
Providence, Rhode Island 02903 To: Paula Shannon, Susan Lusi,
Carolina Creel, the Providence School Board, and the parents of my
students… Below you will find, word for word, my personal
Philosophy of Education, which was part of my application for a
teaching position in the Providence School System in 1999. “I
believe that my goal as an educator should be the creation of
life-long learners. If I am going to meet that goal I must provide
children with an educational experience that is both rewarding and
enjoyable. Therefore, it is important for students to understand
how the knowledge received in the classroom will benefit them in
the real world. It is my responsibility, as a teacher, to find
various ways to make this processes possible. To do this, I must be
creative and open minded enough to try new methods and approaches
but perceptive enough to embrace only those methods and approaches
that prove to achieve that end.” I was hired for a second grade
position by principal, Nancy Owen, at what was then the Charles N.
Fortes Magnet Academy, and it was a great fit for several years.
Unfortunately, in the attempt to conform and abide by the misguided
notions of educrats, the school system in which I had so much pride
drastically changed. Rather than creating life-long learners our
new goal is to create good test-takers. Rather than being the
recipients of a rewarding and enjoyable educational experience, our
students are now relegated to experiencing a confining and
demeaning education. Let’s take a look at their typical day…
Breakfast is no longer served in the cafeteria – where children
used to have time to talk and socialize. Now it’s piled on a table
in the classroom and consumed during the first moments of class –
supposedly while they are “working”. Lunch isn’t much better. By
that time the children are so starved for social contact and a
chance to talk that the cafeteria quickly becomes unbearably loud
for students and supervising faculty alike. The alternative – the
dreaded Silent Lunch – is often the only answer. So now there’s
recess – which lasts all of 20 minutes when weather permits. This
should be time for all students to run around and work off their
pent up energy. But unfortunately, since recess is the only
enjoyable part of the day for the students, teachers have been
forced to use it as a bargaining chip in the classroom – students
either do their work, behave and keep quiet during class time, or
they lose recess. And, more often than not, the kids who need that
recess time the most lose it due to poor behavior in the classroom.
So then it’s time to line up quietly, form a straight line and
proceed back to the classroom for another session of “learning”.
It’s no small wonder that we have such a high rate of Behavior
Disorder within our classrooms. I, personally, had two children in
my class of 26 who were (and still are) severe behavior problems –
and at least six more who would be considered moderate BD.
Actually, there were only four or five children in my entire class
who could consistently hold it together, day after day, without
getting into trouble. My hat goes off to them! And as for the
classroom experience itself, any type of “fun” activity is long
gone. Classroom pets – gone! Parties to celebrate birthdays and
special holidays – gone –gone… How about field trips? Those
adventures out into the real world to experience what it’s like to
live on a farm, trips to the zoo and even the experience of
visiting a real museum? Gone, gone, gone… And finally, my
determination to be creative and open minded enough to try new
approaches to teaching…. Hah! The Powers That Be say that if it
isn’t in the accepted curriculum and done at the appropriate time,
it can’t be used! Why, I was even prohibited from tutoring my
neediest students – my so-called dyslexic students – on my own time
and after school… Not just once, but twice! In two separate
schools! And, this was after my principal and the student’s parents
had approved of what I was doing. These parents were happy that
their children were finally reading, the students were happy to
know that they really weren’t really stupid, and I had the
satisfaction of knowing that I was truly having a positive effect
on children’s lives. But Chief Academic Officer Shannon would
rather see these nine children fail, than do something not
specifically prescribed in this one-size-fits-all curriculum. When
asked for a meeting, she literally would not give me, the students,
or their parents – the time of day. So gone, gone, gone…. I’ve had
it! I quit… I would rather leave my secure $70,000.00 job (with
benefits) and tutor in Connecticut for free, than be part of a
system that is diametrically opposed to everything I believe
education should be. Sincerely, Stephen Round
LikeLike
The part of this I find most interesting? There are more than 3 million public school teachers in the United States and more than 55 million public school students. Say every public school teacher calls in sick on a Wednesday morning at about 7 am. We could shut down a nation. That’s power! Instead, we complain, go about our jobs and then quit or retire.
LikeLike
Well said. As districts insist they are supporting teachers in differentiating learning, they are actually homogenizing instruction in a One-Size-Fits-All state test prep curriculum. Administrators and superintendents say they care about students, but what really interests them is making quotas and goals that make spreadsheet cells turn green instead of red at the state Dept of Education. The people at the top who are most removed from the classroom, and who loved teaching so much they couldn’t wait to get out of the classroom and into the boardroom, set insane policies and counter-productive strategies that change with every new wind that blows from the “experts”.
LikeLike
well said
LikeLike
I have read all of your posts. I have four children 3 of them school age in 9th and 6th. I have had them in private school and public school in Union County and Charlotte Meck. If I could do it I would return the all back into the private sector, unfortunately, I couldn’t get them to agree to fall back 2 years . My 9th grader is being home schooled as we speak. I have watched my oldest become bored, fought to have the twins tested for learning disabilities, watched them pass on curves to keep numbers up, learn to do math four ways in one day, cry because mommy doesn’t know how to had from left to right. I have sat at my bar and listened to dedicated teachers make fun of their students, I have fought with teachers, principals, and superintendents. The last conference I had with the twins group of teachers, they told me not to feel bad that my kids don’t know how to write sentences, spell, or do proper math, they were not alone. WOW!
I am not a teacher, I admire all of those in that profession. It is a job I could never do with someone else’s child. Thank you for trying even with hands tied behind your back.
I have written letters, talked to teachers, superintendents, and principals. My kids are only numbers, and all I get are shrugged shoulders. The twins need IEPs but don’t get them because they are just slightly above the mark, and while they can pass on a curve they cant get help on one. (I apologize for the randomness, trying to get it all in before baby wakes up)
This is my concern, I am but a parent and can only voice so loud due to the fact that I am not a teacher, and don’t have the in class perspective and can only speak for my children. Have any of you voiced your concerns to those that need to hear it? Has anyone seen what is broke and fought to fix it?
But then I wonder to if in fact this county is letting the ones that could make a difference pack up and leave, and hiring ones that are good with following the leader. I don’t think moral values are even required anymore, I have seen teachers be hired that barely had the stamina for college, that need meds to get thru the day, that value their selves so little they maintain long standing affairs. I don’t teach other peoples children because I am not a fit person to do so, I know this. But I do fight for my children even if I do it alone.
LikeLike
Teachers that voice their concern about a broken system are fired for “insubordination.”
LikeLike
What a great and dead-on letter. The level of administrative incompetence in some districts is appalling. It is likely that the admins in districts and states like this (Florida is notoriously anti-teacher) send THEIR kids to private schools. These admins are interested only in teachers “following orders”, and they chase every fad like private company curriculum (like America’s Choice, etc.). They have no desire to let teachers be the professionals they are, nor usually to provide the discipline support for teachers. For thosenonteachers who read this woman’s letter, find a local teacher and ask that teacher about these issues. They are rampant and ruining public education, which for the most part was good until the last 20 years.
LikeLike
I QUIT and I did not send a letter…One day’s notice ….as I have one life to live and had rather rake yards, mow lawns, and even clean houses thasn to walk in any of these schools..
I am exhausted from trying to figure out what to teach for the next county test……then state test.
I am tired of the CLAWS that come at you and the Ugly Faces of the Powers that be when your class of 33 can not make an A on one of those SO BAD BAD TESTS!!!.
Those “Frowny Powers that Be” people may not know it but they will die early and have so many wrinkles form those Ugly Ugly Facial Gestures!!!
I am so tired of the hiring of all of the coaches that nag and nag and nag the veteran teachers and pretend to know more…but they do not..
I am tired of the Professional Learning whatevers where teachers discuss TEST SCORES for a kid with a 58 I.Q….while an administrator that has never taught more than one year takes notes back to the Super Powers…or they have some person whose position has been created to sit there and take notes to take back to the Super Powers..
NY…..NC….should call those meeting-“TESTER MEETINGS”
I know that those States test and test and test and test and test and test!!!!
I am almost positive that the Powers that be will be in the future mandating Pregnant Women to test their Embryos for Gene Defects in order to get a Head Start on any problems the child may have for Future Testing…
I am tired of not having a book…but am asked instead to get all of the material on the web….run off enough material to kill all of the trees in Pennsylvania…..all of the trees in the National Forests.,…etc…
I can not believe that the State is asking for activities that the teacher creates to put on their website for this Common Core..
If I were that teacher..I would charge the state $500 for each and every activity after I had copyrighted the activity…
What the Educational Super Powers have done is to Drain teachers of any motivation and creativity…
The media has turned their heads on this one…unless someone comes to school with a gun or a knife, you never hear of any news of the Destruction of Public Education.
What a shame..
LikeLike
At the high school where I taught for the last sixteen of the thirty years I was in the classroom as a teacher, we had one new teacher quit at lunch on his first day on the job with two more classes to teach after lunch. During the lunch break, he walked into the principal’s office, tossed his room keys on the desk and said, “If they won’t show some respect for me, then I refuse to teach them.” Then he left.
LikeLike
neanderthal100,
I totally understand your response.
thank you for your honesty.
NC Teacher/Fed-Up
LikeLike
I am a teacher in NYC for over 15 years and wept as I read your blog and could have sworn you were writing about me. I too am getting ready to resign. i don’t know how it will affect me as I’m only 44 years old. I’m physically sick, exhausted, and tired of being made to feel inadequate and incapable when my prior success speaks for itself. My latest story is getting hurt at work by a student who decided to push my arm just because he was angry. Its so sad. I loved my job so much and now I panic at the thought of going back and no one in my family, except one or two, really understand why I just don’t want to go back. What happened when you quit? I’d love to know how you made it financially.
LikeLike
That’s a very good question. If we quit, how do we make it financially? I never had time to save anything living from paycheck to paycheck and with one child to raise. I have never owned a home and my divorce, unpaid student loans, and doctor visits due to the strains of work and stress have broken my budget. I don’t even live beyond my means. I have no computer of my own, no cable or satellite, no regular tv, no land line–all of my furniture was donated–and I pay rent. My car WAS mine but I had to refinance it to get loans to pay for everyday funds. BUT because I “make too much money”, I can’t qualify for any public assistance. So, I am in a Catch22. I want to quit but almost cannot!
LikeLike
I’m looking at options into daycare/childcare and tutoring. There has to be something we can do to finally enjoy and find fulfillment in our jobs again. The pay will be less but so will the stress, anxiety and the continual comments demeaning and belittling me as a professional.
LikeLike
One option is to plan ahead – there are teachers I know that are going back to school now, while they still have some income, while taking out school loans, in order to pursue a different line of work. This is hard, yes, and time consuming, because obviously you would probably only be able to attend part time.
This is something I may investigate. I may just try to get 20 years in, which is the minimum for which we can get any retirement that is worth anything, and try to start taking some classes towards a different career. I only have a handful of years left, so I will probably try and start taking some classes within the next couple years. Then after I retire, even if I have to go full-time for a year or two, I will have finish up the degree for a different profession.
Or plan B – I may try and stick it out for as long as possible after the 20 year mark, because I will still be in my beginning 50’s, and attempt another college degree toward the end of that window.
There are lots of variables here, I know. It obviously depends on how old you are, how many kids you have, and what kind of financial shape you are in. However, this kind of helps me get through the days, weeks, etc…, knowing that I am NOT doing this job forever.
LikeLike
I can’t apply for student loans. I have several defaulted undergrad loans that were not forgiven because I was actually receiving my teacher certification. That was why I said I was suffering from a Catch-22 situation. While I went back to school to earn licensure in teaching, I had to pay tuition as well as taking care of a husband and child. I was the primary breadwinner in the class. My undergrad loan repayments defaulted after a period of years and I don’t make enough to pay for my daily living especially now since I am going through a divorce. Education employment opportunities should pay more, but I still am not making over $40,000 and again, I’m NOT living above my means: no cable, no landline, no fancy car, and I’m renting my home.
I was trying to make the 20 year mark but if this frustration keeps up, I’m going to have to quit because I can’t afford to keep going back and forth to the doctor. I just wish I would have never bothered in choosing Education as a profession. Which is quite disheartening because I DO love warning students and protecting them from making the same mistakes as I did. Avoid the academic track of high school. I would tell every student now to go the technology route or the occupational route. Learn a trade. Start your own business! Try to apply for Early College. Getting in debt with a Bachelor of Arts degree was not worth my time and now I have to make proper changes or MY debt will become my daughter’s debt!
LikeLike
I’m thinking about getting an RN. I can do it in two years. Why get a BSN? I really don’t want to be a charge nurse. I figure I can work as a per diem ER nurse.
There’s also law school in three years.
LikeLike
The job is difficult to say the least and the expectations are very high. My thought is the education system has three strong pillars; the teacher, the parents and the efforts of student. Micro managing does not help the teacher.
LikeLike
I can assure you this is not a job anyone wants in this century.
IT IS OFFICIALLY “DOG EAT DOG”
Read the post of the principal almost jumping over her desk …..gritting her teeth telling the teacher that her scores were not up to par…
LikeLike
Bravo….
You did not quit teaching…Teaching is now officially TESTING..
You quit Testing……..
When I become a senator, I will mandate that all of the people working in the Department of Education for any State must teach 3 classes of 32 students each and must do so every 5 years.
They must turn in weekly lesson plans, must show growth for all students, must attend all school activities (even on weekends)
If they do not show growth for all of their 96 students or they will be be fired!!
LikeLike
Last sentence correction..
“If they do not show growth for each of their 96 students, they will be fired!”
LikeLike
All i can say is this- Welcome to the realities of public education, as it stands, in most of this country today.
I too resigned from “the system” after but only after 3 years of teaching. My family is grateful for it. I now have more time for my kids, husband and myself since I have a career with “normal” 40 hour/week hours and don’t have to bring my work home. Not to mention-it comes with a better paycheck.
I worked for the system in three roles simultaneously- a teacher, case manager, and strategist for my grade level. Working upwards of 70-80 hours a week (while only getting paid for 40). As a parent, it is almost as frustrating dealing with the system. My oldest has graduated public high school 2 years ago (though i home schooled him for some of elementary and all of middle school).
Now i am considering “virtual schooling” for my youngest through a private school program. Suffice it to say, nowadays, there are many alternatives to public school.
There’s a reason why so many teachers (upwards of 70%) stop teaching within the first 5-10 years. So much so, that districts seem to operate on a “churn and burn” methodology.
Those numbers are simply going to escalate in proportion to the unrealistic demands placed on them by administrators, districts and the government.
My advice is to parlay your skills and education into another comparable career that offers some “flexibility” in terms of schedules and a better work-life balance.
For example, I know of many teachers that have their Insurance license and are doing well in that industry working in sales, as an adjuster, counselor or adviser. Since the insurance industry is so heavily regulated and complex having the skill and ability to be able to take information and simplify or effectively “teach” a customer is of huge benefit.
Other areas were teachers have done well do to their skills is in counseling, occupational therapy, human resources, nursing, academic advisor (college), admissions and the like.
I wish you luck in all your endeavors.
LikeLike
I made it 13 years before I quit. I feel lost, like one of my arms has been ripped from my body. I just couldn’t take it any more. One thing the letter didn’t mention was the violence. It is as if schools have become their own version of bloody video games. The violence in most high schools toward staff and other students is overwhelming.
LikeLike
Anoteher Typo. I should have written 2002 instead of 2001.
Congress passed the bill in 2001, and Bush signed it in January 2002
LikeLike
When I talk to any teacher in 2013, I get the same responses over and over.
“I do not teach.I teach to a test”
“I teach a Test”
“I do not look forward to going to work anymore”
“I am looking for something more relevant to my degree as I was trained to teach, not test”
“My principal told me to cover all of the standards, no matter what.”
“My principal said that if my scores did not improve, I would be put on an action plan,”
My principal said, “When I walk into a classroom , the standard you are teaching had better be on the board, and, you had better be teaching that standard and not something else.”
Teacher said, “the opening may be a review so may not be the standard of the day.”
Principal said, “You will be put on an action plan if the standard on the board does not match the content you are teaching!”
Principal said, “You had better be on the same page as the other teacher(s) in your subject areas, you should be teaching the same content on the same day”
Teacher said, “You do it, I quit”
LikeLike
Your list is what I’m hearing from my friends who are still teaching. I retired in 2005 after thirty years and yes we taught to a list from the state.
But where did this all start?
Washington D.C. with the No Child Left Behind Act signed into law in 2002 when George W. Bush was president.
In 2001, the GOP held the majority in both the House and the Senate. The Senate was split 50-50 but with a Republican VP casting a deciding vote, that gave the GOP control of the Senate.
In the House, they held 221 seats to 212.
The GOP has had an agenda for years to destroy the teacher unions and the public education system so that tax payer money could be turned over to private schools—mostly religious—-where the kids will then be brainwashed to be faithful Christian conservatives.
Bush also launched two wars and increased the national debt by several trillion dollars while he was supported by a GOP majority in both Houses of Congress.
BACK to teaching to the test. Although the NCLB Act was signed into law in 2001, it took a few years to get it up and running. By then I was gone. For thirty years, I taught and not to a test. I was fortunate.
LikeLike
I’m sorry, a mistake slipped by me. The NCLB was signed in 2001 by G. W. Bush—not 2002.
LikeLike
NCLB was passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law by Pres Bush on Jan 8, 2002
LikeLike
dianerav,
Thank you for pointing that out. That 2001 was a typo. I caught it after I posted it and then wrote another short comment a minute or so later. In January 2002 when he signed the bill, G.W. Bush still had his GOP majority in both Houses of Congress.
LikeLike
I’ve never dreamt that I would retire at age 55. I am
crafting my letter of intent today. Thank you for posting career
alternatives. I plan to sub, but am open to other areas.
LikeLike
I am 56 and doing the same….as of last week:)
LikeLike
I am about to do the same. Does anyone know how to email Diane Ravitch or to send her information directly like Kris did?
LikeLike
I envy you!
LikeLike
I am sorry for N.C.’s loss. Anytime you get government involved in what they think best is for your child. Well!!! ” Houston we have a problem.” It takes support from parents and an well trained educator such as yourself. combined together, to make to make the process work. Some just want test results. NEVERMIND WHAT’S BEST FOR EACH CHILD. I am sad that I am from North Carolina if this is what they are doing. Wake Up People!!!! Change it.
LikeLike
Look deeper than government involvement. Much of what guides education comes from legislation or the courts and behind the actions of the legislation or what happens in court—sometimes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—is an individual or group with a scientific, political and/or religious agenda.
Once there is a law—one way or the other—then there are elements of the government that are duty bound to enforce that law. If you read the oath of office for President of the United States, you will understand what I mean.
The oath of office of the President of the United States is an oath or affirmation required by the United States Constitution before the President begins the execution of the office. The wording is specified in Article Two, Section One, Clause Eight:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Because the government of the United States was set up with three branches, each branch is supposed to watch the others to make sure they are within the law as defined by the U.S. Constitution.
The President is limited in creating laws. Laws come from the courts and the Congress. Even the budget comes from the Congress and the courts may rule that parts of the national budget are unconstitutional. Each state government also has powers over the public education system in each state as long as the state laws do not conflict with federal laws that were enacted by Congress or defined by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The government is not causing the problems in the public schools. It is the political process as defined by the U.S. Constitution. That process even defines how we can change things but once a law exists there is almost always someone or some group that stands behind that law and is willing to fight to keep it.
LikeLike
Thanks for this worthless and somewhat slightly condescending history lesson, Chief.
blandly,
unenhanced
LikeLike
I am a 3rd year NC Teacher. I am a DAMN GOOD teacher and I love my kids more than anything. Fortunately for me I don’t have any children at home. If I did, I would have to quit. I work 65 – 70 hours a week for a pittance. I am told how to do what I know how to do and spend many many hours in professional development that is below my professional success. I will be out of the system in 2 years when I reach 5 years and will go into private industry. Too bad, my students love me, my principal loves me, and my county loves me. I produce results. The state sees me at sucking the system dry. Outta here in 2 years.
