Fred LeBrun of the Albany Times-Union is the best mainstream journalist in New York state. He understands parents and teachers, and he writes sharp columns that explain more about the state of education than anything you will read in the editorial columns of the New York Times, which hews closely to the NCLB/RTTT narrative. This column is a critique of the recent statement issued by State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia and State University of New York President Nancy Zimpher, containing their proposals for elevating the teaching profession and recruiting more teachers. Take it from LeBrun, the proposals are hogwash that will make it harder to recruit new teachers.
He writes:
A national public school teaching shortage looms, with New York no exception.
This is not breaking news. We’ve known this was coming for some time, although New York poses an interesting set of internal contrasts and contradictions for what this actually means. Like most of the rest of the nation, New York faces a big bloc of baby boomers aging out as teachers and administrators, leaving a lot of holes to be filled.
That is nothing new, either, and not necessarily a bad thing. Retirements bring opportunity for new blood, fresh ideas and enthusiasm. Teachers, even very good ones, wear out.
New York has always been able to meet the challenge of filling classrooms in 700-plus school districts with qualified, accredited teachers because we arguably have, in the State University of New York, the best teacher preparation network of colleges in the nation for cranking them out. We are so good at it we’re a major provider of teachers for other states.
And therein lies New York’s problem. It’s not in creating qualified teachers, even with teacher preparation enrollment in New York dropping 40 percent in the last six years. It’s in keeping them in teaching and in the state, particularly in difficult assignments that aren’t hard to guess at.
Nor is it hard to guess why the college-bound are avoiding the teaching profession in droves, or leaving New York once they get a degree.
You’d have to live on another planet to be mystified. Across the country, public school teaching has gone through six years of organized disrespect by opportunistic politicians and morons with big money looking to privatize public education, abetted by morons with higher degrees in education with wing-nut ideas. Teachers have been deliberately made scapegoats for the far-reaching effects of poverty, demonized, demoralized and sneered at by the likes of Gov. Andrew Cuomo among others. Cuomo seemed to particularly relish humiliating teachers every chance he got, for reasons that remain a mystery. Public revulsion for what teachers were subjected to finally put a stop to it.
Morale within the teaching ranks has to be low, and my guess is recruitment for the retiring ranks will be tough for some time in parts of New York. You can thank Cuomo and his hedge fund friends for that.
So, when State University of New York Chancellor Nancy Zimpher* and Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia held a press conference last week to tout an extensive new TeachNY report leading into a campaign for recruiting teacher preparation applicants, it was timely.
I sat down and read all 140 pages of it, and all 62 recommendations. If you can spare a couple of hours, I recommend it. (http://tinyurl.com/hv4y2xc)
Not especially for the content. As I was painfully reminded, there is no gibberish like education gibberish. A good editor could knock it down to under 20 pages of actual English, with maybe a dozen rather ho-hum recommendations. But it’s worth looking at for what it markedly isn’t.
It has only marginally to do with how to recruit teachers to fill a coming shortage. I was astounded at how much a bait and switch it turned out to be, because the report is mostly about how to torque up requirements at those aforementioned teacher preparation colleges in order to make teaching far more demanding, even more rigorous in continual training and evaluation, even more time-consuming in delivery than it is now. More hoops to go through.
The net effect of the recommendations would be to elevate the requirements for becoming — and remaining — a teacher to roughly the status of brain surgery.
I was gobsmacked. Rather than attract more candidates to the profession, the thrust of this report, if executed, will chase more away. What are these people thinking was my first reaction.
Then I took a harder look at the language, and noticed bits like “data-driven” and “evidenced based” and “metrics,” and suddenly the reek of familiar garbage brought on a eureka moment. I’d seen this stuff before, in the justification and language associated with the utterly discredited state high stakes standardized testing tied to teacher evaluations nonsense. The work of the Common Core cadets. That took me to scanning the multitude of participants in this study, and sure enough there was the abominable John King himself, former state commissioner of education, high advocate of blame the teacher. Come to find out the TeachNY report was funded by Race to the Top, groan…..
We need respect for what a teacher is and does and can do, and build from there. This goofy report doesn’t come close.
LeBrun says that the real danger of the report is that any part of it might be picked up and enacted by the legislature, which has demonstrated repeatedly that it does not have a clue about improving education.
He points out that we need an army of new teachers, not a trickle. The recommendations of Elia and Zimpher will narrow the pipeline and make it more like a straw.
The best thing to do with this lengthy report is to ignore it.
Hopefully it is only online and no trees were felled to print it.
*Nancy Zimpher announced that she will step down as president of the State University of New York in September 2017:
http://www.nystateofpolitics.com/2016/05/suny-chancellor-zimpher-to-step-down/
Chancellor Nancy Zimpher says she will step down on June 30, 2017. Another “throw the handgrenade and run” official.
