Paul Karrer, who teaches fifth-grade in Castroville, California, takes a look at our policymakers’ obsession with bad teachers. Who are they? How can they be found out and fired?
Here is one example of a bad teacher:
“The Low Score bad teacher — Education reformers want high-stakes testing to be a prime determinant in teacher evaluation. But if one looks under the tests, interesting facts pop up. Often, teachers who were Teacher of the Year find they are considered bad teachers in the following years. How can this be? Because class composition changes. Teaching assignments (grade-level) change. And unlike charter schools, which expel obstructive, destructive and obnoxious kiddos — those in the public realm must teach all the kids. Just one grade-A-whack-a-mole angry student can destroy a classroom. Many teachers have many more than one. Such a child’s presence is subtractive to the learning environment of others.”
There are more.
But who is behind this pursuit and does it make sense?
“My point in all this is to show that variables — normal life variables — impact classroom outcomes. When pregnant teachers, their compassionate spouses and ill teachers are labeled as bad teachers, something is very, very wrong.
“The profit-oriented talking heads of education reform want to monetize public education. Ed reformers would have us believe poverty, trauma, parental drug use, violence, incarceration and homelessness have no impact. Teachers are losing their profession. Kids are losing their teachers. And communities are losing the democratic concept of public schooling.
“In the end, it is the wealthy profiteers and captains of privatization who are pointing fingers at hard-pressed teachers who work in communities of failure. It is a much easier political fix to scream “fire” than it is to acknowledge the conditions of poverty. And it makes money for a few too.”
And we now have enough “data” to show that the reformers “solutions” have done nothing to solve “the Problem.” Charter school kids should be wowing us with their wonderfulness based on the narrative of reform. Where are these wonderful programs that we can now bring to scale in the public schools? Has anyone spotted these excellent teachers that the reformers’ factories of innovation are supposedly creating?
“Has anyone spotted these excellent teachers that the reformers’ factories of innovation are supposedly creating?”
According to TFA, they are all now “leaders” in Educational Policy,out of the classroom, due to having completed their excellent teaching service that was done in 2 years at a charter school lol.
You know, I think, sadly, that many “bad teachers” will often be older teachers: my school lately has a big thing for hiring brand new teachers who do not carry a full load of students, giving huge classes to the veterans ( one of my colleagues has 190 to a newbie’s 70), and then using the young ones for posters, videos and “photo ops” for the press to advertise my school.
There is definitely an Eduform agenda of young and fresh looking teachers, as being better than older ones.
Example, at my school we are trying to “win back” some of the white kids who are leaving our school for private school. We are also trying to attract out of district kids from middle class homes for our magnet program.
The other day, one of my older colleagues wrote a little blurb about our school for our principal…this was then handed to a young, new teacher, who only teaches 4 classes to our 6, to read on camera for a promotional event. Our teacher of the year was not on the video, who is a mature woman. However, the brand new teacher, who has already accepted a job with another district in a more affluent suburb because she “can’t handle these kids” was called upon to represent our school in the video, along with two other very young, white teachers. One of them is actually a good worker, but the other is late frequently, on her phone constantly and never helps in group planning. She just dials it in.
This caused a lot of consternation for our staff, at least the older ones, but our ( quite) young principal didn’t really care.
Basically the teachers featured in the ads are white and young: to me this is just not remotely indicative of who our student body is, nor our staff. Furthermore every promo has the same teachers, and the rest of the older teachers are the ones who mentor and do extra work…in TX the salary differences are not that great. I make 2k extra a year, with my Masters and multiple certifications, than a newbie with no Masters, after 5 years… Really sad. Meanwhile those of us who are older are the ones with the huge class sizes and/or teaching multiple grades and multiple subjects.
Despite this, some of the new, younger ones are still not doing well test-wise, not that that is the do all or be all.
From what I understand, older teachers used to be considered seasoned, now we are just considered as work horses. I can’t help but think that, if I were 20 years younger, I would have an easier work load at my school. That makes me a bit irritated. We all need to be expected to tow the line.
Your story makes me grateful to live in a union state. It saddens me to see such exploitation. Unions inject a little humanness and justice into an otherwise callous market-driven society.
I live in Texas, too, and I think we need to be careful about expecting teacher racial demographics to reflect student racial demographics because if we use that premise, majority-white districts would be justified in hiring weak teachers who are simply white.