LikeLike
How does the school system not realize that they are loosing good teachers who are just getting their feet wet. I don’t blame you for for choosing that plan of action. I had 22 years of mostly wonderful years I understand your decision. I have 22 years of teaching experience with students and parents however in the end it was the disrespect of administration that led me to leaving the system 4 years prior to full retiree. The principal had to let go positions at our school so she targeted me who was placed in her school after my baby leave of absence. She did not know me so she made up a lot of trivial false accusations about me and place it in my professional file. This is a valid way for the system to get rid of veteran teachers they can’t pay for. I was told by local NCAE rep that this is what is happening.I case you are wondering…I did request a hearing for which I prepared long for. I was cut off half way through my defense. Although I was very professional and respectful to the panel and administrators they did no review of my stack of supportive documentation. Two days later I received a letter from my school system that was only one sentence. It stated ….YOU ARE NO LONGER EMPLOYED WITH…..And the date. No specifics. I had always dreamed I would celebrate at a wonderful retirement party but those dreams are gone….The truth is no matter how difficult teaching got I was willing to trench deeper into the front lines…I was proud to overcome all that was thrown in my path and that made me happy to overcome,learn, and make a difference In children’s lives, but that was unjustly taken away. Now I am a mother of 2 one who is autistic ….and with this loss off income my husband and and family may loose our home!
LikeLike
I retired from the NC School System in July 2012 after 25 years. Today I have been on line looking for a possible teaching position because I miss the actual classroom teaching so much. I happened to run across your blog in my search and now I remember why I retired. Thanks for the reminder!!!!! NC Legislature you are missing the mark!!!!!!!
LikeLike
I am deeply sorry that you are leaving your career in NC.I understand everything that you wrote, and I can identify with all of it. I retired on Jan.1, 2012 from education.I loved my students, and they loved me.I was an English teacher for many years. I later earned my master’s in library science and moved into the media center.I missed the classroom, and I hope to work with students again to promote reading skills on a part-time basis. Why did I retire? I felt that my family really needed me more than the school.I became burdened with too many leadership changes, technology initiatives that sounded great-but had a lot of kinks, and a feeling of lack of respect.What matters to me most about my career is the fact that I touched the lives of many students so their lives would be successful.I am concerned about so many things in the world of education that I could write a book.Mainly, I am concerned that our children and teachers are the losers when a teacher like you resigns.I have watched it happen over and over. I a wondering if our new governor will take a long hard look at education and see what you and I see.There are a lot of good things happening, but there are even more things that need to be addressed. For example, the “testing” frenzy is frightening! We need leadership from people that believe in the power of the basics and value of really good, dedicated teachers. God bless! Wendy
LikeLike
I just want to teach. What the hell am I supposed to do?
LikeLike
Rob, all teachers teach—hopefully—but politics is part of the public education system in the US and those politics tend to intrude sometimes in BIG ways.
There is actually a battle waging from Washington D.C. to state capitals to district offices and into the schools over who will control the methods and content that teachers are allowed to use to teach.
This battle is being waged between scientific, political and religious groups and some of these groups want to control the direction young minds may go.
However, once the door is closed and the class starts, it is usually just the teacher and his or her students. That’s when most of the teaching takes place. The politics creep in outside of those few hours.
But be warned, be careful what you say to your students in class. There may be spies among them. If you pay attention to the media/Internet, a wrong word to students may result in the kind of national attention few teachers really want and a job loss.
LikeLike
Are you a politician of the type which you speak? Administrator of some mold? Your ability to simplify and repeat what you hear on your particular ‘media’ outlet, then add condescension is truly a gift for you alone. don’t dominate the rap jack if you’ve got nothing new to say.
LikeLike
This letter made me weep. I LOVE my children’s teachers; they are some of the most sincere and competent people I know. What I hate is the meat grinder this system has become. I hate it that the people causing the problems are the ones who receive the most financial benefit.
I got out my calculator and figured:
$100,000 annual (tax-free) salary for one good teacher
20 kids in one class
= $416.00 per kid per month. I could pay that. Probably less than the taxes I pay that goes into the state coffers for “Education”.
Parents have a lot of b.s to do too. A simple transaction between parent and teacher allows the teacher time to teach and me the time to properly raise my kids.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on whisper down the write alley and commented:
Teachers are not happy, students aren’t happy. What might happen if more teachers quit?
LikeLike
You all have it wrong..In the year 2013….
You do not QUIT TEACHING ..YOU QUIT TESTING…
When you write your letter of intent..make sure you do not even mention the word TEACHING…….
MYTH…TEACHERS ARE TEACHERS..
FACT..NO TEACHERS TODAY… JUST TESTERS..
LikeLike
neanderthal100,
I agree that the testing culture in state capitals and Washington DC that mandates it as a way to measure student growth is wrong, but TESTING is not a daily function. Testing only takes place a few days a year and the rest of the year, teachers teach the skills that educators/experts decided students should learn.
The testing process is a poor way to measure if the students were taught those skills.
I taught for thirty years and testing was not a factor in how I taught. I never felt any pressure from the testing to teach this way or that or this subject or that one.
We used a state curriculum that lists the skills we were to teach and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, Finland is a great example of how the state sets the standards with a curriculum guide that teachers follow and in Finland almost 100% of the students attend public schools and almost all of the teachers belong to a strong teacher union.
How teachers teach those skills that experts and other educators decide is important to teach is up to the teacher. Testing does not decide how a teacher teaches.
But, multiple choice testing is not the way to measure student growth and decide if teachers or public schools are doing a good job. Multiple choice testing only tests the students memory and does not test if the teacher actually taught the skills being tested.
Most teachers teach those skills in class but many students do not remember them because of the way memory works and in the US rote learning, which works best if you want to remember important facts that may be tested one day, became unpopular in America long ago.
There are three areas to test that do not test memory. The international PISA test also includes these areas besides remembering facts.
1. Literacy skills (writing and reading)
2. problem solving ability
3. and critical thinking.
Those are the only areas that should be tested—not if some student remembered the name of the 23rd president and if he did this or that during the Civil War.
LikeLike
It’s getting to be this way in far too many situations and states. Like every other teacher who wants to “TEACH” what the hell is supposed to be done. I am so glad I am retired. This teaching to the test crap is totally insane.
LikeLike
Teaching is my third career. I went back to school @ the age of 47 and got my master of Ed. so I could teach and make a difference in this world. I was working 60 hrs. a week for the first few years but the district got caught up in a financial squeeze of their own making and I was laid off. With the lay off I began to really question if I was making a difference and was I really teaching what I knew to worthwhile ideas or just teaching so children could pass a test for politicians. Needless to say, when I was rehired, I changed my tune and now work 40 hrs a week and try to slip in real education when I can. my student and I are a lot happier and are both gaining knowledge that can be used in the “real ” world.
LikeLike
This letter is very discouraging to me because I want to teach in NC. I went through the CMS system and my mother was a teacher in this system as well. I know it treats teachers like crap and students like prisoners. I don’t want to teach in CMS, but I still want to teach in NC because it’s my home. Is there no county in NC that is better than others? And isn’t it because the state education system is so bad that good teacher leaders should stay and try to change it?
LikeLike
I am at the same place in my life – I want to teach, I want to be close to my parents, the answer seems to be North Carolina. But I’m getting incredibly discouraged reading this blog! I have the same questions and concerns as Rhackney… any comments/suggestions?
LikeLike
Do NOT come to NC. People are leaving like crazy. Teachers have no respect here. Salaries have been frozen for the last 5 years. Between Common Core, Race to the Top, and VAM for evaluating teachers, I would never tell anyone to come here. And I’ve been teaching since 1973. I’m leaving early.
LikeLike
I quit over two years ago in the middle of the school year when I realized I (and my classes) were being used to get students through the system. In other words, students I never had in class were being added to my roster and given passing grades. Administrators and counselors were also going in to my electronic grade book and changing F’s to passing grades so our graduation rate would meet NCLB. There were other things going on, but this is what directly happened to me.
I quit, and went into higher education and have never looked back. I wrote a book about all the nonsense, unethical, illegal behavior that occurred in schools I worked for, tried to get it published, but was unsuccessful.
My heart aches for the public school system in our country. It is being destroyed before our very eyes, and I am amazed at how blasé people have been about it. When I share stories about what I saw and experienced, people just look at me, shake their heads and change the subject. Few seem to really care, and I think those that do are on this forum.
LikeLike
unheardofwriter,
Getting a book published taking the traditional route is not easy for most writers unless you are already a national celebrity of some kind—good or bad.
The rejection rate is probably higher than 99% and there are stories of many books that eventually were published that turned out to be bestsellers after having been rejected sometimes more than a hundred times by agents and publishers. James Lee Burke, the New York Times best selling author, is one example. He had one book rejected more than 100 times and then after it was published by a small university press, it was nominated for the national book award and went on to become a NY Times bestseller. He’s had about sixteen best sellers now.
I heard a seasoned agent husband and wife team say that they rejected 99% of the books that came into their agency and of the 1% they decided to represent, 99% were rejected by traditional publishers and it sometimes took years to sell a book they really believed in.
However, if you have a book that is well written and safe from the libel risk—check with a lawyer to see because of your topic—there is the indie, self-published choice.
And it has been gaining respect. If you haven’t heard of Amanda Hocking’s success story, I suggest you Google her name. She is not the only example of an indie self-published success story. There are many now.
As for promotion, it doesn’t matter how an author is published, they ALL have to promote, have a Website, have a Blog, network socially on the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Building a platform is a given for authors these days. If you do not have a developed Internet platform with an audience already built in and you are an unestablished author, then the odds are that no publisher will consider you no matter how well written or how hot the topic may be.
I think the fact that you could not interest a publisher wasn’t because of the topic of your work.
LikeLike
Lloyd
General comments on my book seemed to be “well written, but you lack a national platform.” I started a blog where I’ve included some of the book, but have failed to get that out into the public forum. Moving, re-establishing my teaching career into higher ed, starting to work on my doctorate, and adding this element of research to my career has taken a lot of focus and time off trying to promote myself and my work. I have looked into self-publishing, and will most likely go that route. I have a friend who just got published doing that, she also is busy promoting herself and her website and doing well, so I have faith I can get my story out there…it’s just a matter of taking the time.
Thank you for your comments and your advice. I will look into Amanda Hocking’s success.
LikeLike
unheard of writer,
You are busy, I can see that. I’ve been there—not for a doctorate but for an MFA. Back in the early 1980s, I had two jobs, and I was working toward an MFA. I taught days full time and the part-time job was nights and weekends. In addition, I attended classes for the MFA nights for two days a week—my part time job was flexible and worked with me. That was back in the early 1980s, and I survived on about three hours of sleep a day. No way, back then, could I have done what I’m doing now. In fact, I doubt that I could be doing what I’m doing now if I was still teaching. Full time teaching is a demanding hours eating job.
But I’m getting off topic.
I thought you might be interested in what I read last night in Writer’s Digest Magazine’s March/April 2013 edition on page 13.
“How Much is Enough?” was about what it takes to build an Internet platform that will catch the attention of publishers and agents—something I’ve been curious about (not attracting publishers and agents but what it takes to built a platform).
There were four categories (It wasn’t clear to me if an author only needed one of these four or all four. If all four are required, I failed. However, I scored in two of the four but if I was grading it based on all four categories, I might be lucky to earn a D-. That is if each category is weighted equal to the others.)
1. Blog Page Views – I scored a Notable here—the lowest of the three ratings.
2. Newsletter Subscribers – zero for me (I don’t even have a newsletter with no plans to post one.)
3. Public Speaking Appearances – zero for me because I don’t even try to arrange public speaking any more. Done that already and prefer the silence of my small home office where I can work at building the Blog platform without traveling.
4. Sales of Self-Published Books – “Very Notable” here and approaching “Impressive by Any Means”.
For example, Writer’s Digest says for:
1. Blog Page Views
Notable: 20,000/month
Very Notable: 100,000/month
Impressive by Any Means: 500,000/month (I don’t think any of my Blogs will ever come close to this. Even Very Notable could be a challenge.)
LikeLike
Unheardofwriter:
I am going through the same thing…even down to the F’s being changed to passing grades. I am quite disheartened at the news that your book was turned down because I, too, was going to expose them all.
It seems that money is in control of everything–even our children.
We have no future if this keeps up.
LikeLike
Olivia,
I haven’t given up getting my story out there, and it sounds like you have one too that needs to be told. Start writing your book and maybe we can promote together.
LikeLike
For those of you who do care, there is something that can be done. My name is Stephen Round and I’m the Rhode Island teacher who quit on YouTube just before Christmas. Soon after my video “went viral” I was asked if I’d be interested to speak in Washington at the “United Opt Out National occupation of the Department of Ed in April. This was the first I had heard of it, and that may be the case with some who are following the discussion here. Simply GOOGLE “United Opt Out National” for more information. The goal is to do away with High Stakes Testing in it’s present form and hopefully replace it with something that makes more sense.
Kris Nielson, Diane Ravitch and a host of other notable speakers are slated to take part in this three day event (I’ve also been asked to speak on Day 2).
Of course, High Stakes Testing is just a small part of what has gone wrong with Public Schooling, but it’s a good place to start…
LikeLike
I’m a new teacher living in New England….there are basically NO jobs up here. Everything is down in the southern areas and I was hoping to relocate to NC in a year or so to try and find a job. What I’d really like to do is become a reading specialist/interventionist. Only problem is I have to work a minimum of two consecutive years in a school before I can enroll in the classes! Ugh. This is very discouraging.
LikeLike
I taught for eight years. Three years at the university level as an assistant instructor and five years in public high school grades 9-12. My students loved me. Once I was subject to a total lack of integrity by a colleague. My principal did not complete my evaluations according to the letter of the procedure. She had a consulting teacher stand in and complete the evaluation. The consulting teacher blasted me on the evaluation because I did not employ her english literacy strategies in a spanish class to her satisfaction. According to the letter of our educational agreement, it MUST be the principal who conducts and completes evaluations. Our principal was unable to comply with completing my evals because she was not present at school. She was brought up on domestic violence charges and the district suspended her. The consulting teacher stood in and completed the evaluation under the principal’s name….a total forgery and dereliction of duty. I contested the evaluation with the support of the MNEA but the committee upheld the forged and illicitly executed evaluation. I took my greivance all the way to the state department of education of the state of tennessee. The lead attorney for the state department of education’s legal affairs office told me that they don’t get involved in local matters and that I would have to go back to the local district level committee and ask them to hear my case again. Since exercises in futility are not what I am into, I dropped the matter entirely. The principal I told you about earlier in this post was temporarily replaced by another with integrity, common sense, and compassion. She wrote me a glowing letter of recommendation despite the negative evaluation on my record. The school was closed down entirely at the end of 2010 due to the fact that the state welched on their contract with us. We had a three year opearating agreement in place but it was not binding. The state had the right to pull the foundation out from under us at any time. And they did. I got hired into another district, spent my 8th year in the classroom with a nice bunch of kids and worked on project based learning to try to interest them in Spanish. Some days were great, other days were so-so. I resigned voluntarily to seek other employment o opportunities and have been working as the executive director of a business. Unfortunately the business is going bankrupt. My fiance is finishing her PhD at Vanderbilt this May. We will be moving from Tennessee to Boston, both applying for teaching jobs…. her in political science and me in middle school Spanish.
LikeLike
I taught for fourteen years in a Texas school district. The problems expressed in this article do not exist in only one state. We tested over and over. The students weren’t allowed to use and develop their own thoughts or ideas…there was always a test for which they had to be prepared. I now home school my granddaughter and hope she never has to attend a public school.
LikeLike
I am a Fine Arts teacher in CMS, and for the past 3 years have been on the team that was charged with the creation of “standardized assessments” for the performing arts. It has been a monumental waste of time and money, and yet the district and state continue to barrel headlong towards the cliff. Why? Because the state received Race to the Top monies so NC must assess all teachers in all subjects, including the fine and performing arts, yearbook, newspaper, kindergarten and more.
I can only speak to the performing arts, but what I have seen, and continue to see, is a blind determination to put SOME form of standardized assessment in place, whether it truly assesses the skills in question or not. What is most frustrating is that the teachers of these fields are not the ones who ultimately design the tests. That work is shopped out to professional testing companies, to the tune of millions of tax dollars, that have no comprehension of what competency, (let alone mastery) of these skills look like. In addition, most, if not all, of these elective courses do not have a standard curriculum, and therefore do not have a uniform foundation of terms, goals, and objectives to work from, so these tests are fatally flawed to begin with.
But the biggest, and most fundamental, obstacle standing in the way of standardized testing in the arts, is that the arts are, by nature, SUBJECTIVE. Standardized testing requires objective, repeatable analysis of the students work, but appreciation of Art and Music and Theatre and Dance are subjective, and sometimes it is the subtle differences in a performance, or product that show the greatest understanding of concept. You will never see that subtlety reflected in a one-size-fits-all test.
This is what I have learned over the past 3 years, and I will be presenting this information at a conference soon. I am very curious to hear my colleagues views on this subject as it is a trend that is inexorably spreading across the country.
LikeLike
Way to go! I moved to Cabarrus County from Baltimore to teach. 6 months later I quit! The state of NC has education so backwards, and treats their teachers like crap.
LikeLike
You must have gotten one of the Diploma Mill Doctors for an administrator that are rampant in the state..They have CLAWS ..they use them …..They have diplomas they paid for..PAID FOR…..they enjoy putting teachers on action plans for having a bad score on a test in a class of 35…half homeless..the other half ..discipline ..
Believe it or not..their are some very good and INTELLIGENT administrators….You just have to look for them as they are fading away at an alarming rate..When the diploma mill administrators get a teacher who speaks up…you are outta there..THEY WANT PUPPETS…
LikeLike
Neanderthal, In August I was strongly advised by my doctor (I was diagnosed with cancer, 2nd time around). As devastating as a cancer diagnosis was the timing was perfect. I taught 18 years and loved it, until the last year or so. I don’t need to explain the conditions at the high school I taught at because it is pretty much a clone of what teachers are complaining about all over the country. Your last line is what hit home. You are right any teacher who speaks up is out of there. I fear if I had ignored doctor’s orders and returned I would have been forced out anyway. I had a long successful 43 year career in both education and the corporate world. It often bothers me that my career ended on such a sour note. But it was a lose/lose situation all around.
LikeLike
OMG! I am thinking of moving to North Carolina and I am horrified because I am an experienced teacher. I have applied to private schools. Are they better. ?
LikeLike
It depends on whether you want to TEACH or to TEST..
Private = teaching…good good good schools…
LikeLike
neanderthal100,
You certainly have a right to your opinion, but …
Reputable, non-biased long-term studies show that when we compare private to public over a long period of time, the results from private schools are not that much different from public schools.
There are many (millions) dedicated good teachers in the public schools doing a great job. The problems have little to do with a school being private or public.
Parenting is the biggest problem. Students that come from homes where there are parents that encourage reading at home from an early age, as they do in Finland, and also support teachers while the children are in school, as they do in Finland, students do just find.
In Finland, the almost all the teachers belong to a union and almost all the schools are public.
The second biggest obstacle to public schools achieving even better than they are is politics and the culture of testing to measure student growth. Testing does not show what one learns. Testing only shows what one remembers and the memory process is out of our hands.
Studies of the brain show that our brain works harder when we sleep than when we are awake and it is during sleep that the brain makes decisions without our conscious thought of what is important to remember.
If a child comes from a home where there is little or no importance placed on education and reading (homework, study, etc) then the memory reacts accordingly during the sleep cycle and what was taught during the day is not stored away as the brain sees it as unimportant.
Then there is diet. The average child in America consumes more sugar annually than his or her body weight and studies show that too much blood sugar messes with energy, mood, memory function, etc.
Most children today hate water and love sugary sodas.
LikeLike
As a parent in UCPS how can I help? I know Teachers have a up hill climb and are very under paid. I let teachers know I am available to help and assist and how much I am grateful to them. It is obvious that they have to teach to the tests and I hate that. What, as a parent, can I do to help?
LikeLike
Get an organized group of parents and OPT out of the test.
Get as many parents as you can..