She’s almost 70, but she’s spry.
If you have a bird pet/s in a large cage, print it out and use it inside the cage so it gets what it deserves, bird poop.
Mr. Lofthouse, you have tickled my funnybone:o)
As a baby boomer I did finally wear out (well, a grand baby did enter the picture) and retired in March. Here in North Carolina we have been importing newby teachers from New York and several other northern states for decades. Now we are getting them from Jamaica!
It saddens me to think about who will be teaching my grand child and what she will be taught, some newfangled reading or math techniques someone will think is the best thing ever and teachers will once again be trained to pervert learning.
Why not become a grand-teacher for a home schooled grand-child?
Have you seen the headlines lately calling out our future of turning into a Substitute Nation?
It’s all there – the citations from NCTQ and Levine, the reframing of clinical experience to include simulations (a so-called “holistic” definition p. 33), the new admission criteria of a 3.0 GPA. What is strangely missing is the true death of recruitment – the GRE. This exam costs almost as much as the edTPA, has absolutely no connection to teaching and has never been studied as a predictor of teaching success because it was designed for those intending to do graduate research. This new admissions requirement in New York State starting this fall is already devastating enrollment numbers. What will the state do when there are no more teacher education programs? Expand Relay of course!
Alendandra,
Expand Relay of course!
Not a joke. Bill Gates has just poured money into this sham teacher prep operation for three years, along with several other operations based in Louisiana, Texas, Michigan, and Massachusetts–all designed to eliminate professional judgments and academic freedom in teaching teachers. These investments also come with a new Teacher Education Inspectorate, adapted from a British Model, intended to put all other accrediting systems in the dump. In other words, this is not just a NY issue.The impulse to exercise complete control over education and teacher preparation is moving into all of higher education in public colleges and universities.
In addition to union busting, the aim is to demolish the role of professional associations of teachers of English, Science, Mathematics, the Arts, World Languages, and teacher associations for varied roles such as preschool, special eduction, teacher education. Next up is higher education where programs and graduates must demonstrable contribution to the state economy, with salary earned by graduates tracked.
What is called “elevating” the profession is exactly the opposite and that language comes from McKinsey & Co. filtered through USDE spinners who think that teaching is best if it is test-driven and free of job security, but lots of temporary “career ladders.” They called that the RESPECT Project (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching) and the pitch was to”elevate” the profession–perfect pitch doublespeak.
The phoney baloney rating scheme forwarded by the National Council Council on Teacher Quality has been elaborated to include checklists of course syllibi for the use of specific books for teaching reading, and some “essential” teaching skills wildly misrepresented as proper conclusions from citations of educational research on teaching ” effectiveness.”
Nancy Zimpher and Michael Kirst in California were early shills for the Common Core and clueless about those standards except for the scripts that the Common Core press officers crafted for them.
Perhaps state officials are clueless about New York State’s teacher shortage because there isn’t actually a teacher shortage in New York State, with the usual, perennial, decades-long exception of high-school-level math, science, and language teachers.
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/education/2015/01/23/tough-job-market-teaching-candidates/22235837/
The reduction in the number of students enrolling in the state’s graduate schools of education is overdue; a response to the reality that the state’s programs are preparing far more teachers than what’s actually needed. Also missing from LeBrun’s analysis is a look at K-12 student enrollment trends in New York State. Few districts are seeing an increase in student population, many are in decline, many are flat. If you want a teaching job, you go to where there’s a population boom: Texas, Utah, Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas, the Dakotas, etc.
If so many teachers are fleeing New York (average teacher salary: about $80K) due to poor working conditions and a mean governor, hopefully in a future column LeBrun will document their actual stories.
I find it interesting how you rounded up average teacher pay in New York State to $80k from Annual mean wages in New York of secondary school teachers at $75,250.
In fact, to set the record straight and avoid your cherry picking and rounding up, New York offers the sixth best annual salary to beginning teaches in the nation at $41,079. That is a long way from your rounded up $80k.
And you didn’t mention that the price of living in New York is significantly higher than in most states.
http://www.teachingdegree.org/new-york/salary/
And of course after throwing out that rounded up $80K, why didn’t you mention how many teachers in New York earn anywhere near that. In addition, annual mean wage varies in New York by city. In Rochester it is $54,810 and in Buffalo-Niagra Falls $47,250.
Then there is this with citations from Wiki. To see the source of the citation, visit the Wiki site and click on the citation numbers.