In majority-Hispanic districts like Dallas ISD, AA teachers (the current racial majority of teachers in the district) would see their numbers lowered to make room for more Hispanic teachers.
The race-matching is sword that cuts both ways and I really believe that most of us are beyond race these days; we want excellence regardless of skin color.
I do agree that using young, white teachers is an attempt to lure back white families and I agree that it’s pathetic (and it isn’t going to work), but isn’t that par for the reformers? They aren’t very smart. Their ideas don’t work. In Dallas, since the arrival of Mike Miles, the only thing that’s increasing is teacher turnover. Scores are not going up.
The white parents won’t be fooled by the pathetic attempts anyway. The reformers can fill their schools 100% with young, white teachers and the white parents will still seek to get their kids into the elite privates where the competition to get accepted is fierce and the teachers are overwhelmingly mature veterans.
This is the United States….the country that chases anything that will bring them youth. Duh…stupid. Look at the commercials…OY!
I teach in a suburb of Houston. I love the plan of the area, raise the salary for zero year teachers to 50K and pay 25 year teachers 58K…that is some really bad math and logic.
clarification: I have 10 years teaching experience, but 5 years in TX. I am over 40, this is my second career.
Mr. Karrer is right. I challenge any one of these “experts” to teach students Mr. Karrer describes. Secondly, they should be required to read, Reigh of Error by Diane Ravitch. Perhaps then, they’ll have some credibility.
A “bad teacher” is one who:
is over age 50
is a few years away from collecting a full pension
makes over $50,000 a year
may have a chronic health condition
is a whistle blower
refuses to carry out illegal directives by insane principals
advocates for students
is close to getting vested in a pension
just gets vested in a pension
opposes all of the “reformers'” education agenda and is vocal about it
has no family connections to have gotten a job with a school district
is scapegoated by a principal who has the desire to cover up his or her own negligence and incompetence
AMEN!
That’s me!!
That’s me, too, Susan! Well said!!! Thank you!!!
I am, therefore, a pretty bad teacher. There must be a whole bunch of us out there. I am a whistleblower. I am approaching 50. I will fight for my kiddos no matter which insane/power hungry/mean spirited/spiteful/incompetent (choose any that apply) ‘leader’ is doing something wrong.
I’m well on my way…
Guess I’m a 100% “bad” teacher by Susan’s criteria.
Darlene, you can just delete the emails. One click and the email goes away.
I bought symphony tickets 18 mos ago and now get a dozen emails from the symphony every week. Every. Week. I simply delete them. No big deal.
Life is full of little irritations. Just hit delete! 🙂
I don’t think this is real. Someone playing a game. Multiple posters have told this person how to unsubscribe. Ignore.
There’s a Darlene Wilson on Twitter that believes the White House has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood. If this is the same person then I doubt that calm, rational thinking and solutions will have any effect. If it’s not screamed by Drudge, Fox, or Limbaugh it ain’t so for her, I would guess.
“Teachers are losing their profession. Kids are losing their teachers. And communities are losing the democratic concept of public schooling.”
Criminal.
It all started from the top, with federal policy and politicians.
Crimanal is right.
We have 1 or 2 TFA teachers on my campus who stayed for a 3rd year.
They suddenly aren’t the “best” teachers anymore and they are shocked at the unfairness of the favoritism shown to the first-year teachers.
One was particularly upset to learn that despite her self-touted rapport with kids, all of this year’s crop tried to change their schedules so they could be in with the newest new teacher instead of with her. And when that newbie got the same evaluation score that she did, she was furious.
She literally said, “There’s no way a first-year is as good as I am. I have experience.”
I said, “You didn’t have a problem with that when you were the first-year teacher.”
She says that’s she’s fed up and next year will be her last year in the classroom. Lol.
Cupcake: real-world experience combined with a little thoughtfulness provoked by a colleague and a little nudge from the School of Hard Knocks.
Teaching… Learning…
And not a data point in sight.
😎
“And not a data point in sight.”
Exactly!
No bubble test was needed, either. Or a rubric….
Yet I’m 100% certain she’s mastering the concept.
Cupcake and KrazyTA,
Both of your are hilarious! Keep up the good work of “training” the TFA’ers!