On another blog on this site is a link…
Think it was on the AdultTest in Providence..
LikeLike
Wow…I could’ve written that letter myself; I resigned (4/1/13) after almost finishing my 14th year in the Boston Public Schools. There seems to be a trend emerging lately of a different group of teachers exiting the profession from the traditional group of 0-5yrs experience….it’s the teachers representing the younger side of a “generation” – those of us who aren’t close enough to retirment to suck it up & ride it out, but who began our careers prior to the disease of NCLB infecting it. Years ago, you’d never hear a teacher who was near- or in -her 40s leaving the profession. Never…they were advancing their careers administratively, taking on leadership roles in the school or district, teaching college or graduate level courses, or even just excelling at what they did…regardless, their professional status was @it’s peak, & they were highly regarded as being the “experts”. They weren’t leaving. Why would they leave?
Today we are leaving. & I’d just walk away and take a job at Yankee Candle, except I have a 6, a 7, & an 8 year old boy to think about, who have a lifetime of education in front of them…This year I experienced MCAS for the 1st time as a parent, & It brought my rage to a whole new level. Bc I saw the true level of harm we’ve brought these children as we force them into complying with these truly outrageous, in fathomable, & TOTALLY ILLOGICAL sanctions that people who don’t even know what they’re talking about – who haven’t set foot in nor thought about a school since their last day as a student – have decided to impose upon us for their own financial gain. & seeing the kind of “Learner” & Thinker my oldest son had turned into with the Drill & Krill that’s been suffocating him since New Year’s made me want to vomit. Knowing I was part of that problem – seeing the consequences of what I was helping turn children into over these last many years disgusted me. So last Monday I resigned, & this coming Tuesday I’m testifying for the 1st time at the Senates Joint Committee on Education Hearing regarding some MCAS bills. & that’s where I’ll throw my efforts in.
LikeLike
I am proud of you.
LikeLike
This teacher hit the nail on the head!!! I day dream about being able to walk my key to the office, walk out the door, and NEVER look back! Unfortunately, I am middle aged and not in a position to do so. There is another letter a N.Y. teacher recently wrote that is even more compelling than this one! The saddest thing is the bureaucrats and politicians, who have ruined education, could care less about it!
LikeLike
The previous post is merely a vent. I do love my students,but teaching has become truly an almost impossible task!
LikeLike
Thanks for your marvelous posting! I genuinely enjoyed
reading it, you can be a great author.I will remember to bookmark your blog and
may come back later in life. I want to encourage you to ultimately continue your great writing, have a nice holiday weekend!
LikeLike
Just in case you do come back later in life, I now blog at http://www.atthechalkface.com
Thanks for the kind words!
LikeLike
I quit. After 14 years I’ve had enough. I will never teach the test again. I can never quit teaching because I love what I do, but I have decided to teach what I believe my students need to learn, not some “prioritized” curriculum that force feeds a one-size-fits-all set of standards. This concept of a federally mandated body of knowledge that is the same everywhere in the nation means that we’re going to lose critical and divergent thinking. What’s next, Federally approved uniforms? I can’t decide which metaphor to use because we might be the Borg, or products of US Robots and Mechanical Men, or we might just be an ant farm. In any case, we will never again be the great nation that put men on the moon. Such achievement requires out of the box thinking, which will no longer be possible because everyone will be thinking the same thoughts.
And for those who want to teach in NC, it’s not much different anywhere else. You just have to work for less, and you probably won’t get tenure. Public education everywhere is the whipping boy for every half-witted wannabe politician hoping to claim a sense of self-importance before next election. But we deserve this. We thought running a school like a business was a great idea. Listen to Arne Duncan talk about efficiency and logarithms while he tells teachers to chose battles carefully when we complain about standardized testing. He should know what he’s talking about because he was the CEO of Chicago’s schools.
Standard Six is going to thin the ranks for us, so prospective teachers take heart–you’ll find a job. If I get “thinned” by Six, I’ll go knowing that I did what was best for my students.
LikeLike
With you….already Quit……..Private Schools are the only way to go..
Saddened for former co workers who have no voice…so we the “Quitters” speak for them.
Did Not Quit Teaching…..Just Quit Testing!!
LikeLike
I cried for a long time when I heard some of the parents concerns about NC EOG’s. Children are becoming emotionally scarred due to these testings. My grandchild who is a honor student came home crying on several instances expressing they don’t want to go to school anymore. Why because they feel like they are going to fail anyways.
This is not something that any child should ever have to say. Parents need to stick up for their children. They can not do it for themselves. What ever happened to “No Child Left Behind?” What does it actually mean? Does it say yes you are smart during school, but no you are not smart enough to pass state testing? It seems like maybe it is the teaching standards being taught throughout the year that DOES NOT match or measure up to whats being given on the test. Notice I did not say that it is the teahcer fault. Why? Because most ( I strongly put emphasizes on the word MOST) teachers are trying their best to teach their best. All I can say is get ready for some serious student counseling.
LikeLike
The principals in these schools can be heard saying..
YOU MUST “COVER THE CURRICULUM”..COVER…COVER…COVER….COVER..”
TEACH MY a******..no such of a thing these days…I speak for the teachers and I can say that I discourage anyone from teaching in a state that Masks the Quality of the curriculum..
Never time to really analyze and see the world from all angles in the
Mumbo Jumbo standards…and they are so Mumbo Jumbo…
LikeLike
I cried for a long time when I heard some of the parents concern about NC EOG’s. Children are becoming emotionally scarred due to these testings. My grandchild who is a honor student came home crying on several instances expressing they don’t want to go to school anymore. Why because they feel like they are going to fail anyways.
This is not something that any child should ever have to say. Parents need to stick up for their children. They can not do it for themselves. What ever happened to “No Child Left Behind?” What does it actually mean? Does it say yes you are smart during school, but no you are not smart enough to pass state testing? It seems like maybe it is the teaching standards being taught throughout the year that DOES NOT match or measure up to whats being given on the test. Notice I did not say that it is the teacher fault. Why? Because most ( I strongly put emphasizes on the word MOST) teachers are trying their best to teach their best. All I can say is get ready for some serious student counseling.
LikeLike
Okay, the reality of the situation is a once slow suffocation. The people in power want public education to wither and limp along on life support. This will help further marginalize minorities and low-income families, so the power base has little to no competition politically, economically, or socially. Public education in the USA enabled a post-WWII country to prosper and reach heights that were unimaginable just a decade earlier. If one follows the money trail in public education he or she will find that faltering school systems are locked into contracts with educational corporations that force them to adhere to and use antiquated educational programming that lobbying and politicians signed onto.
The solution: do what’s right regardless of what the board of ed, the superintendent, or your principal says. As a public educator I have to make this decision on a daily basis. This also means I need to keep my own data on student growth, so I can defend my practices and live the life I believe was intended for me.
LikeLike
You know what other teachers have done in past all over the world? STRIKE. There needs to be a revolution in your country. No healthcare, poor education and even more people living in poverty. Is this really how you thought your life would turn out? Its time to do things differently.
LikeLike
Well said Ashley..Hope the Testing Hierarchy reads your posts while
they are retreating to their Fine Mansion Beach Homes..with, of
course, the giant of giant book company that is taking all of this
country for a “Race straight to Nowhere”!!
Creativity Out…Chaos in full Control!
LikeLike
It is illegal in the state of North Carolina for teachers to collectively bargain. It’s interesting – I’m against unions but the shift to evaluate teachers based on 6-12 hours of standardized testing in NC is making me rethink the fairness of that…where is their voice in the legislature and board of ed?
LikeLike
True, get rid of the teacher unions and then the teachers have no voice. Then who makes the decisions? politicians and special interest groups with agendas
With that choice, I’d rather trust teacher unions as the lessor of evils. Teacher unions are run by teachers and most teachers are interested in what’s best for a child’s education. But when we turn that decision over to religions and political interest groups like the Tea Party, do you really think they are interested in a child’s education if what’s best for the child doesn’t fit the political/religious agenda.
In Finland, the teachers belong to a very strong union but that hasn’t stopped Finland from having one of the best if not the best public school systems in the world.
LikeLike
we have stop teaching our children. prepare, prepare…do this , do that, what culture wants.. lets step back….what did our grandparents teach…..my father is a great man…….VPI grad….with much to teach…I have learned more from my parents than I have learned in any school….My mother was home, my father worked….3 square meals a deals…a grandmother that taught me how to set a table, sew , etc… our country needs to step back….money doesnt make a better family or a better student….family!!!! family makes a better student….we put all of our effort for our teachers to raise our children…..if you have a baby…be prepared to raise your children…if you can read the paper…dont have a child. if you can’t keep your checkbook, don’t have a child…it really is that simple…..our teachers are great…we can have better students if we have better parents!!!! wake up…. our children are our furture…..
LikeLike
Here is another very emotional teacher explaining her personal experiences leading up to her decision to resign. Share the be-jeepers out of this one please.
LikeLike
You are my hero. I WANT TO QUIT!!!!!!!! for the reasons you state and a million more. I have 20 years in and I am stuck in that need to retire…or don’t re
tire and let the system kill me. I QUIT IN MY DREAMS EVERY NIGHT. Why can’t everyone see what this state is doing to our children?
LikeLike
WOW! What a wonderful way to put your thoughts together. This is not just a problem in NC but all over the United States. We are all lambs to the slaughter. On this, my nineteenth year teaching, I too will hang up my hat and bid the sweet little children goodbye . They will never know the impact they have had on MY life either. I am not a “yes” woman” either. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it? We have very similar stories.
LikeLike
I’m another one who wants to retire but has to hang in because of financial reasons. Originally, I had planned to teach until I was 65 but there is no way I am going to be able to hang in for 10 more years. I am leaving in 5 years and even that seems like too long because I cannot stand the dumbing down, the authoritarian top-down, micro-managed effects of policy that is breaking our schools. It is so sad and I try to go to work with a smile on my face but it is all a facade and insincere.
LikeLike
Okay friends,
I get it. It’s getting pretty dark in sweet, sunny NC these days. Obviously, politics, big money, and ultra-conservative think tanks are using NC as a testing ground for regressive interests, but I refuse to quit my chosen profession because someone is trying to bully me out. You are all correct: testing is out of control and the stripping of masters’ compensation and tenure are setting us up to lose seasoned professionals who understand education from different perspectives and vantage points. I get all of this. What I don’t understand is playing the victim and rolling over in defeat.
I love this state and the great people who make it wonderful. If I jump ship now, I am letting myself down, my family down, all the children who deserve an accessible, quality education down, and what’s left of our democracy down. The darkness won’t last forever. It will fade if we stay vocal and keep fighting.
LikeLike
It’s just as bad in NY if not worse with assessments. Maybe a miracle will happen and they will actually ask the teachers what should be done. For God’s sake I have more education than our district’s superintendent!
LikeLike
My daughter just started teaching in a Missouri School District known for being a very good school district. She is 2 months in and wants out. Paperwork, test goals IEPs, etc have made her an emotional wreck. If she quits in this state, her license is revoked. It makes me sick. She was so excited to begin teaching, but now she just wants out. And I have to say I can’t blame her. I want her happy and this job is killing her. She said she will use her abilities to help special needs children in a career other than teaching. I am behind her 100% Teaching has changed so much. I taught a special ed. class and was actually able to teach. My daughter feels she is not helping the kids as much as she would like to. Too much other stuff is getting in the way. I would rather her quit now than in a few years. I am just so disappointed in the government and the expectations that they have placed on teachers. They need to spend time in the classroom and see what they have done to good teachers,
LikeLike
Congratulations on quitting! I think it’s great you are passionate about your beliefs and are following through on them. Unfortunately, it is not only NC with these new teacher/student expectations…I am coming from CT and what you mentioned has been occurring for years in the city of Hartford. I thought it was because I taught in an inner city school that we had such rigid curriculum…all work, no creativity or fun allowed. But, after reading your blog, I can see it is the same. This is the new wave in Education. It has changed so much since I began 14 years ago. I pray you can find a place where the focus is on the children. I haven’t seen it in awhile. I am thinking of taking my experience and teaching in a private school. I feel there will be more flexibility and caring in teaching –maybe students will come first –ahhhh…imagine that!!!
LikeLike
I am sorry for you. I am sorry for all the students you could have touched if given the chance to educate them by YOUR means. I am sorry for myself and so many others who have lived and experienced each word in your video.
My sad, heavy heart is waiting at the trunk of the tree for you. Come on down, it’s time.
LikeLike
Last year was my first year in a new school system. I thought it would be a nice change from the system I was so use to, something to bring the morale of my profession up. I began the school year happy and ready to build children into successful students, and by the end found myself hating my profession; something I NEVER thought would happen. Multiple reasons started running through my mind as to why I did not enjoy the past year. I thought maybe it was the leadership that we had in our school, until we were given a new leader, then I just found myself wondering what the real issue was (finding all reasons outside of the state treating us like dirt). Needless to say, I talked myself into another year in the system….major mistake. I started this year more negative than I ever had started a school year before. Last year at the end I said, you know what, maybe something will change in this upcoming school year. Maybe this new leader in our school will be able to make a positive change and help us see the teaching profession for what it is suppose to be….However, I found myself resenting the start of school, not connecting with my parents and students, and already looking forward to June so I could begin the journey of finding a profession (a new career path) that would appreciate the hard work I put in EVERYDAY. (not just Monday-Friday)!
It’s a battle I have with myself each night I get home from work. Constantly asking myself why I’m doing this, why I put myself in this same situation again this year. The state isn’t going to change it’s mind anytime soon. Our pay is going to continue to be the lowest in the country. We are going to continue to move forward with lack of appreciation from outsiders who do not understand the profession and what we deal with on a daily basis. The state is going to continue to throw ridiculous amounts of assessments, state mandated tests, and expectations our way. Why continue to put up with it when we are the ones fighting for ourselves, fighting for the profession we so love, the children we so deeply care about/think of as our own. Your article has inspired me to finally make my change…to NOT put up with this anymore. Next year will be a change- one for my sanity, well-being, and family as well. I truly appreciate the bravery and courage that it took for you to stand up for what you believe in, to back away and not feel guilty. I only hope that come June, when the students let out for summer, that I have the same courage to sign my resignation letter, and begin my journey in a new and positive direction.
LikeLike
Is work in private education a possibility for you philosophically? Same low pay, but possibly the freedom to really teach?
LikeLike
Okay, one of the themes on this blog is that there
is something wrong with the North Carolina tests at
the end of each school year.
So, I went to a site of North Carolina education,
found the sample tests for mathematics, picked the
eighth grade, which was the most advanced test they
had, and answered all the question on all of the
parts.
My first conclusion was that the people who made out
the test should return to the eighth grade and try
again to learn enough about eighth grade math to
make out a good test.
My specific objection was for the last part and for
two questions. One question had to do with y = 3x.
The other question had to do with finding the phone
call with the least cost per minute.
The question about y = 3x looks just wrong —
incompetent. The question about the phone call
charges omitted the origin from the graph! Bummer!
Look, guys, for that question, having the origin
present would be a big help and, really, necessary
for the only good reason to answer that question
with a graph!
There was another issue: Somehow some North
Carolina (BC) math education people have decided on
their own to use their own wacko, smoking funny
stuff, nonsense notation in total conflict with at
least 200 years of rock solid math notation in math,
physics, engineering, with everything printed by
Elsevier, Addison-Wesley, Springer-Verlag, John
Wiley, D. Knuth’s rock solid, unchallenged, totally
dominant, international standard TeX, etc. So,
these NC quasi-math edu-twits often put a minus sign
as a prefix superscript. Arrogant. Incompetent.
Outrageous.
It does look like the topics in eighth grade math
are mostly a mis-mash of topics that should be
covered in a more organized way and more thoroughly
later. We’re talking, what, rational and irrational
numbers, ratios and proportions, square roots, areas
and volumes, some simple algebraic expressions, how
to put points on a graph, and the Pythagorean
theorem? This material should take a student, what,
an hour each night for, what, two weeks, with lots
of time out for TV?
In NC, there’s no excuse for bad math tests in the
eighth grade: NC is awash in good math expertise at
Duke and UNC. Heck, Davidson College has a good
math department.
Otherwise, I thought that the questions were not
very well considered but fair and reasonable. I
don’t see why teaching enough in eighth grade
arithmetic to permit passing that test should be an
undue burden.
What’s the objection with that test?
LikeLike
Please look at that test again. Now this time imagine that 2/3 of your students are not working on an eighth grade level (this number may be too low, I had an Algebra II class of 25 in which not a single member knew the proper way to find a least common denominator for integer values). For example, I had a seventh grade math class that could not do a review chapter on fractions because they told me the previous year’s teacher had skipped that chapter (verified to be true). Now, when you realize that in addition to teaching eighth grade math you must somehow teach the necessary remedial math where any teaching that does not address eighth grade test standards directly can get you a disciplinary write-up, that is one source of stress (when I did a review of finding LCDs in that Alg II class, I was instructed by the principal to never do such a thing again). Having after school meetings 135 out of 180 school days is another. Having some students miss class as many as six times to have their pictures taken is another. Combine this and other academic factors with trips to the principle’s office to answer challenges about why you are not playing one of the county school’s high-level administrator’s son more on the basketball team you coach and a whole other set of sources of stress can be seen.
Combine this with staff-wide blowouts from your principal on poor test scores including in math where the test scores were actually good in comparison with the rest of the state, but the scores that year had been renormed and the principal was unaware of the change (not to mention over half the teachers in attendance did not have EOC tests and were completely blameless).
Unless you have seen the absolutely incredible nonsense that goes on in NC public education (along with many wonderful INDIVIDUAL accomplishments), normal educated people could not begin to imagine how bad it usually is.
LikeLike
I know exactly where you are coming from. I was in a district where I was moved to another school, without asking for it, and told this is where I would be if I wanted to continue working. Then after 8 years of proficients and accomplished evaluations I was told that I was not differentiating enough or teaching the standard course of study. Now mind you we, the 6 1st grade teachers, were using the SAME lesson plans. But I was the only one they had a problem with. This interim principal, who was suppose to be a consultant from DPI, turnaround school, came in and cleaned house. We were subjected to this women telling us that we picked the wrong profession to be in, never once offered to tell us exactly what she wanted, never once offered to help, but was more than willing to fire us for not kissing her butt. As a result several tenured teachers resigned to keep their perfect records clear.
North Carolina doesn’t need teachers, they need superintendents who will work at being good at one thing county wide instead of buying into everything that comes down the pipe.
Very disgruntled resigned teacher from NC
p.s.- maybe we need a union here to prove a point to our legislatures and districts,,,,
LikeLike
I retired from a Georgia public school system and my reasons could not be stated better than those by Dr. Atlkinson.
LikeLike
North Carolina Education System Is Broken and has been broken for more than 30 years!!!!!!
I sad thing is…………Only The Teachers Care!!!!!!!!
LikeLike
I am a parent of 2 children currently in the CMS schools and I care a lot! Unfortunately, the parent involvement my schools so desperately ask for excludes speaking ones mind or offering opinions. I’ve been told by 2 principals and 1 teacher that I do not have an education degree which keeps me from knowing how to teach children. It also keeps me from understanding why the curriculum they have selected is so much better than the “old difficult way” I was taught. My 4 year communication degree and 20+ years of corporate work experience makes me ignorant apparently.
I’m only one voice and they don’t want to hear what I have to say. I’m also the customer so to speak as I am paying the administration and teachers to teach my children but I can’t have a say in how that is done. I can’t afford private schooling and pay for college too. However, I’ve been forced to seek assistance for both children outside of CMS in order to ensure they the foundational skills that the CMS administration has pulled from elementary education. I know most parents can’t even do that for their children. As a veteran of corporate America I’m well aware of how our children need to be prepared. I work with Indian and Chinese folks who our children will face more rapidly than I and they are prepared, aggressive and motivated to take any Americans spot.
I care I really do! I hate what is happening to my children and their teachers. Teachers in CMS have no autonomy or power within their classrooms. They have no support from above and they are not compensated at all. I’m not sure why anyone would want to teach in NC. I’ve know that for years. I’ve had friends teach in other states to come back to NC to teach and absolutely hate the administrative BS in NC schools. It’s ridiculous. It won’t stop until people start speaking up in large numbers.
I care I really do! I’m tired of my children being tested to death. I’m tired of the fear my children’s teacher instill in them about taking these tests. I’m tired of more and more being removed from the curriculum to squeeze in more time to learn how to take a test. I’m tired of programs being pushed and millions being spent on the programs so the teachers are forced to use them in ways that turn students against reading and math (AR and Math Investigations). I’m tired of seeing teachers forced to drink the administration Kool-Aid and tell parents the programs are good and we should be happy our children don’t have to learn like we did. It won’t stop until more speak up.
I think there are more who care than we realize but the efforts to make change are often met with adverse reactions.
LikeLike
The arrogance of frightened public school teachers. Yah, charters (and vouchers). In contrast to most here, I think the foundation allowance is YOURS, not fungible in the adamantine public school system. Oh, but they are “democratic” and a “public institution” like . . . what? The state police? The county road commission? The parks and recreation department? Sure, it USED to be, but after 60 years of progressive ideological indoctrination, they’ve lost their claim to being a public institution. Rather they’ve become an anti-constitutional ghetto. They have forfeited their right to a monopoly on the tax revenues.
And it really does come down to each individual teacher’s intellectual preparation multiplied by hundreds of thousands. The rich are always going to be able to escape. But the middle class and the poor can’t. Thus the charter movement, to give middle class and poor the options rich people have of an education governed by common sense, order, safety, and high expectations.
The reformers have the right arguments, even if their performances fall short. They don’t have to do better than the public schools, just equal to, without an environment polluted by future hoodlums and their victimized girls.
LikeLike
“to give middle class and poor the options rich people have of an education governed by common sense, order, safety, and high expectations”
WRONG Harlan…the rich aren’t flocking to militarized test prep sweatshops or the Obama, Emanuel, Rhee/Huffman, Kopp/Barth children would be attending KIPP and Achievement First.
LikeLike
I’m actually for vouchers and charter schools. I think school administrators need a wake up call. They need parents making choices that depend on what the school is offering. Maybe administrators would start fighting for their teachers, providing curriculum choices and allowing teachers to really teach and use their craft. Administrators should be providing a product the public wants! I don’t believe the teachers are being arrogant in being afraid of charter schools but their administrators are using charters and vouchers as a scare tactic. Teachers are caught in the fire storm in my opinion. They are not the problem it is the government involvement and school administrators who are the problem. Well, our society in general is a problem too because we have a mass of parents who don’t help the situation either. I agree with Linda too that the powers to be don’t even send their children through public institutions, just like they won’t be participating in Obamacare but that’s another subject. In NC I would just like to see that our teachers are respected a bit more for what they do. I know if I were treated as such in my job I would be looking elsewhere to use my talents. We can’t blame the teachers for this mess. It’s much higher up.
LikeLike
TJ
I am a concerned parent in NC and I would love to meet with other teachers and parents who are willing to work toward change. Amanda I am experiencing all of this now and I refuse to be a paretn who sits by quietly. We need more parents to get involve and stop drinking the Kool-Aide. Teaching should be about Autonomy, being creative and encouraging the joy of learning!
LikeLike
I agree with all that has been said above. I moved out of state and I am now in a state where they do care about education. Yes, my taxes are higher but who cares!!! I will not have an ignorant child who does not know how to read or write. It is truly scary what will happen to all these kids who will be totally uneducated. In Forysth county 5,000 children are in home school. What does that tell you about the public education in that county. No one wants to talk about that. The private schools in the same county also are terrible so there is no where to go, but to leave which we did. Good luck to you all!!!
LikeLike
If only the powers that be in North Carolina would listen to you. I am a teacher in North Carolina. This will be my last year (2013-2104). Thank you, thank you, thank you.
LikeLike
Amen, sister! I think the more teachers like you actually take the stand you’re taking and expose the dificiencies of our education system, the better our students will be served! I resigned in 2010 and started what is now a very successful tutoring business. Why? Because I knew the students were not receiving the skills necessary to actually achieve the standards set for them. The teachers are neither supported nor do they have the resources needed to be effective. What’s worse is that they refuse to acknowledge their shortcoming s out of fear of losing a monthly paycheck. Sad. Thank you for standing up and actually putting the needs of students and your family first.
Former 1st Grade Teacher, NC Public Schools
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Dečiji kutak.
LikeLike
Thank you Diane. I was a teacher for 36 years. On the first day of school in 2012 I freaked out handed the keys to my principal and went home. I took sick leave and retired. Thank you for putting into words how I felt. Sincerely. Amy Fier. Catawba county
LikeLike
With every syllable you wrote – I hear you. I’ve lived it. I am NOT good at many areas in life. However, I was an excellent teacher. It was the one area in my life where I knew I was doing it right and doing it well. I had the evidence of it from parents, professional reviews, colleagues and those who meant the most, my students. Then, too many people with the title of ‘administrative’ who had zero or little teaching experience told us how wrong we were doing it. After only eleven years of teaching I left and will not return. It nibbled at me. It chewed at me. It ate me up. You made the right move – and yes, I know what that sounds like. It’s an incredibly sad statement that a teacher who was effective, experienced, and pro-student has left the field of education. Yet I applaud you for doing so. Be well and seek out the woman you used to be – she’ll be back to you very soon!
LikeLike
That’s exactly how I feel right now. New Mexico Education has also fallen. I strongly hate to say this but there is no way in hell my little girl will attend a public school in New Mexico. I hate how they are hurting these kids and even worse the professionals that in many cases are their only hope. Many teachers have left the school district I work in and many others are preparing to change careers. What they once loved to do is no longer allowed, to teach. GREAT JOB PED!!!
LikeLike
We know the frustrations of teachers in NC. Stand with us on November 4 as we protest the lack of appreciation, respect, and compensation shown to educators. Take a personal day or sick day with a sub or call government agencies and express your concerns. Let your voice be heard! Stand up for yourself, teachers, and education in North Carolina.
LikeLike
Why did you pick November 4?
LikeLike
Hopefully…Test Day.????..then again..they are almost everyday in NC..
Quarter Tests…..Pre-Quarter Tests…Pre-Pre-Quarter Tests..
Daily Tests…etc..e.c…etc..
LikeLike
My spouse and I decided the very best teachers will walk out….
They will be able to get another job anywhere.
LikeLike
What % of teachers are expected to walk?
LikeLike
Are you aware that a teacher in NC can not receive the highest rating unless that Teacher teaches other teachers.???
You know those teaches that bore you in the workshops for 5.5 hours of useless Gar…’Bage…
Especially the workshop where they told the teachers to roll around in a chair and never ever stand up…must be eye to eye with student!
Hey J……the Cat is out of the bag…or the Rabbit is out of the Hat!! whatever…
NC = Chaotic Curriculum…..!!!!
The Powers that be on the Hill must know of the harassing principals that lurk outside of doors listening to teachers…then writing them up for not rolling around in a cheap chair in order to teach the students “Eye to Eye”…..
The principals in the very large counties are the most harassing ..
I must say there are principals in NC who do work with their teachers but they are in a minority!!
LikeLike
You’d think that if these kinds of beyond-words-idiotic/moronic/B – S /plain down STUPID ideas (AND THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM FROM THE [clear-throat] EXPERTS)were compiled and published in every newspaper in the country, the normal people who apparently do NOT run this country would finally begin to “get it.”
LikeLike
I’m going to save this for when I have had enough. My question is, is there anywhere for teachers to go?
LikeLike
“Life after Teaching”,…does exist..
Some are getting those online degrees in hopes for better jobs OUT of The Classroom.
Only Problem….Some of those degrees are only Paper Degrees…
LikeLike
This is why we left NC and moved back to CA. They spend less on each student than nearly every other state, try to stamp out each child’s creativity, critical thinking, and imagination then treat the teachers like dirt. I wanted no part of this as my kids started school. What a waste of tax dollars and talented educators.
LikeLike
Which county..
I know of two giant counties with all of the above!!
LikeLike
I taught in Virginia until March of 2013. We are hit by a constant bombardment of test preparation, coaches who only cared about alignment or narrowing of the curriculum to standardized tests, changing SOL numbers and rules and ignorance on the part of the politicians and top level administrators. Things were going for the most part OK until they changed the nature of the tests, made them more difficult for the kids, and the scores went down. Most of my kids were not nearly at the level of reading the tests demanded, but it didn’t matter. Some were not in school for a good part of the semester (out of class suspensions), but in some cases, it didn’t matter. They were tested anyway. When the scores were not what was expected-70% pass rate, my principal called me in. I was considered a top science teacher, but now I was up for needs improvement. I refused to work under those conditions! Within 48 hours, I went down to the Virginia Retirement System and put in for retirement. I left the same day as another math teacher. Now I sleep much better, haven’t had any kind of cold or ailment since I left, and enjoy sculpting prehistoric animals and movie monsters, working out at the gym, and seeing friends and relatives. I have read Diane Ravitch’s book, and my entire teaching career is in that book! The conditions the public schools have to deal with is much worse than I thought. It is horrible how our politicians, business leaders, and “reformers” are so greedy, ill informed, and dictatorial. We no longer live in a democracy, but a totalitarian regime run by big business.
LikeLike
You have Hit the Nail on the Head!!!!!!
LikeLike
This worries me greatly! My twins who are now seniors moved to NC to live w their dad on the basis that they would be getting a better education there than what they could get here in Ohio I have no words other than I’m ashamed I did not dig further into this before agreeing to let them go. Good for you for taking a stand for yourself, family, and for your students!! Ty for putting this out there to help educate us parents also! Good luck where ever you go…I’m sure you will do wonders!!
Sincerely,
Debbie Rudy
LikeLike
A student said to me the next time i went to dollar store to pick her up some tape…a command not a polite requezt….because as teacher it was my “objective”job” to provide for her…..sad
LikeLike
I understand.
A year didn’t go by that some kids wanted to know why I didn’t supply free pencils, paper and tissues to blow noses. My reply was that I didn’t have the money to supply those things to 200 students on an annual basis. If they wanted those supplies, they had to buy them—not me.
LikeLike
It is better with Common core. Students must learn to think and discuss during all lessons. I actually like it
LikeLike
I’ve looked into the Common Core and I have nothing against the concept, but the success of this program means winning over the cooperation of teachers and this will depend on how each one of the more than 14,000 public school districts in America implements the program.
For example, I have a friend and colleague who detests Common Core because his school district decided to micro-manage it and direct the teachers as if they were puppets and the district administrators are pulling the strings leaving the teachers no time for anything else—just a lock-step Common Core program leading to the annual standardized test.
A Forbes headline may have said it best: “Is Common Core Too Hard-Core?”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2013/08/16/is-common-core-too-hard-core/
Finland, with one of the best public education systems in the world, also has a Common Core curriculum, but teachers in Finland are given the respect, responsibility and power [supported by a very strong labor union] on how to implement and teach the Common Core—and any subjects beyond that core that individual teachers have a passion for or their team decides to teach—mostly with great success.
Common Core isn’t supposed to mean that the list on the core is the only subjects teachers should be allowed to teach. It means a core with other subjects and skills being taught beyond the core and those subjects may vary from teacher to teacher and school to school.
But my friend, who teaches in Southern California, says the teachers have been told in his district that they must teach only the Common Core and nothing else to get test scores up. All the lesson plans for the year have already been mapped out and teachers are expected to keep pace on a daily basis.
I have spent years studying the history and current state of public education in America and I have learned that the public schools in America today—regardless of the critics claims—have never been more successful than at any time in the history of this country.
The only room left for improvement is to reach higher levels of success that have never been achieved before. But it would help if the United States implemented a vocational track that would lead to high school graduation as the rest of the developed world does.
LikeLike
Very sensible observation, Lloyd Lofthouse. And reaching that HIGHER level will not be achieved by applying the CCSS to everyone.
LikeLike
I agree with all of you. Its sickening what has happened to a once progressive state such as North Carolina. I recall somebody commenting about the fact that its pretty bad in New York too. See, the root of the problem is charter schools. So many people have been brainwashed and convinced that charter schools are the way to go and the solution. The only “solution” charter schools provide is destruction of teacher unions and the legalization of employing teachers at slave wages for corporate CEOs who could care less about children and are all about the “bottom line.” I am currently working in NC and this will be be not only my first, but also my last year teaching in this state until Patty Duke (McCrory) and his cronies like Bergerchef are vanquished from office.
LikeLike
Remember this, in the private school you will probably be paid less and have less job protection.
What is happening in the public schools is designed to destroy them so the $1 trillion that is spent on public education across America will eventually flow to private schools where there will be no job protection and the teachers do not have to be qualified to teach whatever the private sector wants to teach those kids.
In the private schools, anyone can teach with no qualifications or background check needed.
And there will be no tests to check if the kids are learning. In addition, the private schools do not have to take every student. They can turn students away and take only the best.
LikeLike
Certainly the case: less pay, less protection for teachers, but not necessarily less learning for kids.
LikeLike
Harlan, have you read “Reign of Error” by Diane Ravitch? I recommend this fact filled book.
The facts, once one digs them out as I have done in many of the posts for one of my blogs, points to a truth that the critics of public education don’t want the public to know. Our schools are succeeding as they have never done before.
And evidence now points out that there isn’t much of a gap between the public schools versus charter and private schools. The results do not match the claims of the critics, because the critics cherry pick their facts and misrepresent the reality of this issue.
The private sector critics have a goal—to get their grubby, greedy hands on the trillion dollars the US spends annually on the public schools.
LikeLike
Thanks, Lloyd. I haven’t read Diane’s book yet. My interest is more in the theory behind government semi-monopolies on education. The main defense of public schools are that they are schools of democracy, not that they are successful in providing intellectual training and job education. I find it very difficult to reconcile that argument with the extent to which the general populace has supported President Obama and his program. If the youth of the country had been properly education, the demagoguery President Obama practiced in both his campaigns (and DeBlasio recently in NYC) could not have succeeded. Thus I must conclude that American public schools are failing in the primary mission progressives have assigned to them. I suspect that you do not accept my premises, but if you did, I don’t see how you could disagree with my conclusion.
LikeLike
Harlan,
Read her book before you come to a conclusion that because the public voted Obama into office, the public schools are failing. Before I reach Ravitch’s book, I already knew enough about what was going on that the campaign against the public schools has been going on for years to paint the schools as failures.
To do this the critics of public education in America cherry pick the facts they present to the public in a constant barrage of propaganda, misinformation and lies.
If you actual took the time to research the history and growth of public education in the United States from 1900 to 2013, you would discover that the graduation rate from high school for teens age 17/18 went from about 3% to almost 80% at high school graduation in 2012. Go back to the 1960s and you would discover that the graduation rate was about 60%
In fact, you can track it from 1968 on this chart and see that there has been a steady gain for every category listed and no decline. The reason that there is still a gap between white, black and Hispanic is because as the minority graduation rates have improved so have the whites. But you won’t hear any of this from the critics of public education because their agenda is aimed at the profits to be had from the trillion dollars spent on public education in the United states and/or the power to control the content of what is taught to children so their minds can be molded to libertarian ideals or fundamentalist Christan ideals or neoconservative ideals, etc.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2900934/figure/F1/
And this is only a sample of the evidence that proves public education in the United States is not failing. How can something fail when it has had steady improvement for more than a century?
The next chart shows high school graduation rates from 1870.
Click to access 05-03-2201.pdf
On June 6, 2013, The Atlantic ran this headline: “High School Graduation Rate Hits 40-Year Peak in the U.S.” Actually that is a historical high that has never been achieved before in the history of this country. And just in-case you trot out the old and wrong use of automatic social promotion to an assembly line graduation, think again. Back in the 1980s, competency exams were included toward high school graduation where students and to prove on an exam that they met a state by state set competency level to graduate. Texas had one of the lowest competency levels. California the highest.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/high-school-graduation-rate-hits-40-year-peak-in-the-us/276604/
In addition, those who do not graduate from high school on time—which means age 17 or 18—-go on to earn an equivalent degree form night classes, community colleges or take a GED test. When that high school graduation rate is factored in, it reached 87.65% in 2012 age 25 and over. The reason why these people did not graduate on time usually has to do with a dysfunctional home environment or poverty—not incompetent teachers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States
LikeLike
I, too, had to make the decision to step away from teaching. I however would NOT say I quit. I have done what I preached daily to all of my students….I made the best decision for my life/family at the time! My students inspire me to this day with messages of how something I said inspires them to be better in their lives! Saying “I Quit” and “I Can’t” was never allowed in my class, and that meant from me either. I feel your frustration, but I am offended by the message.
http://ojlowe.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/the-day-my-students-refused-my-apology/
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Along The Way and commented:
It’s sad when this becomes the state of our education system
LikeLike
As a parent with 3 children that spends a ton of time at her children’s schools and is very good friends with one of my children’s ex teachers, I commend you. All the tests and meetings and “support” teachers get. I truly don’t see how you guys and gals do it.
LikeLike
In the fall of 1999, after 4 years of teaching and feeling underappreciated, I resigned from teaching. That lasted all of 2 1/2 months. I returned with a renewed zeal and zest for learning. Although I still have that inherent love of learning, I echo the concerns of Mr. Nielsen. As a veteran teacher, I look forward to two things – September when I receive my longevity check and July of 2025 when I can retire.
It’s unfortunate but true. My reward for earning a Master’s and National Board Certification is to be given larger classes, more responsibilities outside the realm of teaching, and to be made to watch classes when other teachers are out because I know how to “control the students”.
Consequently, it is for this reason that I am biding my time until 2025. Until then, I will continue to tolerate the system. I, too, see myself as part of the problem. I am tired…too tired to complain and to tired to stand up for what I know is right.
LikeLike
The government requires these standardized tests so that they can make sure that your kids are being dumbed down to their liking. People with money and power only want more money and power. The way to ensure that they keep the power they have and even get more is to make the upcoming generation safe. In this I mean that they are making sure that your kids will not grow up to be the next Einstein. This ensures that their money and power will be safe because they can keep your kids from thinking for themselves.
When slavery was still around, how do you think the white men kept the hundreds of slaves they had working? They dumbed them down to the point where they were scared to try to overturn their “masters”. The best weapon a man has is his own mind. When you take away his want and ability to learn, he is a “slave” to others. This world has become a terrible place with many terrible people. Teach your kids to learn how to think for themselves, not what someone else wants them to think. This is the best gift you could ever give them.
LikeLike
You put into words my feelings when I quit 23 years ago, I’m very sorry it has not changed. Be it FL (where I was), or NC where you are, it is a system that has crashed and burned, and yet no one in charge sees it.
Best of luck to you, enjoy your new life and lack of stress. I honor your courage and wish we had known one another 23 years ago because only my husband “got’ my decision.
LikeLike
“no one in charge sees it.”
Sad to say, they know exactly what they are doing. The people in charge are the ones responsible for the crash and burn because the goal of these people is to destroy the public education system and turn over control—and the one trillion dollars in annual taxes that funds public education—to the private sector making Wall Street and corporations richer while improving nothing.
In fact, the evidence so far indicates that the move to privatization ends up with schools that perform worse—on average—while the steady progress to improve in the public schools is ignored.
Both G. W. Bush and Obama signed legislation that would make it impossible for the public schools to succeed—something no country on earth throughout history has ever achieved, and that is 100% success in every academic area with every child in America reading at grade level and then going on to college.
And when the public schools fail due to these impossible demands that were included in the law, public schools are closed—even if they have been improving for years—and the highly trained teachers are fired along with their administrators.
Then the 21st century carpetbaggers move in and take over with no oversight on how they spend the taxpayers money and no laws that hold them accountable to meet the same goals the public schools have been forced to achieve for decades.
The people who don’t know what is going on is a growing segment of the population that isn’t in education or part of the plot to destroy public education.
In the early 1980s I suspected something like this was going on. The policies that were being forced on teachers and the public schools were insane and made no sense. Ever the decades I saw more and more responsibility heaped on the backs of teachers while taking away any power the teachers had to actually achieve those next to impossible demands.