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Completely agree with the blog post. But — there are “bad” teachers (that is, teachers who are not doing what teachers are supposed to do in the manner that teachers are supposed to do it) who should be improved or discharged. Our public schools have — for decades — largely failed to identify/improve/remove these bad teachers. Virtually all voters know — from their own personal experience or indirectly from the personal experience of their children — one or more bad teachers who continued teaching for years. These facts — that there are truly bad teachers, that school systems have tolerated these bad teachers, and that voters know about these bad teachers — largely explains the enduring popularity of the horribly counterproductive high-stakes testing/teacher discharge approach school reform.
We who strongly oppose teacher discharge based on student test scores will never win the public debate if we focus only on identifying the unreliability and adverse side effects of high-stakes testing/teacher discharge. If we do not offer an alternative reform that will identify/improve/remove the bad teachers, we will lose the debate — the voters and officials will prefer a bad solution to a real problem to no solution to a real problem (particularly where the bad solution is relatively inexpensive and might, in some cases, actually reduce school spending as new hires replace discharged senior teachers).
The traditional principal-observes-and-evaluates is not an effective approach. We’ve used this approach for decades and it has usually resulted in far too few discharges. And, many of those discharges were of competent teachers who were discharged by insecure/incompetent/biased/mentally unbalanced principals. Principals have too much unreviewable authority, too little time, too little opportunity to observe, too few incentives to evaluate fairly, and (sometimes) too little subject-matter expertise for the traditional approach to fairly/effectively identify/improve/remove the bad teachers.
The answer is probably something like the Montgomery County, MD peer-review approach that, in effect, gives a teacher who is likely to be a poor performer (junior teachers and teachers identified by the principal as poor performers) a first-line supervisor teacher who closely monitors the teacher’s performance for a relatively long period (a few weeks, not just a few class observations); the supervisor teacher writes a report recommending retention, further evaluation, or discharge; a committee of supervisor teachers and principals makes the final retain/discharge decision; the supervisor teachers are selected and assigned by the central office; the involved principal plays no role in selecting the supervisor teacher or in the committee decision. In 10+ years, the program has resulted in the discharge or resignation in lieu of review of 500+ teachers. The union supports the program; the teachers view the program as generally fair; there have been few challenges to the discharges; and there is no high-stakes testing with its inevitable adverse side effects.
In any event, we must offer an alternative to high-stakes testing/teacher discharge if we hope to win the battle.
I think this is post is spot on.
This seems pretty fair, though I can imagine a Machiavellian superintendent choosing only sycophants and like-minded partisans (e.g. pro-creationism) as supervisor teachers. Do you know if dismissed teachers have a right to appeal the decision?
Not sure re the exact mechanics of selecting the teachers to be in the supervisor-teacher pool, but I believe the union plays a role in the selection — so there’s a check on potential superintendent abuse. Also, the program requires that a supervisor teacher return to the classroom and not move into an administrative position after X time as a supervisor teacher. Discharged teachers have the usual just-cause union-contract right to appeal a discharge decision; do not know how much deference the union and/or an arbitrator would give to the supervisor teacher/committee decision; my guess is that both the union and the arbitrator would give the decision a lot of deference. On the other hand, high-stakes testing and principal-observes-and-evaluates discharges are extremely difficult to challenge on the merits — even if the union (if there is one) was willing to grieve to arbitration (or lawsuit), the neutral decision maker would probably be very reluctant to second-guess the VAM model or the principal’s judgment + in some school systems, the union contract, civil service rules, or statutory law effectively allows only procedural not substantive challenges (that is, the teacher/union can argue that the school system did not follow the correct procedures but, if the school system followed the correct procedures, then the discharge result stands).
The personal standards that most adults (or their children) use to judge a “bad” teacher are in the vast majority of cases insufficient grounds for dismissal. Just because a teacher’s style and methodologies doesn’t match a parent’s vision of what good teaching should be, doesn’t mean that they are incompetent. In fact the personal criteria that people have in their heads varies wildly, with of course some common ground. Within any classroom you would have no trouble finding student opinion that varies. When everyone agrees that a teacher is not capable or unwilling to teach at a reasonably competent level – the only question that remains is, where was the administrator or supervisor who let this happen. Never blame a “bad” teacher for their own existence.
My point is that virtually all parents/voters believe — drawing on personal experience — that there are “bad” teachers + that the traditional principal-observes-and-evaluates approach has allowed to these “bad” teachers to continue teaching. For this reason, parents/voters will eagerly support any reform that promises to identify/remove the “bad” teachers. Whether the parents/voters are factually correct that Teacher X is a “bad” teacher is irrelevant to this argument.
I could not have said it better myself!!! Thank you for being my voice!!!!!