I even thought that maybe there was a plot to destroy the public schools but dismissed that because it seemed too far fetched.
Now, after having almost finished Ravitch’s book, I know that my original hunch back in the 1980s was right. Insane, power hungry, greedy very rich and powerful people are making this happen. I just didn’t know all the details until now.
What’s happening in the public schools is deliberate. Some of the movers behind this destruction may be ignorant and unaware that they are contributing to the destruction but a few billionaires know exactly what they have been doing for more than thirty years as they waged war to achieve their political and religious agendas on a country where most of the people did not agree with them.
So what did they eventually do? They found a way to bypass the people and ram these policies through the school, shut them down and then replace them with mostly failing private sector schools paid for by the public’s tax money.
LikeLike
“What’s happening in the public schools is deliberate. ”
It has been deliberate since it was established and mandated by the
Government.
For the life of me, I don’t understand how so many people “Think”
Public Education was established to dilute or share power.
Public Education primarily serves as the Public Relations “Arm” of
the Government.
Gasp, would any Government use Propaganda to faciltate the
power structure of the elite?
Would a Government stoop so low as to offer a prepackaged
version of political reality containing cherished myths or invented
traditions?
Would a Government indoctrinate and demand obedience and
passivity from the “Kiddies” as soon as possible?
Would a Government concoct an organization to serve the
interests of the Elite, by selling illusury “Salvation” based on
a culture that ties Education to superiority and less educated
as defective and therefore less entitled to resources?
“public education in the United States is not failing. How can something fail when it has had steady improvement for more than a century?”
The ELITE would agree!
LikeLike
Oh my goodness, “NoBrick” what subversive words you speak.
LikeLike
I think NO BRICK may work for the private sector money people behind the movement to destroy the public schools.
I taught for thirty years in the public schools [1975 – 2005] and I never knew any teachers who worked as a PR person for the feds. There about 3.5 million teachers in this country and I doubt that any of them were PR people for the FEDS. They are highly educated individuals who come from all walks of life.
Some teachers are conservatives and some are liberals and many are moderates. In fact, most of the teachers in the history department at the high school where I taught were Republicans and conservative. Science teachers were mostly conservative too but in the English department you would have found more Democrats but most were moderate democrats and not far left liberals.
I taught English and that meant grammar, spelling, writing, reading literature, poetry, etc. There was no curriculum to brainwash kids to think the federal government was wonderful. My kids read Steinbeck and Shakespeare and Steinbeck was no lover of government or corporate America. No way can a kid reading and learning the themes behind Rome and Juliet have been brainwashed to be a federal government stooge.
The textbooks had no material that focused don how great the federal government was. The material focused on teaching the kids the meaning of the work they were reading and that led to critical thinking and problem solving and had nothing to do with becoming a brick in the wall for the US federal government.
However, when we turn our kids over to corporate America to teach, you can be sure they will become another brick holding up Wal-Mart or another evangelical fundamental Christian who believes the earth is 6,000 years old and started with Adam and Eve instead of 600,000,000 years ago when the first life crawled out of the oceans and adapted to live on the land after the earth had already been around for four billion years.
In all of my teacher training workshops—that never ended for thirty years—not once did anyone tells us or give us material that would have led to kids becoming a bric-in-the-wall for the feds or even state governments. Every workshop focused on ways to teach kids to think critically; how to solve problems and also how to work in teams with others.
tarting in the 90s, pressure from corporate America and the feds forced the public schools to focus on getting kids ready to take a multiple choice test and took away time to work on critical thinking and problem solving but even those tests do nothing that would turn a kid into another brick in the wall that I”m sure you are for some corproa6tion or religious group.
In fact, I recall that this movement to judge public schools from the results of multiple choice tests started after a former US President [about thirty years ago] sat down with about 30 of the biggest and wealthiest CEO’s from the private sector to find out what could be done to fix public education to make sure kids would come out of school ready to work for one of these companies.
So if today’s schools are doing anything, they are being forced to get kids ready to have the skills to fill private sector jobs where there are shortages of skilled people. That was where this movement against the public school all started.
LikeLike
A fascinating defense of the integrity of public education and its success in teaching “critical thinking.” Yet I continue to want to hear explained how a majority of the country could be fooled by Obama, the magnitude of whose incompetence is becoming daily clearer and clearer and still have been through an education which produced the mindlessness which elected him. Literally almost, mindlessness. He was never properly evaluated by those who supported him. He is still supported in spite of the concatenating instinces of error and intellectual and perhaps even venal corruption. How can it happen that a great country, with a superior public school system, which Diane says is the foundation of democratic government, can have fielded an electorate so naive, ignorant, and/or corrupt as to have not seen through him. He must appeal to something deep within their souls that either has nothing to do with education or which has been profoundly miseducated. The constitution was written to defend the populace from whatever that crime of the soul is, but it has been abraded over at least 100 years so badly that it no longer protects the people from human nature and itself. It is too easy to blame the debacle through which we are living on corporate greed. How does the soul of a whole people get so corrupted? We must ask of ourselves the same question any observer must ask of Germany: How did Hitler come to power and function with the support of the whole society. To what irrational and atavistic part of individuals did he appeal? How did he bring out the worst in humanity, even as Obama is now bringing out the worst in the body politic. It may not be caused by the public school system, but it has certainly not been prevented.
LikeLike
Oh my goodness, Harlan Underhill what subversive words you speak.
The O’bomer thing is easy…Remember “Rope A Dope” ?
HOPE a Dope works too.
BTW, I don’t work for the private sector money people behind the movement to destroy the public schools.
Self congratulatatory tribalism may sound good to the tribe.
Singing to the choir is nice too.
Public Education has the best interests of the “People” in mind.
Once you realize WHO these people are, you understand the
function of Public Education.
Drum roll….This is a Government of the People, for the People,
and by the People. Hint (Money is free speech)
LikeLike
Harlan Underhill,
The public education system is not responsible for what people believe as adults. The role of public education does not include brainwashing people to think one way or the other [politically or religious] and kids are often exposed to both sides of the political spectrum because teachers come in conservative and liberal colors.
But the curriculum and the state standards to do not support any religious or political party. Only a hard core liberal or conservative would dare to lecture what they believe about politics or religion. In the school where I taught, that would be dangerous because teachers teach kids that come from both conservative and liberal families and from many different religions. For a teacher to start preaching what one believes in a classroom can stir up a storm of protests from parents when kids get home. Most kids get their political beliefs at home and not from teachers.
Graduation from high school doesn’t mean that everyone is a genius who critically thinks at a high level. Graduation means the person met the basic requirements to graduate that includes a competency exam to prove the child reads at whatever level of reading each state sets. In California, we were told that competency was set at 9th gradelevel and that was one of the highest in the country while in Texas it was set at 4th grade and was one of the lowest in the country—G. W. Bush was governor of Texas at the time and that boosted the high school graduation rate making Texas look more successful than most states.
In fact, the love and habit of reading is mostly learned in the home before a child starts school. Studies show that 80% of children who leave high school and do not go to college never read a book again.
Studies show that children who come from poverty usually have a vocabulary of 3,000 words, on average, when they start school but a child who comes from a middle class home has a vocabulary of 20,000 words. Kids from poverty seldom catch up because everyday when they go home they go home to a house where there are usually no books, no magazines, no newspaper and no one reads. For millions of children who are Latino/Hispanic, that also means no one at home who is an adult speaks English and many of the parents in those homes are also illiterate in their home language.
What’s interesting about the 2008 presidential election is that the top most educated states voted in a block for Obama and a block of the least educated states voted for McCain.
In almost every election the choice is to vote for the lesser evil because there is no perfect candidate.
Then of course for everyone who votes we have Project Vote Smart that was founded by a coalition of former US presidents from both major political parties to offer an unbiased site that only reports facts and not biased opinions.
Even I turn to vote smart to untangle the mess of facts that come from both sides that throw out false claims and misinformation as if it where rice at a wedding—that often confuses the public during an election.
http://votesmart.org/
If like Finland, almost every child in America came to school at age seven when they start there and they were already reading at grade level and were close to each other then few kids few kids would fall behind here. But that’s not how it works in a country with the third biggest population in the world with a large ratio of the population living in poverty and coming from homes where the parents do not value reading. In Finland, almost every parent starts teaching children to read at the age of three at home and by age seven, they have been reading for four years. But in the US, at least a third of the kids show up and never even held a book in their hands.
LikeLike
Harlan,
You are changing the subject. The topic of this post and this comment tread is not about President Obama being incompetent or not and I’m not going to argue with you.
No President is perfect and no president is totally responsible for the success or failure of his policies because without support of the Congress there is no way for a president to achieve anything. If you want to debate Obama, you can find plenty of websites that focus on him as a subject. In fact, I’ve mentioned him in a few posts on my blogs.
Now, back to the topic of public education in the United States.
Every developed country and every developing country has a public education system. Finland’s public education system—considered one of the best in the world—works and 99% of the teachers belong to a strong union but unlike the U.S. instead of demonizing teachers; attacking the public schools and the teacher unions, in Finland teachers are supported by the parents and respected. And teachers are in charge of what and how they teach—something seriously missing in the US—and receive support from the Finish government.
Singapore also has one of the highest ranked public school systems in the world but is dramatically different than Finland’s public schools. In Singapore there is corporal punishment using a bamboo cane to deliver the public punishment in front of each school’s entire student body. In Singapore the teachers are also supported by parents and teaching is a highly respected profession just like it is in Finland. But in Singapore the schools track students and students must compete to earn a seat in the higher tracks.
Education works when parents support teachers and there are no witch hunts to find scapegoats for cultural problems. In the US, the Koch brothers; the Walton family; Bloomberg; Gates Foundation, and more billionaires are funding an all-out war of lies and misinformation to destroy the public schools and turn them and the more than one trillion dollars that pays for them over to the private sector to boost profits in the corporations of the public schools enemies. These billionaires are not interested in supporting the public schools or they would be doing what Finland and Singapore are doing for their public schools—supporting them and offering resources to teachers and public schools to succeed.
LikeLike
If you don’t see the relevance, you don’t Lloyd, but your inability to see the real Obama is symptomatic of the mindset that attacks Koch and Gates instead of looking within for answers to why the public schools are slowly being defunded. Singapore and Finland are too small to be relevant to a country this size. Public school teachers whine but do not see that they are their own worst enemies politically. It is a true pity, because in general the public schools do a good job and are filled with dedicated teachers. But neither you, nor Diane have seen the real sickness of soul of this country and even less so have identified that you are the carriers of the disease, but choose to call it external victimization of you rather than an internal misorientation to life itself. WHAT IF Gates and the Kochs and the Waltons really are only trying to improve the schools? Even if they are out to destroy them, can you imagine why they would want to? Is it because they are evil? It’s just your liberal puritanism looking for witches when the real problem is in the minds of the pious residents of Salem, i.e. yourself and Diane.
LikeLike
Harlan Underhill.
Once again, the topic of this post is education—not President Obama. The movement against public education has been going on for decades. When it started, Obama was in his twenties and not even out of college. And as President, he has only joined the fray with his flawed educational program that is a continuation of President G. W. Bush’s flawed and punitive no Child Left Behind.
Testing kids and judging teachers by the results of those tests is wrong, totally wrong!
LikeLike
On THAT you and I can totally agree. But you are ignoring that the public school systems of the country are making love to those tests as if they were teen agers in the back of a car at a drive in. How do you explain THAT, Mr. Lofthouse?
LikeLike
Harlan asked, “But you are ignoring that the public school systems of the country are making love to those tests as if they were teen agers in the back of a car at a drive in. How do you explain THAT, Mr. Lofthouse?”
Where are you forming your opinions? Let me guess, Rush Limbaugh; Glenn Beck or some other ignorant fool that knows little or nothing about what goes on in the public schools.
Harlan. The tests you refer to were mandated by misguided elected officials at the state and federal level. This has been going on for decades.
And administrators have no job protection and can be fired for any reason or even for no reason. When the state or federal government directs the schools to give a test, the district will do as it is told or the state and/or federal government will withhold millions from that school district.
And when those administrators order teachers to teach to the test and a teacher refuses, he can be fired for insubordination and refusing to follow orders. There is no job protection for refusing to do what the contract and the law says you have to do.
In fact, if a district rebelled, the state could fire all the administrators and assign new ones to take over. Then they could fire all the teachers and start hiring again. This has happened in a few districts and those districts just got worse because they dumped all the people who knew the kids best and how to manage and control them.
LikeLike
An addendum: The topic of the post IS education, but trying to limit discussion to education without taking into account the cultural mind set that brought Obama to power is tunnel vision. Obama is, for me, mainly a metaphor for what’s going on in education, but we must remember that it is his education department that is directly causing the damage, even as it is his legislation, know popularly as ObamaCare, that is even more massively causing damage economically and perhaps directly to health care outcomes. Why do you feel you need to restrict the light we are shining on the political disaster we are living in to just education? Do you think you can still be a Democrat and support Obama and at the same time animadvert against what is going on in public education? What you legitimately object to in education is what Obama directly wants. It’s like claiming to be a Christian and worshipping Satan at the same time. It requires a very high tolerance of internal contradiction. Emerson was certainly wrong in claiming that consistency was the hobgoblin of small minds. Consistency, i.e. lack of self contradiction, is what is called integrity. If you are against slavery in education you should be against slavery in every other area of life, yet you seem not to be. You seem to embrace the slavery of Obamaism except in education. True?
LikeLike
NoBrick
You say, Public Education has the best interests of the “People” in mind.
I disagree. Public Education should have the best interests of the country in mind. That means its economy and its survival and if the country’s economy is healthy and the country is safe from its enemies, then the people will benefit. And in the US today, the private sector economy is booming. All through the recession, the stock market climbed and corporations were making huge profits. The federal national debt is a government debt and does not impact the financial health of corporations that are making huge amounts of money. The reason employment is down is because many of these corporations are turning to automation to replace workers.
And are the schools doing the job? All one has to do is look at the innovations coming out of the United States for that answer. The answer is YES!!!
The U.S. military is the most powerful and most advanced military in the world. In addition, medical breakthroughs are happening all the Time.
The Global Innovation Index lists the US as one of the five most-innovative nations in the world.
http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/content.aspx?page=gii-full-report-2013
US colleges and universities are ranked highest in the world. No other country in the world even comes close to the quality of US colleges.
You think the US public schools are failing, but you are wrong. Explain the college graduation rates the US. This year, 50.1 million students are attending the public schools. And in the fall of 2013, a record 21.8 million students [43.5%] were expected to attend American colleges and universities, an increase of about 6.5 million since fall of 2000. Nearly 7.5 million students will attend public 2-year colleges.
During the 2013–14 school year, colleges and universities are expected to award 943,000 associate’s degrees; 1.8 million bachelor’s degrees; 778,000 master’s degrees; and 177,000 doctor’s degrees. In fact, The Atlantic published a piece that says, “America May Have Too Many College Graduates”
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/america-may-have-too-many-college-graduates/261454/
To get into college, one has to quality and to graduate one has to be able to do the work and get the grades. Who got these college students ready? America’s public school teachers supported by their unions.
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
And our daughter—who is now in her fourth year at Stanford—is a product of the public schools. What made the difference? She had two supportive parents who turned off the TV and offered her books to read to read instead. Her parents, us, did not buy her video games or a cell phone she could spend hours on each day texting. Teachers have no control over the TV in the homes of their students. It is impossible for one teacher to supervise 200 studies at home each night and on the weekends to make sure they do their reading, study and do homework.
LikeLike
Lloyd,
You might suggest to “Nobrick” and others who falsely say that public education is failing to read my latest book, Reign of Error. It documents the facts that: 1) test scores are the highest in history for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians; 2) graduation rates are the highest in history for the same groups; 3) dropout rates are the lowest in history for the same groups.
The “crisis” narrative is used to pave the way to replace public education with entrepreneurial opportunities.
Diane
LikeLike
I know. I’m aware of this. I was aware of it before I read your book and I’ve written about some of the successes of public education on my blog.
But before I read your book, I didn’t see the whole picture and how well organized the critics were in their goal to rape public education. Lost sleep over that section of the book.
My review of your book is coming soon. Almost done reading.
I also have to finish the revisions and editing of my memoir, “Crazy is Normal, a classroom expose”. This memoir will support your book that teachers are working hard to overcome the challenges they face that walk in the classroom door daily. And as your book has well documented, the public schools are winning that war but slowly generation by generation. Changes of this magnitude do not happen overnight as NCLB and Obama’s worse policy demand. Instant gratification seems to be driving America
Educating poverty out of the population will take an effort that will stretch far beyond our lives. I was pleased to see that all of your suggested remedies in your book fit exactly what I’ve been thinking and saying for decades.
Thank you for shining a light on this issue. Now we have to rally the troops and fight back. I’m going to try and recruit my wife to be part of that war to save public education. My wife is Anchee Min and our daughter is product of public education and Lauryann is in her fourth year at Stanford. Both my wife and daughter spent some time with me in my classroom when I was still teaching and they were both shocked at how difficult it was to get most of the kids to cooperate. Without cooperation from the children and their parents, it is very difficult to teach them anything.
And as you say, poverty is a big factor in this challenge.
LikeLike
Not to dispute that graduation rates are the highest ever, dropout rates the lowest, and test scores the highest, I must point out the following. Graduation rates are the highest because graduating with social promotion and grade inflation makes it the easiest it has ever been. Dropout rates are the lowest because of similar reasons and huge amounts of money spent on dropout prevention, again while dropping the standards of the diploma obtained.
But most importantly, test scores being the highest does not correlate well with educational achievement outside the tests. Just ask college professors and employers. Most colleges have had to reduce what is asked of students in class because of their reduced skill sets. Anecdotally, I recently learned of one professor that has had to go back to volunteers to read aloud because simply proceeding seat by seat showed that the skill was not available to all students. I was initially surprised until i realized that reading aloud is not part of standardized tests and so would not be practiced in most public schools. Broader examples of skills disappearing currently or already relinquished, basic arithmetical calculations (died with overuse of calculators), spelling (died with overuse of spell checking), and ability to manually make change (died with computational registers).
In North Carolina pay is attached to quantifiable, easily produced numbers like test scores for teachers (despite the fact that without pretesting AND post-testing no such evaluation is legitimate) and dropout rates for principals (hence their reluctance to expel even the most dangerous students). There also is rampant misuse of studies that may be legitimate within the proper framework but are taken out of context consistently by administrators. For example, the selfsame study that shows tracking reduces performance in the lower track(s) also shows that not tracking reduces the performance of those who would have been in the higher track(s). The real message of that study, along with the necessary followup study would show that the data proves that tracking should be implemented with the proviso that each level has the highest appropriate expectations.
BTW, there are any number of studies that prove, by implication, social promotion undercuts educational performance. Relegating students to classes where they fall ever-farther behind is a horrific example of the Peter Principle applied in education. It is both unfair, and unwise, to claim that all criticism of public education is done with the agenda of privatizing it. I would argue the data points instead to fixing what is broken by returning within reason to those approaches from the past that worked better. Combined with the new approaches made possible by proper implementation of the avalanche of new knowledge about how learning occurs we should have public education that produces genuinely, across the board, better results.
LikeLike
George Privacy, you argue the case well.
LikeLike
You guys are too funny, falsely claiming that I said or think Public Education was failing.
“You think the US public schools are failing, but you are wrong.” LL
“You might suggest to “Nobrick” and others who falsely say that public education is failing to read my latest book, Reign of Error.” DR
Public Education functions as intended.
It serves the interests of the Elite , by selling illusury “Salvation” based on a culture that ties Education to superiority and less educated as
being defective and therefore less entitled to resources.
Next LL, you verify two of my observations with your PR campaign
of Exceptionalism and how swell you are as a parent.
1)Public Education primarily serves as the Public Relations “Arm” of
the Government.
2) Self congratulatatory tribalism may sound good to the tribe.
Singing to the choir is nice too.
Funny too, is your out of context: “NoBrick
You say, Public Education has the best interests of the “People” in mind.”
Try the whole equation:
1)Public Education has the best interests of the “People” in mind.
2)Once you realize WHO these people are, you understand the
function of Public Education.
3)Drum roll….This is a Government of the People, for the People,
and by the People. Hint (Money is free speech)
Was my Hint (Money is free speech) too cryptic for you?
How’s this? This is a Government of Money, for Money, and by
Money.
Holy “Paint yourself into a corner” Batman.
The daily dose of the Demon Reformers setting out to make money
at the expense of the Children through Abusive Testing.
The Demons care not for the children, the Demons only care about
the money.
Educators set themselves apart from the Demons. They command
the Moral highground, the “Right”, to do the “Right Thing”,
“And administrators have no job protection and can be fired for any reason or even for no reason. When the state or federal government directs the schools to give a test, the district will do as it is told or the state and/or federal government will withhold millions from that school district.
And when those administrators order teachers to teach to the test and a teacher refuses, he can be fired for insubordination and refusing to follow orders. There is no job protection for refusing to do what the contract and the law says you have to do.”
Any way you cut it, for the Money is for the Money, be it Demons
or “Educators”.
The Abusive Testing is NOTHING untill it is given.
LikeLike
No Brick,
Interesting but confusing rant. I have no clear idea what point you were trying to make. I think you were saying that the testing mania is backed by big money and that the teachers are not to blame, but I’m not sure. You ramble.
Politically, are you [check all that apply]:
A: Democrat
B. Republican
C. Libertarian
D. Moderate
E. conservative
F. Progressive
G. liberal
H. fundamentalist, evangelical Christian
I. None of the above
I suspect you may be a libertarian and that’s why you use No Brick as your anonymous name.
The Walton family (with conservative political leanings) is one of the biggest movers behind destroying public education in America: Jack Walton said, “Our family has come to the conclusion that there is no other single area of activity that would have the breadth of impact that improving K-through-12 education in America would have. It would have a positive impact on every single societal challenge that we face, from crime to productivity to economic health and growth, to true equality.”
John is the family’s social reformer, leading the Waltons’ effort to transform education.
John Walton said, “We had been talking about problems in elementary education as a family for a long time, going back to when A Nation at Risk was published,” says John, referring to the watershed 1983 report that gave a scathing review of K-12 education. “Dad was very interested in this area, too…. So we began to look at K-12 actually while he was still alive.”
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/11/15/8191093/
The Koch brothers are also among those who would destroy public education in America, and the Koch brothers are known libertarians. The Koch brothers support primarily Republican candidates, who received over 80% of their political donations.
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry – especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. … Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a ‘kingpin of climate science denial.’ The report purported to show that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outspent ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies – from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program – that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the “Kochtopus.”
Then there is Rupert Murdock who owns and controls the second largest media empire in the World and Murdock is a known neoconservative.
These are only three examples of rich individuals who use their wealth and the influence that wealth buys to challenge and force change in the public schools in the United States to strip democracy from public education and move it to the private sector.
Before the war on public education started in the 1980s, public schools in the United States reflected the states and communities where they exist. Each state had its own agenda and state curriculum based on the majority of voters in each state. Each school district in each state also had some flexibility to mold the schools in that community to fit the beliefs and the will of the majority of active voters in those school districts.
For well over a century, the public schools in America were run by democratically elected school boards that reflect the majority of voters in each community. Those elected representatives then guided the administrators who were mandated to run each school district according to the law of the state and the wishes of a majority of each school board.
Because of the structure of public education in America, each school district may be very different from one a few hundred miles away in another state or even a different city.
The US has the third largest population in the world behind China and India, and there are about 99,000 public schools in the United States divided between 13,600 public school districts each with its own democratically elected school board.
Until the federal government started to implement control from Washington DC under President G. W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” followed by President Obama’s worse and more punitive “Race to the Top”, those 13,600 school districts reflected the unique qualities of each community that they served–communities that elected the school boards through the democratic process.
There are 30,900 private schools in the US but they usually have much smaller class sizes. There are also 5,300 charter schools using tax payer money to operate.
The public schools educate 50.1 million children. The private schools 5.2 million. Forty-three percent will go to college after high school graduation. And currently, by age 24, 90% of adults have earned high school degrees. about 15% don’t graduate on time and finish in adult school or by taking classes in local community colleges.
The public schools in America have never been controlled by the federal government.
But now, we have a few billionaires with different conservative political and/or religious agendas attempting to change all that and it is obvious that they have no respect for what the majority of the American people want–the voters who elect the democratic school boards of 13,600 school districts.
To learn more, I suggest you read Diane Ravitch’s “Reign of Error”. She covers all of this and much more and then concludes her work with wise suggestions of what America should consider to improve the public schools that are NOT BROKEN and are still not controlled by any one man, family or small group as it is obvious the Waltons, the Koch brothers and Murdock have set as their goal.
A few super wealthy Americans think they know what’s best for the rest of us. If the rest of us do not educate ourselves by reading books such as Ravitch’s “reign of Error”, and then use that knowledge to fight back to hold onto the control of our public schools, these wealthy meddlers in the American way may live long enough to succeed or maybe their children or the grandchildren of these billionaires will take over the country and run it from their corporate offices.
LikeLike
But climate change is a hoax. How does it count against the Kochs they want to expose the bad science behind the anti capitalist program of the IOOC?
LikeLike
Harlan,
This post and this comment tread are not about climate change. It’s about the public education in the US and the people who are out to destroy it when it isn’t broken and never has been broken.
But thank you for bringing it up, because now we know who influences your thinking and opinions. The Koch family along with the Waltons; Bill Gates and especially Murdock have all created and/or paid for well-oiled media PR machines that pump out an endless assembly line of propaganda that supports their individual thinking and opinions. If they believe the schools are broken, they are going to make sure everyone believes the schools are broken.
No wonder you think the way you do. And when these guys have totally brainwashed an individual to believe the opinionated and often unproven garbage they are churning out, those individuals distrust anyone else no matter where the facts come from.
But if you were to read Ravitch’s book, Reign of Error, you would see the she has carefully footnoted every claim she makes The book has an extensive chapter index. And I admit that even with that index I might be skeptical if I relied on the conservative media machine behind the lies and deceit that conservatives like the above mentioned billionaires are funding was the only source I relied on.
You know, until recently, I never gave much thought to my being born into and growing up in poverty. That was my life. I grew up in it. I didn’t know any other world. I never planned to join the Marines after barely graduating from high school and then later go to college as a way to escape that world.
It was never planned.
It happened almost by accident. One could say the Marines made a huge difference in my life. I certainly think so. But it was this conversation that made me wake up recently, and I called my sister and asked her if we had lived in poverty, and she replied, “Oh yes, we were very poor. Mother was on food stamps. Dad was often unemployed and drunk. I still don’t know why mother stayed with him. When he was drinking, he was a horrible person.”
LikeLike
You are totally stereotyping and stigmatizing me. You keep saying this blog is only about education to invalidate my extension of my analysis to the culture in general. I do agree with you, however, that I must finish Diane’s book so I know whether she has adequately established her claims. From your stories and tone, you seem like a really great guy, an ideal teacher, colleague, and person, but I do encourage you to poke your head UP out of the liberal sand, and like a meerkat, really look around you at what is happening in this country and why. We know which side you are on, but whether that “side” has sound philosophy behind it, i.e. a framework to understand the facts and events we are seeing, remains to be seen. To save the public schools we have to know a lot more than what “side” we are on. We have to know economics, we have to have a view of the human person and know what it means to be fully human. These are not mere givens, mere obvious facts. Reality has a way of biting everyone in the butt if we do not understand it. I really like you, but I don’t think your view of society is complete.
LikeLike
Harlan,
You claim I’m stereotyping you and then you stereotype me by assuming that my thinking has been influenced by liberals by saying I need to stick my head out of the so-called liberal sand.
On the contrary, I question everything and then I seek the facts as close to the primary source as possible and then make up my mind. I also apply my life experience to what I learn form those facts and then I think for myself.
Unlike Rush Limbaugh’s ditto heads—as he calls them when he tells his fans they don’t have to worry about thinking because he will do their thinking for them—I think for myself and question everything I hear or read.
Why is it that conservative critics of any kind always resort to calling anyone that disagrees with them a liberal or someone who has been brainwashed by the liberal media, etc?
That’s easy to answer, because they heard their favorite conservative use the same tactics to blow away an argument that doesn’t fall into line with a political and/’or religions agenda of any kind.
In fact, when I want to know where a candidate stands and how close that candidate is to thinking, I turn to Project Vote Smart and study their voting record and not their speeches. Anyone who believes what a politician says while stumping for votes is a fool.
http://votesmart.org/candidate/political-courage-test/102026/randy-weber/#.UpEx38Rth2o
And talking about tests, I did take an online test once that was designed to discover where one stands on issues and I came up right of center on the conservative side of political map—a moderate leaning conservative—but I wasn’t close to the far right and a long ways from the far left.
I just went looking for a few of those tests on-line and here are the links. You may be interested to see where you stand on the issues. Of course, all tests are only as good as their questions and all tests are subject to error. :o) Which is why teachers should not be judged by the annual standardized tests students take.
http://www.people-press.org/typology/quiz/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/vote2012/quiz/
http://www.selectsmart.com/FREE/select.php?client=no
http://www.gotoquiz.com/what_is_your_political_ideology
http://www.politicalcompass.org/test
Think about this. When Nixon, a Republican, was president, on his agenda was a national health program. Back when Nixon was president, conservatives were more like Democrats are today and today’s Republicans have moved to the extreme right.
And President Clinton, a Democrat, dramatically reformed welfare in the United States. Americans on the far left complained about what he did but most moderates and conservative applauded him at the time and supported him.
“The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is a United States federal law considered to be a fundamental shift in both the method and goal of federal cash assistance to the poor. The bill added a workforce development component to welfare legislation, encouraging employment among the poor. The bill was a cornerstone of the Republican Contract with America and was introduced by Rep. E. Clay Shaw, Jr. (R-FL-22). Bill Clinton signed PRWORA into law on August 22, 1996, fulfilling his 1992 campaign promise to “end welfare as we have come to know it”.”
The bill’s primary requirements and effects included the following:
Ending welfare as an entitlement program;
Requiring recipients to begin working after two years of receiving benefits;
Placing a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by federal funds;
Aiming to encourage two-parent families and discouraging out-of-wedlock births;
Enhancing enforcement of child support; and
When you throw out comments like I need to know what’s really going on in America why don’t you get specific and list what that is with links to primary sources. Where are the facts that prove America’s public schools are failing?
And do you know the difference between a primary and secondary source?
LikeLike
The problem is that they are using “testing” rather than TRUSTING a professional teacher’s “assessment” of whether or not an individual student is doing as well as he is personally capable.
My school record was covered with “comments” like “good potential but doesn’t apply himself” and “needs self-discipline”.
“Opinions” yes, but CORRECT observations. Once I accepted them as valid, my grades and “test scores” improved.
The measure of education is not WHAT you know but the skills and maturity you acquired in learning it. :-<
LikeLike
Public schools especially high schools are nothing more than controlled babysitting for the sake of busy parents and communities that just don’t want to invest in humans. I, like many others, fell for the “feel good” visions of personal sacrifice to make a difference in the lives of others by sharing my knowledge and creative ideas and willingness to lend a patient helping hand to those younger than me desiring to expand their own little wings. The pangs of regret began during student teaching during college. After 5 short years into full time teaching at several different locations, I had had enough. I quit. I felt guilty. But I watched my own family suffer because I gave all of myself to my students or actually the administrators’ demands who were just following orders from their higher-ups. So who is the ultimate “higher-up” that education is answering to, making happy, pleasing? Just exactly who is making all the educational rules that the rest of us are following? Who do we go to to change the system. The answer is parents. Until parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, neighbors become invested and involved, nothing will change. Parents passed the job of education to someone else, (mostly because they had no other choice thanks to compulsory education laws) someone who is not personally vested in the end product. Any family owned business that falls into the hands of a non-interested party only working from a profit venture angle will eventually either go bankrupt or seek the creative, risky ideas only brought on by competition. Until public education has competition, things will not change. Bring on the charter and private schools; welcome competition; start your own school; get out of the trenches and build a supercenter! And for the sake of all humanity stop teaching children everything; instead, teach them how to learn for themselves, teach them to emulate movers and shakers like Abraham Lincoln and Ben Franklin who only had a few years of formal schooling and then taught themselves the rest. Create a generation of interested learners and stop manufacturing a herd of sheep. Let them fail algebra and master creative design. Einstein could not tie his shoes. Ponder the fact that the only time in life humans are expected to be good at every subject is from the ages of 5-18. You do not expect your doctor to know how to fix your leaking toilet, nor do you expect your mechanic to tutor your child in reading comprehension. Teach to students’ strengths and allow them to become happily engaged life long learners instead of force feeding them every tedious fact and making them depressed and left to feel stupid and thus incapable of new things and thus addicted to the soothing comforts of television and cheap entertainment as academically burnt-out adults. We as teachers have created white knuckle syndrome for learning thanks to all the testing.
LikeLike
Amanda, although at times I felt like I was a baby sitter for some kids who weren’t there to learn, I also had kids in the room who cooperated and worked and learned in every class I ever taught.
And I still have friends in the classroom who go to school everyday to teach kids and not be just a babysitter. Those friends didn’t change just because I retired from teaching in 2005 after thirty years as a public school teacher.
If you think you are just a babysitter instead of a teacher, then you probably are because you gave up on the kids that are there to learn and not be babysat.
Any teacher who stays in the classroom in this environment should never give up teaching for those kids who are there to learn, and we will never be able to teach them all.
If there was a way to be 100% successful, then we’d be using those methods. Teaching is a tough job. There is no easy road to success in the public schools. No law will ever change that and no private sector CEO who is being paid hundreds of thousand and millions of dollars from the tax payers to run private sector schools that are replacing public schools will also never achieve the goals those unrealistic and unfair laws created.
But if one of these private sector schools can cherry pick the students and throw out all the ones teachers in the public schools end up babysitting, then of course the CEO will have better odds of being successful with the best students left behind who have supportive parents.
And this is what is happening.
Here is an example of what I mean. For seven years starting in the 1990s I had the privilege of teaching one period of journalism at the high school where I taught. The students in this class published the high school newspaper. That class was an elective and most of the students came from AP and Honors classes. Until then, I had never taught students at this level.
My first four classes were like all the classes I had taught for thirty years—filled with kids reading from 2nd grade to college level with many coming from poverty and belonging to violent street gangs.
But the kids in that one journalism class all came from homes with supportive parents and I never had to baby sit any of those kids who often were waiting for me outside my classroom one to two hours before school started and were willing to work until 11:00 PM when the alarms were turned on and the night custodians told us we had to lock up and leave. In addition, all of those kids went off to college—some with full ride scholarships.
But they lived in the same community that fed into that one high school. The biggest and only difference was the parents who I never had to call over behavior problems or work not done–something I did in my English classes every day.
The journalism kids started school a month early in the summer when I came in on my own time without pay to open my classroom so they could get the first paper out in time in September. In fact, some of the journalism kids expected me to show up during the Winter and Spring breaks to open the room so they could work on the paper then too. When I wasn’t available, they borrowed computers from the classroom with my permission, took the computers home and then brought them back on the first day of school following a vacation or weekend.
Eventfully, about three or four years into teaching that journalism class I had to put my foot down and say we had to always leave by at least 6;00 PM and never work on weekends or holiday. They were killing me by wanting to learn at all hours and at anytime.
LikeLike
While I applaud your own willingness to stay I must disagree with your injunction for others that “…Any teacher who stays in the classroom in this environment should never give up teaching for those kids who are there to learn.” Most of the point of the people that follow this blog and believe quitting was the right decision are taking the position that participating in what teaching in North Carolina has become is not worth it for the teacher OR the students. First it was the pressure to “teach to the test.” Then it was “don’t ever do any remediation in your class again no matter what your professional judgment about their readiness for that skill, we will be teaching on the county approved timeline and ONLY on that guideline.” Finally, the program was to teach off county-wide approved lesson plans , using only those techniques approved whether those lesson plans and techniques suited the students learning styles and/or the teacher’s skill set. In other words they want assembly line instruction using assembly line techniques. That was fine when you wanted a Ford Model T in any color as long as it was black. It does not work for human teachers trying to teach human children.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Samuel Snoek-Brown and commented:
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything related to education, but this one feels important. It’s set in North Carolina, which is an absolute disaster, but there’s a reference to the recent problems with educational funding here in Oregon, and a lot of what this teacher describes reminds me of my own mother’s frustrations with education in Texas, which drove her to gleefully retire. So this feels personal to me.
Some highlights from the laundry list of problems this teacher calls out:
I refuse to subject students to every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is important. I refuse to have my higher-level and deep thinking lessons disrupted by meaningless assessments (like the EXPLORE test) that do little more than increase stress among children and teachers, and attempt to guide young adolescents into narrow choices.
[. . .]
I refuse to watch my students being treated like prisoners. There are other ways. It’s a shame that we don’t have the vision to seek out those alternatives.
I refuse to watch my coworkers being treated like untrustworthy slackers through the overbearing policies of this state, although they are the hardest working and most overloaded people I know.
I refuse to watch my family struggle financially as I work in a job to which I have invested 6 long years of my life in preparation. I have a graduate degree and a track record of strong success, yet I’m paid less than many two-year degree holders. And forget benefits—they are effectively nonexistent for teachers in North Carolina.
[. . .]
I’m tired of watching my students produce amazing things, which show their true understanding of 21st century skills, only to see their looks of disappointment when they don’t meet the arbitrary expectations of low-level state and district tests that do not assess their skills.
Is it possible to cheer for someone while simultaneously feeling heartbroken?
LikeLike
Public education is ObamaCare for the mind. Pity though.
LikeLike
After teaching for 33 years, I feel sorry for all those professors, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and just plain well adjusted, successful students that I taught when they didn’t have all the testing and just learned to think and enjoy learning. It is amazing how all those who wanted to learn did and those who didn’t want to learn didn’t. It is easy to have “no child left behind” just keep the moving gate used in starting horse races in place so no horse run ahead but keep the pace of the slowest horse. Individual encouragement and knowing your student instead of just a test score number resulted in more success with those who needed additional help. I left teaching when the testing instead of teaching began. I did ten years as a computer network person and it was like being on vacation every day compared to teaching. Twelve hour days and fifteen hours on weekends in teaching went to eight hours and no homework… papers to grade… etc. I still tutored college students (non paid) to satisfy my need to teach. Finally, as a science / math / computer person, I never figured the logic of how every six years experts in education determined what you were doing didn’t work but studies showed this new thing did work. After six more years, it was determined that didn’t work but the new thing would. We are now in an extended time of the new thing which will also be determined not to work. Pray it will be soon!
LikeLike
Everything you say is truth to the highest power. I quit also… In Virginia…..but did not publish my complaints to the public. I should have. You are right to set the record straight. Amen and Amen.
LikeLike
I refuse to be led by a top-down hierarchy, period.
LikeLike
I read this, and parts of it make me wonder if she came into NC thinking everyone was going to bow down to her because of her past experience & doctorate degree. She had some good points, but I question her decision to quit without any notice. She did a disservice to her students by doing that; I’m sure they had a non-certified substitute teacher until the school could find a replacement…not very professional, in my opinion. I am in a neighboring state, and have worked in 6 school systems in 3 southern states in my 29 years. Are there some aspects of education that need to be “fixed”? Most definitely, but there are also some excellent things happening out there. Maybe this teacher was just burned out. If she couldn’t find a job in Oregon after all of those applications and only 2 interviews, there’s something not right. Especially if Toys ‘R Us wouldn’t hire her.
This was written a year ago. I’d like a follow up to see where she is now, and what she is doing.
LikeLike
Kris Neilsen is a he, not a she.
LikeLike
Kris, I can’t help but notice your last name. This spelling is not the norm. My maidan name has the same spelling. Just wondered where your family comes from.
LikeLike
Toys R Us didn’t hire her because she was overqualified. And he doesn’t sound burned out at all – except by the outrageous corporate and government control of education – excellent things happen because teachers work double time to do excellent things while still complying with the teach-to-the-test rules.
LikeLike
Just not buying that he was overqualified. I know teachers who have 2nd jobs at national retail stores.
LikeLike
EXACTLY…..SOUNDS TO ME SOMEONE IS JEALOUS OF SOMEONE’S DOCTORATE….I TOTALLY UNDERTAND HAVING TAUGHT WEST COAST AND EAST COAST. AND I MAKE MORE IN MY BAND, THAN I DO IN MY BANDROOM.
LikeLike
He doesn’t have the phd,
those CC’ed on this letter do.
LikeLike
Again…my mistake. I assumed “he” had his PhD.
LikeLike
Did you even read this???
SHE????
Sounds to me that you are one of those defending this Testing Mania and it also is clear that you are not in the Front Lines..
Or maybe you are one of the ones that want to keep their non-teaching jobs..
LikeLike
correction
“non-teaching job”
LikeLike
I saw no indication of gender in the letter, and, since the majority of teachers are female (along with the name “Kris”), I assumed he was a woman.
I am by no means defending the “testing mania”, and, oh, yeah…I AM in the front line…in the DIRECT line. Perhaps you failed to read all of my comment.
LikeLike
AMEN!!!
LikeLike
Hey Mark…
Peace…and thanks…read again your comment..
I bought Kris’s book .
Goggle him …a good read…
Happy TG!
LikeLike
The point is enough is enough
LikeLike
Good point Mark! Those same points occurred to me also.
LikeLike
South Carolina schools are no better! I always say that they are focusing on the standardize tests instead of the Childrens education and their ability to learn. They continue to shove information in their head so quickly in order to move rapidly to the next lesson only to find out that the students didn’t learn the the lesson before the last. Smh…these schools have got to do better. My desire is to home school my children in the long run because they aren’t learning what they really need to know in to succeed in the real world
Believe me I Know because I have been a sub for almost five years and I just walked
LikeLike
You are so correct.
SC is more chaotic than it;s Northern Neighbor..
Never have seen such a web of Chaos in one curriculum….
These states Cover.Standards.they do not Teach. Standards..
LikeLike
Very sad, but true about NC. Teachers are bullied into compliance and not allowed to question or disagree. About 12 weeks out of the year is spent on testing and they are NC tests, not nationally normed or parents would know exactly how poorly prepared their student are due to restrictive curriculum that is just geared to the state level tests to which teachers must comply. Teachers are poorly paid, have no support or representation and live in survival mode just to keep their jobs. And now, the state is taking away what little respect and merit pay they could earn. They were already paid much less that other states. So, so sad.
LikeLike
Spot on JJ
LikeLike
I completely agree. That is why I quit 15 years ago.
LikeLike
You were the wiser……
15 years ago ..I could take the low-pay because of the rewards.
Now there is Low-Pay and No Rewards….None..None…and None..
LikeLike
Kudos to you! I retired early from CMS two and a half years ago for the exact same reasons listed in your resignation letter. This state undervalues teachers to the point that is has become a laughing stock – which would be sad if it wasn’t tragic for the students themselves. Discussing teaching issues and conditions with teachers from around the country at conferences and online forums it is obvious that the administration in NC is broken from the top down. I applaud your decision!
LikeLike
Have you studied your County Commission’s Budgets for schools? Do you attend school Board meetings? You may find that your school districts’ Superintendent receives an outstanding pay check. Here in Hendersonville I think I saw almost an 8 to 1 pay differential between the Super and the avg teacher. Anyhow it might be worth checking into.
\
By the way, I’m a retired Electrical Engineer and my wife worked as a teacher in Buffalo NY years ago. I spend time in two Tea Parties and we have initiatives to investigate education, with an emphasis on the effects of the Common Core State Standards. If you think teaching is bad now, just wait for those standards to come out. Feel free to email me on information related to NC education. I’ll keep your information confidential. gedanz@gmail.com
LikeLike
There are no teachers these days…They are officially been reprogrammed to be Testers..
They dread going into work…
From my research this is in all States..
NC does love to test…They should get the
RACE TO THE TEST AWARD….
LikeLike
oops…”to work”…
“Into War”
LikeLike
I enjoyed the truth from someone who was willing to say it out loud.
LikeLike
George Privacy:
“Graduation rates are the highest because graduating with social promotion and grade inflation makes it the easiest it has ever been.”
WRONG!!! That criticism is so outdated.
Back in the late 70s and 80s, due to this very criticism you mention, states and districts across the country instituted Competency Exams that required kids to pass the exam designed to prove the child could read, understand what he read and do math at a set grade level in addition to all the credits they had to work for and earn before they could graduate.
And this explains why when 75% of 17/18 year olds graduate on time, the high school graduation rate climbs to 90% in the next year or more. Many kids that did not qualify continue to take adult eduction courses or enroll in 2-year community colleges continuing to work toward earning that high school degree.
The only flaw in Competency Exams is that each state could set its own competency level—there was no uniform standard. California set one of the highest and Texas one of the lowest. I’ve been looking for years to find a list that would show what the competency level was for each state but haven’t found it yet. We were told—while I was still teaching—that California’s basic competency test was set at 9th grade and I heard that Texas set there’s at 4th grade.
To be competent and literate enough to understand most of what one reads [outside of academic and legal journals], one should read at least at 6th grade level or higher.
Here’s a research paper out of UCLA that addresses this same topic:
Click to access TR320.pdf
Here’s another study from another university:
http://www.cehd.umn.edu/NCEO/onlinepubs/archive/AssessmentSeries/WyReport1.html
Pull quotes from umn.edu study: “Several studies (e.g., Frederiksen, 1994, Winfield, 1990) reported that student achievement improves when minimum competency testing programs are implemented.”
“We are frequently bombarded with media stories of students who make it all the way through high school without being able to read, or that the cashier at a local convenience store is unable to make change when the computer loses power. Policymakers and citizens feel compelled to rectify the ills in the educational system so that these examples become rare exceptions. Minimum competency tests are often used as a policy tool to require that students meet some basic level of achievement, usually in reading, writing, and computation, with the intention that the use of these tests will lead to the elimination of these educational problems.”
In addition, the competency test was also diagnostic. In the district where I taught, kids took the test in 10th grade and who failed portions of it were counseled on how to improve in the areas where the child fell short. Summer school classes; adult school and tutoring was offered to help those ids improve in those areas. Kids who had not passed one or more sections of the competency test were allowed to take it again in 11th grade; in summer school and in 12th grade while the counselors worked with those children to come up with a plan to improve in the areas where they failed.
I can’t speak for how other school districts handled the competency tests but where I taught it was taken seriously by the district and interventions were implemented to deal with the kids who failed one or more of the areas of the competency test.
I think that test are good if we only use them as a diagnostic tool to help us implement strategies and curriculum that helps meet our clients [students] needs. I “hate” tests that are used as a tool to judge and condemn anyone.
The competency test—for good or bad—came about to act as a filter and deal with the issue of social promotions and inflated grades.
In addition, not all teachers cave into the demands of parents to water down the curriculum and pass more students with higher grades. I was one of the teachers who refused to do that and I knew many who felt the same as I did and also refused to give in to the pressure of the self-esteem movement.
In fact, the private sector movement to water down the curriculum did not start in the schools. The importance of self esteem in children that would lead to this issue started as a debate in the late 19th century and decades later in the 1960s reached the pulpits of non denominational Christian churches in addition to being preached from textbooks that were used in Catholic parochial schools.
The self-esteem parenting movement reached critical mass in the 1980s and is where the pressure came from that forced the schools to make it easier for kids to appear successful in school. But that pressure did not convert every teacher. It didn’t convert me and it didn’t covert most of the teachers I worked with.
And watering down the curriculum and inflating grades does not indicate a teacher was incompetent. The children with supportive parents still learned and often went on to successfully graduate from college.
LikeLike
Outdated? I think not.
I could fill an entire chapter in support that this practice continues but will only relate a few highlights.
The competency test in NC is not a measure of high school achievement even though it is required to graduate. Even a cursory review of what is on it makes clear it is actually composed of those things that someone should have mastered to get INTO high school. Look at the students taking the math classes in high school designed to remediate those students that fail to pass the test the first try. I have taught that class, including fifth year seniors, that had significant trouble with basic arithmetic but were able to graduate with the required math credits even though they had failed the unbearably easy competency test on multiple occasions.
In NC students are not supposed to be promoted to high school out of eighth grade unless they met certain standards, but those standards are routinely waived and they are sent on anyway. I found this out after checking on the academic status of some freshmen when I discovered many had not met those standards including one student who had passed only 1 credit in each of his two semesters of eighth grade. Of course, given his involvement in a murder case before high school I could certainly understand his principal wishing to send him on up.
In my first year of teaching in the public schools, after teaching in community and university classes for multiple years, I went through, with permission, all the basic academic records at the school, K-8, to try to understand the “problem” with our test scores. Here are some of the highlights, test scores tracked very closely to gender and race, despite the fact the students were taught by the same teachers. In one year not a single student had been held back K-8 in the entire school because the principal was “tired of dealing with the flak caused by holding students back.” Another student had been placed in the AG program even though she did not qualify so she could stay “with her friends.” Of the ten students allowed to take Algebra I in eighth grade only 1 was clearly qualified, one was borderline, and eight were clearly not qualified. Plus, statistically speaking, for that size student body one would expect 1.5 qualified students. After I left the Algebra teacher that took over, who admittedly had as many as ten qualified students in a once in a generation extraordinarily talented cohort, expanded the class to something like 24 because she wanted to “open up the advantage of the opportunity to as many as possible.” She was appalled to find out the high school principal had made her much below average state test scores publicly available to the entire high school faculty as an example of what not to do to have high test scores.
Also, the move to block scheduling has been driven in some part by the desire to allow for more classes to be failed and yet still graduate. More to my point, recently various special schools have been implemented in our area that reduce the number of credits required for graduation under waiver as part of a dropout prevention program.
Finally, do you really want to claim that grade inflation is no longer practiced? After all, state scores were, at least until very recently as far as I know, curved.
Again, I have ready access to any number of college professors who will tell you that the students they are getting in their Freshman classes no longer have as good a skill set as those they were getting earlier in their careers. I myself have returned to teaching at the University level and can see the drop.
LikeLike
You can’t fix stupid, George, and I don’t mean the students, but rather the faculty.
LikeLike
Harlan,
I disagree. You use the wrong word. Ignorant is the right word.
There are probably a few incompetent teachers just like any profession, but none of the critics of public education can refer to one reputable study of just how many so-called incompetent teachers there are in the public schools. This is a claim that has never been proven.
In fact, the huge number of new teachers who leave the profession in the first few years probably means anyone who was incompetent was gone before they could do much damage.
Having spent thirty years in the classroom, I’m convinced that if a teacher is really incompetent—if administration doesn’t get rid of them before they have completed the three-year probation—the kids will drive them out by making their life miserable.
I doubt that many teachers are stupid. There are 3.5 million teachers working in the public schools and they are all college graduates with a very high literacy level and most of them actually enjoy reading for entertainment and to expand their knowledge. In addition there are workshops that teach and guide teachers to become better at the profession of teaching.
In fact, in California to renew a teaching credential every few years,teachers have to take approved classes and workshops at local universities outside of school hours. I vaguely recall something like 20 college units every five years. If I’m wrong, anyone who knows may correct me. It would be easy to find out because I have friends who are still teaching. So teachers never stop going to school.
In the district where I taught, many of the new teachers were also assigned a mentor who evaluated them and then provided advice on a regular basis, and that doesn’t count the administrators who evaluate them by dropping in and observing the new teacher working with his or her students. The observation is followed by a meeting where the teacher is evaluated in writing with recommendations for any areas that need improvement.
As for me, I spent my first year full time in my master teacher’s classroom. She started me out working with small groups and by the end of the year—after much advice and guidance, I was teaching the class full time.
As for ignorant, there are many students who are ignorant but that can be corrected if the student pays attention to the teacher and does the reading and work assigned. Cooperation goes a long way. But in schools surrounded by poverty, there are not that many students or parents who cooperate or support the teachers. Teachers are pretty much on their own in those schools.
And here is an example from the early 1980s when a mother came to see me about her 7th grade daughter who was a student at Giano Intermediate—a school that was considered the most dangerous in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County. We were warned by the principal to never leave the campus for any reason because the gangs were very dangerous. The school had its own full time campus police officer.
This single mother was concerned for her daughter who was reading way below grade level.
This mother listened to my advice and grudgingly followed it. The advice was simple: turn off the TV and spend those hours doing homework and reading for pleasure. Not just her daughter but the mother had to read for pleasure too and then end every evening by talking to each other about what they had read.
At the end of the year, the standardized test showed that her daughter gained five years in her literacy skills.
Sad to say, in thirty years and six thousand students, she was the only parent to seek out my advice and follow it to the letter. Most parents in America seem to prefer just blaming teachers for thier own failure.
LikeLike
Mr. Lofthouse I must agree with your correction of Harlan. I do not think that teachers are in any way stupid. They are often treated by administrators as if they are, but they are not. I can still remember my amazement when I went to faculty meetings where the principal gave out a detailed agenda and then proceeded to spend almost the entire meeting reading it verbatim to a room full of people with college degrees with about 33% having graduate degrees.
The problem is systematic rather than assignable to teachers. While there are bad teachers, a distinct minority, you can easily tell the problem is a systematic one because of the fact that it rewards compliance with arbitrary administrative dictates far more than it rewards good teaching. As a public school teacher I was called on the carpet many times, almost without fail instances where I was doing my job the way I should. For example, I was punished for deciding I would no longer coach football (even though I was still coaching baseball and basketball). Said punishment was to have my college prep Algebra III class taken from me and assigned instead to teach Math Competency. When a group of parents questioned the reassignment when they were informed by an unofficial letter sent to them by another faculty member making them aware of the change, my principal called me on the mat and accused me of sending the letter. I was also questioned on another occasion as to why I was not giving more playing time in basketball to the son of a high level official at the county office. The list is almost endless.
I.E., even Einstein would seem stupid if made to go down to the ocean with a teaspoon and made to try to fill it up with sand off the beach.
LikeLike
George Privacy,
“While there are bad teachers, a distinct minority …”
I agree that there are a few bad teachers but not many—certainly not enough to cause the damage the critics of public education claim. Once you teach in a school for a few years, you learn who they are and there was usually one or two. At the high school where I taught the last sixteen years, there were one hundred teachers and we knew of at least two who were not performing as they should have. One, who taught band, was burned out and it was obvious that the stress crippled her with PTSD and the other one was clearly incompetent, but she taught French, a subject that is not tested. The administration eventually forced that incompetent French teacher to quit teaching.
Then there were a few teachers who were good teachers but they caved into the pressure from parents and administrators to lower standards and inflate grades to boost a false sense of self-esteem in the kids. But the majority of teachers—at least 98%—were hard working and dedicated and refused to bend or bend much.
Our daughter attended four different public school districts before she graduated from high school. After graduation, she was accepted to Stanford. Because of all the noise in the media about incompetent teachers in the public schools, I asked her how many incompetent teachers she had K – 12. By then she was in her second year at Stanford. She thought about for a few hours and then said “TWO”. During her thirteen years in the public schools, she had maybe 40 – 50 teachers and those two didn’t stop her from graduating with a 4.65 PGA; straight As starting in 3rd grade and being accepted to Stanford where she’s in her fourth year.
Because there have been no studied to determine how many teachers I the public schools are incompetent, I can only rely on my own observations and what our daughter told me.
“it rewards compliance with arbitrary administrative dictates far more than it rewards good teaching”
My experience mirrors the previous statement. No matter how successful I was with my students and I was very successful during the thirty years I was in the classroom, I was constantly under pressure and watched to make sure I was in compliance with federal, state and district mandates mostly based on untested and unproven educational theories such as the Whole Language approach to teaching kids to read and write. Even with all the success I had with students, no administrator ever asked how I did it. Instead, they were always forcing new untested curriculum on the teachers without asking what we thought. And if we protested as a department or staff, we were forced to comply or else.
Like you, I was called on the carpet a number of times through the years. One example: between 1986 and 1989, I taught at an intermediate school in a blue collar middle-class community in the same school district on the other side of the freeway from the barrio where I spent 27 years of my teaching career. In the third year the school got a new principal and at his first meeting with the staff he had a flip chart. The first page said, If you write too many referrals it’s your fault because you can’t control the behavior of your students. The next page said, if you fail too many students, it is your fault because you are not motivating them. The third page said, do not ask me to help you with students who misbehave. My office door is closed. Handle those problems on your own. Do not send students who misbehave to the office. We don’t have the room. And when I failed a third of my students first semester, that principal called me to his office where he shoved his face an inch from mine and yelled at me pressuring me to admit that it was my fault so many students had failed my class. I refused. I replied that the students had failed because they didn’t do the work—testing and quizzes was never more than 9% of the total grade. I don’t believe in judging kids or adults from a multiple choice test. The grades in my class came from the work and the quality of the work.
But that principal wouldn’t back off. He kept yelling at me until the vice principal who was a witness stopped him and pulled him aside. I don’t know what the vice principal said to that idiot, but that principal told me I could go and I wasn’t called into his office again. I still refused to lower my standards as did most of the staff. Some teachers did lower standards because they couldn’t handle the stress from the pressure that came from self-esteem boosting parents and administrators.
At the end of that principal’s first year, half of the staff left. They retired early, quit; left teaching or transferred to other schools in the district or found jobs in other districts. I left too. I transferred back to the barrio on the east side of the 60 Freeway and spent the last sixteen years teaching at a high school that had a street gang culture and its own campus police force.
LikeLike
As a non-teacher I have a question. Why in the world are people being graduated with ONLY a 9th grade or 4th grade ability to read?? Why isn’t the standard at 12th grade? This country falls further and further behind the rest of the planet when it comes to education, students are only becoming less intelligent, not more. Science and math? It’s embarrassing. Standards should be higher all around.
LikeLike
Unfortunately, it’s a combination of low standards and job security. If teachers don’t pass the students, the teachers may run the risk of keeping their jobs.
LikeLike
I quit too!! I have been a classroom teacher in Va for 15 years and I quit last year. This is a well written letter and I commend the author for being so truthful.
LikeLike
Absolutely right on!!! Along with two of my fellow teachers, I retired early from CMS (Charlotte, NC) schools for many of the same exact reasons. Kris has eloquently stated the sad truth. The situation is pathetic and the CYA administration has simply become the enemy of quality teachers who want little more than to do their jobs with integrity. The severe anxiety, constant harassment, and unending frustration is physically unhealthy to teachers and does nothing but steal quality education from the students. My wife, also a CMS teacher who quit, loved the kids, but the soulless administration and idiotic policies all but beat the dedication out of her. As she was walking to school one morning and saw a skunk. Her reaction was, “Hey, if I get sprayed, I won’t have to go in today!! That’s the heart-breaking result of many of the things Kris brought to light.
LikeLike
NC no longer pays new teachers with a masters degree any more than than a BA degree. So why would any new teacher in NC seek further education to further their career and help student? This narrow minded thought process has filtered down to the university level where there will be less college and university professors and (supporting university staff) teaching courses for a masters degree. Way to re-enforce a stereotype NC.
LikeLike
What specifically makes a teacher with a Masters better than a teacher with a Bachelors?
LikeLike
More knowledge is better than less knowledge.
LikeLike
Truth? Not really more knowledge. More patience. A (demonstrated) better ability to put up with B.S. and maintain one’s composure.
LikeLike
Knowledge from primary-source facts helps one discover the truth or get closer to it.
LikeLike
“We know more than they Understand”
From what I have see.
Some teachers really deserve their Masters…but there is a way to obtain Masters PHD’s…online from Diploma Mills….$$$ talks…
Masters Folks are no better teachers but Learning is for a Life Time .
Depends on the teacher…
I sincerely believe that all teachers are very motivated and want to learn all there is to learn so they are constantly educating themselves via classes…workshops…conventions…internet…
..
LikeLike
Too early…oops…
“We know more than WE understand”…..
LikeLike
I got an idea. u guys need to go get a real job that actually goes yr. round and you only get 2 weeks off a yr. – Oh yeah – you also retire at 72 not 52 and you have to perform to keep it. Result of what happens to people when they never get out of school. Get some people. Nobody is making you stay.
LikeLike
Please tell me how often you work 60-70 hours per week every week and also over half the time you are supposedly on holidays. It works out to less than 2 weeks of holidays a year. Then please tell me if you’d continue to consider this is not a real job when 45 minutes a day is added to the instructional day (works out to an additional month) with no compensation. This is on top of no raises for 4 years even though the cost of living continues to rise. You should not comment on which you know nothing about!
LikeLike
Do you teach?
No…
Teachers are not paid for the 2 months they are off in the summer unless they are teaching summer school..
They also use that time to take the required courses needed to renew their certificates..
Teaching was a very respectable and rewarding job at one point in time but no more…..
Teaching is now Testing…
and,.,most of these comments are from teachers who have children in the schools…..They will fight for their children’s education..They will not bow out and let the Testing Mania continue…
I should not even have read your comment as you are…CLUELESS
Teachers/Parents will continue to fight….
I wonder what the world would be like if everyone had your attitude…
Zero Progress…
LikeLike
I am not a teacher so I am sincerely curious about the testing. How has it differed from all the testing that has always existed? I’m 42-years-old and when I was in school we always had testing. Every year we had to pass a test in order to advance. There were always assessments happening, year-round. Then there are the usual pop quizzes, mid-terms, finals, etc. When wasn’t it teaching for testing?
LikeLike
Kristine, you never had standardized testing control the life of the school. Was your school closed because of its test scores? We’re your teachers fired because of your test scores? No nation in the world tests as much as we do.
LikeLike
I never reply to these things but this is RIDICULOUS. I left the classroom recently (for all of the reasons listed above) and got a “real job”. This “real job” is so much easier and pays way better. I am not stressed out at the end of every day and thinking about doing work all night along. When I leave work and physically go home to my family, my mind can be there also. I’d work every single day of the entire year (without even two weeks off) to not have to go back to teaching. I can’t imagine any work harder than what NC’s teachers are being asked to do. And another bonus, with my “real job”, we can even pay the bills AND I can eat lunch every day and go to the bathroom.
LikeLike
Love your Post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LikeLike
What kind of job do you have? Honestly I have been in the corporate pressure cooker for years and thought teaching would be a better scenario. I have no evenings or weekends anymore (with technology charting our every move) and live for the paycheck. You are saying that teaching requires that you actually give up all of that time off for the job? And the pay sucks?
LikeLike
eri – you are simply shallow. I earned several opportunities to serve in several careers well outside of education. I chose to become a teacher to serve a superior cause. However, I was quickly struck by how many incompetent, lazy people (such as yourself) seem to think teachers are getting a free ride. I was confused by all of this until I realized that you are jealous. Well, rest assured, this is the most challenging career around. If it weren’t for the investments teachers make into their careers, they would never stick around (many don’t regardless). Your argument is as worn-out as the bar stool you sit on when you preach it and factually incorrect.
LikeLike
Chuckle 🙂
LikeLike
“However, I was quickly struck by how many incompetent, lazy people (such as yourself) seem to think teachers are getting a free ride.”
You think this is funny? Am I missing something?
I started working in the private sector part-time at age 15 thirty-hours a week.
Out of high school, I quit that three-year, part time job and served in the US Marines, fought in Vietnam and then—during and after college (subsidized in part but not totally by the GI Bill)—I worked in the private sector for a number of years ending in a mid-level management job with twelve hour days five and six days a week before I went into teaching
Teaching was the hardest job of them all. And While teaching, I even worked a thirty hour week part time job nights and weekends for three years while I was teaching because I wasn’t earning enough as a teacher. That private sector job was easier than teaching too, and that private sector job was fun even if the pay was too low.
In fact, if I had to go back to work because CalSTRS went bankrupt and I lost my retirement, I’d rather go back in the Marines if they would have me at this age and fight in Afghanistan. I’d even volunteer to strap a bomb on me and blow myself up in the middle of a bunch of al Qaeda terrorists then go back in the classroom and those 60 to 100 hour workweeks while being attacked by self esteem obsessed parents and administrators forcing teachers to use methods that were untried and untested and often failed ending with the teachers being flamed for the failure of programs they were against from the start..
LikeLike
Lloyd..
I agree with you…
LikeLike
I’m glad Eri posted the comment. It has always seemed that teaching was an intrinsically rewarding career that had a relatively low pay, but great benefits. i.e. summers and vacation days off, work during kids schedule, and until recently, pension or at least health care in NC. The corporate world is extremely frustrating, stressful and there is always the requirement to work very long hours with little time off. Why wouldn’t we think that teachers have it easier unless/until teachers tell us how it REALLY is.
LikeLike
Well, this might be more effective If you attempted to use proper grammar to make your argument. In addition, you are arguing out of ignorance. Teachers are ten month employees. We do not get two months off. We must have second jobs to cover the two months of the year that we do not get paid. You are completely right that we could leave, but many teachers actually care about what happens to their students. You must be kidding about retiring at 52. There are so few teachers who can actually do that it might as well not be possible. That retirement you mention will not keep most teachers above the poverty level. Before you write something this ignorant again, perhaps you ought to go back and thank a teacher for caring enough to make sure you knew how to write it.
LikeLike
As far as I know, and perhaps it differs from state-to-state, but teachers do have the choice to be paid over the 2 months of not working. As in, how pay is received. The objection by some is that say a teacher paid $40k annually can opt to have that paid out evenly over the 12 months of the year but don’t actually work during 2 months. Whereas a non-teacher making the same amount of money still has to work those two months to make that same amount.
But again, perhaps some states are different.
LikeLike
Why do people still think teaching is a 10 month job? You hit it right on the head. BRAVO!!!
LikeLike
Diane, thank you for your book Reign of Error. I am enjoying it and it is ‘spot on.’ I am a retired administrator/re-employed teacher in my 35th year.
LikeLike
I have said it before and I say it again now. The easiest way to destory a nation is to destory their educational system, and NC in well on its way. So SAD
LikeLike
It makes me sad to to read a letter like this from a teacher. Sad because I know, first hand, the frustration, anger, disappointment and pain behind the fire and venom of their words. While I understand the resentment and respect a teachers right to do as they wish for their principles and/or families, quitting will NEVER be an option for me. Our kids and our futures deserve better than someone who quits.
Bureaucracy stinks. Paperwork sucks.
High stakes tests should not be the only measuring stick by which students and teachers are judged.
Educators are not paid enough.
Politicians who pass ridiculous laws concerning education, without any educational experience, infuriate me.
I could go on and on about what I disagree with regarding the current state of education. The system needs work (a lot of it!) – But I won’t quit. I can’t quit because I feel like you are part of the problem if you’re not part of the solution. Maybe I’m not intelligent enough to know how to be part of the solution from outside a school system, but if I quit there will be one less person advocating for teachers and students. I don’t pretend to have all the answers – but if I quit there will be one less person demanding answers and change from the powers that be. If I quit there will be one less qualified person teaching our kids and shielding our teachers from as much red tape as possible. I’m going to outlast this educational down-swing because I’ve been called to do this work. Of course I have bad days, I get angry, feel frustrated and overworked and many times I feel discouraged – but then I SUCK IT UP. I pack my “atta-girls” on my back and I go to work doing what I love – because NO ONE is going to steal my joy or make me quit. You see I’m selfish – there is no other profession that can bring as much joy as teaching does (IMO). Watching the lightbulb come on for a student or a teacher is better than just about anything for me. No one could make me give that up! I believe education is the most noble of all professions and a paycheck or politics won’t change my opinion – I’m just that stubborn! Students and learning are my passion and teachers are “my people” – so even though things are tough presently – I won’t quit.
The only thing that is consistent in education is change. My fervent prayer is that positive changes in education come sooner rather than later (but change is coming!) In the mean time you can find me in a school, with some students and/or teachers, hopefully, making a difference because (yep – you guessed it!) I WON’T QUIT!
LikeLike
Well then…just keep testing..
I can see they are hiring their puppets..
We are fighting for our children…and our grandchildren…
You say you want positive changes..
Keep praying but the Good Lord gave me the Common Sense to stand up and fight for these children….and Prayers were answered when Diane started this blog..
Look no further..that is what we are fighting for..
You need to buy Kris’s book………
LikeLike
I’ve read Kris’s book and even used some excerpts in some of the graduate classes I teach. I won’t apologize for praying about the current state of education – I believe it needs prayer and action – so that’s what I do. I don’t use the excuse of testing as a reason not to teach. Testing and teaching should go hand in hand – unless of course you are afraid of accountability. All good teachers test many times per day- whether it be formatively or summatively. Good luck to you!
LikeLike
Good teachers do not use inappropriate testing that forces one to “teach to the test” and disregard what is best educationally for the student. Lest one forgets, tests should be more about assessing students than their teachers, especially when using indirect measurements of teachers like student test results substitute for rational direct measurements readily available. For example, give me a class of students that already know the material and I will get you fabulous scores, while teaching very little (although I might still be doing a good job under the circumstances). On the other hand, give me a class where no one is properly prepared for the new material, and the results will be below average even if I do a much better job “teaching.”
LikeLike
Emy..
You do not get it…
No one is against teaching……TESTING MANIA….
You say you believe it needs Prayers and Action..
God gave me the Common Sense to know these children are not being prepared for the Real World…but for a Good Score on a Test..
Thank you again God for the Gift of Common Sense..
LikeLike
Emy Nice to hear someone with the same thoughts that I have. I am a first year teacher but have 12 years as a TA. I know the frustrations of education but I like you will not leave my students. We teachers are depended on to save the lives of many doing the best we can to teach others to be survivors in a constantly changing world. I am committed as long as I will be allowed to teach and I will do it with a good attitude!
LikeLike
Looks like denial takes many forms.
LikeLike
I too taught in Charlotte for 1 year. That year made me quit NC after living there for 10 years and move back to Canada. This article is so accurate it’s scary. I love NC but would never teach there again. EVER! Now that I am back in an excellent school system I wonder how I lasted in NC for so long. In NC you are not allowed to actually teach. Very sad. I feel for the children but I did them no good as stressed, frustrated, exhausted and bullied as I was.
LikeLike
It is sad…..They so love Testing…..
I have checked out Canada’s curriculum….Love it..
LikeLike
I’m one of the lucky ones. I was able to bail out as well, but had enough years to take early retirement. Bless all my colleagues. I hop the tide will turn soon. It’s so disheartening.
LikeLike
I agree 100% with her thoughts in the school system and what it has become. No wonder so many people home school or put their child in private programs. It’s sad to see how the people that teach the future of our world are treated when they should be paid more than the people in our legislative branch. All teachers should take a stand.
LikeLike
Are you saying that New Mexico and Oregon do not have that? They probably do now. This is now a National phenomenon. And if you think it hard on the teachers, it is worse for the students.
Learning is a natural need of the children and is even fun until we adults take that joy of learning from them with our need for structure and control. And somehow the further that control is from student the harder it is applied. It is a wonder any learning occurs at all.
LikeLike
I am a retired teacher and all I can think after reading this is why would anyone in his/her right mind even consider teaching as a career possibility today? It is a completely thankless, stressful, demanding job with limited (really limited) opportunities for advancement. Even if you LOVE LOVE LOVE kids as I did and still do, there is no way I would choose this career again. Ever. I don’t blame this teacher for leaving the job one bit.
LikeLike
Spot on
LikeLike
I have asked the same question:
Why would anyone want to teach in today’s public school environment?
… where the teachers are often told what to do as if they are wooden puppets and when programs and fads that often started in the private sector; state capitals and Washington DC fail—as they have done repeatedly—the parents who drove the [self-esteemism] fads; politicians and the media then blames the teachers [who were not responsible for the flawed fads/programs that failed]?
My first thought was that all teachers should walk off the job and refuse to work. But I was wrong. I can see that now.
We are in a war to preserve the freedoms we have taken for granted. We must fight back to stop the special interests that are directed by billionaires and religions driven by idealistic beliefs that stem from racism; libertarianism; conservatism; neo-conservatism; fundamentalist Christian beliefs founded on literal translations of a book written thousands of years ago by people who did not think literally, and progressive agendas. Today those groups and individuals all have a common goal and that goal is to take democracy out of the schools and turn those schools over to “them” so they can teach the kids anyway they want without any rules or restrictions. And after those individuals and groups have achieved their goals, they will turn on each other.
Diane Ravitch’s book is a warning that we are on the cusp of losing those freedoms we most cherish. “Reign of Error”, which I’m almost done reading, warns us—with lots of footnoted evidence from primary sources—that these groups and individuals don’t care about kids succeeding and learning. Instead, they care only about control and for some that means profits and wealth. The evidence shows that the private sector as it moves in is doing a worse job teaching our children than the public schools we are in danger of losing. In fact, Ravitch’s book proves beyond a doubt for any open minded person who has not been totally influenced by the propaganda and lies of the enemy or in the pay of the enemy, that our public schools have been slowly and steadily improving year after year and decade after decade and they are not failing.
Heed this warning from someone who came from extreme poverty and no freedoms. My wife, Anchee Min, the author of “Red Azalea” and “The Cooked Seed”, was born in China during the Mao era, and she lived through the rape of China’s public schools during the Cultural Revolution when the teachers were stripped of their power and the classrooms turned over to teenage bullies who stormed through the streets of China’s cities destroying everything they could. As a child, my wife starved during the Great Famine and lived in poverty that most people in the U.S. never experience. My wife has said more than once that America is going through its own Cultural Revolution. She has heard me rant and complain about what was going on in the schools, and she is tired of listening to me.
She sat in my classroom and saw with her own eyes and heard with her own ears how difficult it is to teach kids who come from poverty. We also raised a daughter who attended public schools in four different school districts taught by public school teachers who were either excellent, good, average or even incompetent (our daughter says two of the 40 to 50 teachers who taught her from K to 12th grade were incompetent), but that didn’t stop her from being accepted to Stanford where she is in her fourth year and planning to go to graduate school.
We are fighting—for example: the Koch brothers; the Walton family and the Gates Foundation—to preserve America’s freedoms.
The people who want to destroy the public schools are no better than the Maoists who almost destroyed China before Mao died and Deng Xiaoping swept in and turned China toward economic reforms with an open-door policy to the world that made China into an economic powerhouse that led to a country that now has the largest middle class in the world—a middle class that is still growing and finding more and more freedoms as China’s government slowly loosens the reigns giving its people more freedoms of almost every kind that we in the U.S. have taken for granted. America’s freedoms are only as good as the paper they are written on and that paper can be burned and legislated out of existence.
Teachers are highly educated professionals, and those public school teachers are America’s first line of defense to maintain the freedoms Americans often take for granted. We can’t take them for granted anymore. We must fight back.
As a work force, public school teachers are the most educated in the world. But today, those teachers are also warriors who must go to work every day to their classroom and fight to take the schools back if we are to maintain the level of freedoms we can’t take for granted anymore. And those teachers need the support of the American people so the public schools stay in the control of local communities and not corporations or non-profits funded by the same people who own those corporations. Corporations and non-profit organizations are not democracies. They are dictatorships run by CEOs. The question should be, do you want America’s schools that teach all of America’s children run by someone like the libertarian Koch brothers; the conservative Walton family; the progressive Gates family, or neoconservative Rupert Murdock?
LikeLike
The original letter is so thorough and emits intelligence that grasps most of the flaws in the majority of our educational systems. I could enumerate the reasons I left teaching (health proved to be the source of any problems I had), but they are irrelevant… except that the stress, etc., is the primary cause of the conditions I developed. Suffice it to say that the major concern is that young people who are entering the profession today are the beginnings of the flood of potential and hired persons who are products of “teach to the test,” and all that’s coming with it. The future isn’t bright for my grandchildren.
LikeLike
Why are there no thousands of posts to this. I know from personal experience the things brought up here are true. When will all teachers walk out and let administrators and government employees try the job for awhile? Teachers are a great asset that we are wasting!!!
LikeLike
Homeschooling, it is legal in all 50 states. Who better to make sure your children get the best education they can. It is ridiculous what the state comes up wirh and they are not looking out for the best interest of the children.
LikeLike
with*
LikeLike
After 26 years working in the Miami-Dade County School System I am disgusted, discouraged, and disrespected as a teacher. In all my years I have seen many changes. But I am at the end of my rope literally hanging on by my fingernails. I just hope I can make it another two years. I never imagined that I would look forward to becoming 62. Good luck to those that have to stay behind.
LikeLike
So very true about the differentiated imstruction.. So YES, Why DONT they differentiate. Tests…. Why would THEY expext the exact same results?? Also, Special ed patents have No Clue, their kids who hVe been evaluated and labeled, are getting. NO services… 29 years in education, 20 placing students in soecial ed. Programs and then trying to tell rhe parents we will help, finally… Really? What a joke.. I could go on and on and exprrience in Jersey and Florida….
LikeLike
This was an excellent letter that reflects what I have stated for more than thirty years! I did not have the strength or the station to do what Dr. Mary Ellis did, quit!
I will never understand a system where women are in the majority, both in education and in the entire country allow “men” to make these awful decisions that determine the future of our children! Many of these same people are pulling in six figures while keeping teachers on a pay freeze year after year. As a single mother, I worked two, sometimes three jobs to make it and stay in a job that I loved. I applaud those that decide not to sacrifice their own family to remain in teaching.
How about we demand our government officials past test to verify their ability to make sound decisions for millions? Making certain that they are highly qualified to lead and their salaries should reflect the test scores of the students in their districts.
I am now retired, but still forced to work because of the terrible system this state has for most of its working class. I tried to organize teachers thirty years ago and failed. When will they become aware of their power and change what is not working and not productive? The power is with them saying enough is enough! If we truly “love” children, we cannot continue to support this madness with silence. Attitude reflects leadership. There are no real leaders in education, because it would reflect in the attitudes of teachers, in turn would reflect in our society and the importance of what they do. Teachers touch the future through every child each day.
LikeLike
Sadly this sounds like corporate America too. This is what happens with distribution of wealth gets out of control. People are forced to serve institutions that care little for the customer or the service provider and drive profit as the only goal. Thank you wall street and thank you presidents for putting corporate greed over the needs of the people.
LikeLike
So True
Great Post!
LikeLike
I had the misfortune (yes, you read that right!) of teaching 6th grade at Monroe Middle School in Union County, North Carolina. I worked there about 15 years ago, but I still consider it the L O N G E S T year of my life! The author of this letter is spot-on. The pay is a joke~ almost all of my co-workers had 2nd jobs. I remember my principal walking in my room one day while I was doing a lesson on grammar. She stopped my lesson, and in front of all my students, told me that grammar is not on the EOGs (what they call the End-of-Grade test in NC). I also had the inclusion class. I was never told I was given this class but figured it out about 4 weeks into the year a woman walked in while I was teaching. I assumed she was there to help with my many ESL students, but she informed me that no, she was the special ed. teache , there to co-teach with me as I had the IEP students~ you’d think I would have seen an IEP or something, right?!? Not to mention that many of my non-IEP students read WAY below grade level but we were expected to get them to pass that 6th grade EOG test.
LikeLike
I had a similar experience…
When meeting with a Principal mid semester….I said I was behind the Pacing Guide..
She became a Drama Mama insisting that I must COVER all of the standards by the end of the 8th week of the second nine weeks because the 9th week of the 2nd 9 weeks would be used for Testing..
So….”Do you want me to Cover the Standards or do you want me to Teach the Standards”
She did not have a clue as to the number of standards included in the guide…….she was interim ……. but got all up in arms when she found out that I was behind …
Hell bent on “Race to the Test”
LikeLike
I, a former Office of Special Education fellow at a Tier 1 research university and educator for over 20 years, quit for many of the same reasons. I also quit working for the testing company currently monopolizing the country because they had no use for anything I might know about education.
LikeLike
I quit, too. After 38 years in education, the last 9 years in the public school system were too much. I must admit, when talking to young women about careers, I dissuade them from pursuing a career in teaching. Perhaps the lack of qualified educators will finally get through to the powers that be. There is something wrong…but it’s not the teachers.
LikeLike
Same here Amy
LikeLike