Beginning in 2000, after experiments with hiring uncertified teachers to fulfill a massive teacher shortage failed to produce acceptable results, and responding to pressure from the New York State Board of Regents and the No Child Left Behind Act, the DOE instituted a number of innovative programs for teacher recruitment, including the New York City Teaching Fellows,[14] the TOP Scholars Program, and initiatives to bring foreign teachers (primarily from Eastern Europe) to teach in the city’s schools. Housing subsidies are in place for experienced teachers who relocate to the city to teach.[15]
In the course of school reorganizations, some veteran teachers have lost their positions. They then enter a pool of substitutes, called the Absent Teacher Reserve. On November 19, 2008, the Department and the city’s teacher union (the United Federation of Teachers), reached an agreement to create financial incentives for principals of new schools to hire ATR teachers and guidance counselors.[16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Department_of_Education#Teachers
And this expose from Politico.com: As shortage looms, state rethinks how it recruits and treats its teachers ( March 7, 2016)
“And while about a third of the state’s classroom teachers will soon be approaching retirement age, only half that many are 32 or younger, according to 2014-15 data.” …
“Enrollments in education schools, applications to education schools, are plummeting — and not by a little bit. By huge amounts,” said John Ewing, president of Math for America, a fellowship program focused on creating professional development communities to support math and science teachers. “Even if there is no shortage right now, it’s pretty clear we’re headed for trouble.”
http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/03/as-shortage-looms-state-rethinks-how-it-recruits-and-treats-its-teachers-032004
Hi, Lloyd,
The average salary you quote is from the 2012-2013 school year, and the average salary in NYS is much closer (and possibly even more than) $80,000 today.
I’m not sure why you went all the way back to 2010 for your source for NY’s average starting teacher salary. The NEA calculated $43,839 in 2012-2013, trailing only NJ and Alaska among states. In New York City, the base starting salary for an NYC DOE teacher in 2016-2017 ($51,791 — this is for a teacher with a BA who is getting a master’s on the job; most will get closer to $60,000) compares quite favorably to the city’s median household income ($52,737, 2010-2014, in 2014 dollars).
And yes, thanks for the timeless reminder about what an average is, and for reminding us that New York has some areas with very high costs of living (like Scarsdale, average teacher salary >$130,000) and some where the cost of living is comparable to the US average.
I find it interesting how you ignore all the data you can’t challenge and only pick on what you think is the weak link.
Tim, when I Googled the issue, that’s what came up. I returned to Google and here is a few up-to-date pay schedules for a few different school districts in New York State – date April 2016.
Is this data too old for you too? If you click on the links and visit each site, scroll down to see the chart that shows the bottom 10% and the top 10% earning the highest pay.
Repeat, the top 10% only earns the kind of money you carelessly throw around without bothering to mention the bottom 10% that earns the lowest teacher pay or the median. This is only a sample of what is available from salary.com.
“The median annual Public School Teacher salary in Albany, NY is $51,170, as of April 26, 2016, with a range usually between $44,675-$59,084 not including bonus and benefit information and other factors that impact base pay.”
The top 10% of all teachers in this NY district earn $66,290, the top of the pay scale. That means 90% of the teachers earn less.
http://www1.salary.com/NY/Albany/Public-School-Teacher-salary.html
The median annual Public School Teacher salary in Brentwood, NY is $59,531, as of April 26, 2016, with a range usually between $51,974-$68,738 not including bonus and benefit information and other factors that impact base pay.
The top 10% of all teachers earn $77,121. That means 90% of the teachers earn less.
http://www1.salary.com/NY/Brentwood/Public-School-Teacher-salary.html
The median annual Public School Teacher salary in Buffalo, NY is $50,973, as of April 26, 2016, with a range usually between $44,503-$58,857 not including bonus and benefit information and other factors that impact base pay.
The top 10% of all teachers in this school district earn $66,035. That means 90% of the teachers earn less.
http://www1.salary.com/NY/Buffalo/Public-School-Teacher-salary.html
The median annual Public School Teacher salary in Jamestown, NY is $49,925, as of April 26, 2016, with a range usually between $43,587-$57,647 not including bonus and benefit information and other factors that impact base pay.
Scroll down again and discover that the top 10% of all teachers in this school district earn $64,677. That means 90% of the teachers earn less.
http://www1.salary.com/NY/Jamestown/Public-School-Teacher-salary.html
Saved for last – NEW YORK CITY
The median annual Public School Teacher salary in New York, NY is $62,751, as of April 26, 2016, with a range usually between $54,785-$72,456 not including bonus and benefit information and other factors that impact base pay.
What about that to 10% again, the professional, veteran teachers that put up with the Tim’s of the world and stuck it out for decades so they climbed to the top of the pay scale?
Ah, now we are talking about what Tim allegedly wants everyone to think – that all teachers in New York City earn more than $80 grand annually when only the top 10% does in that one New York State school district in a state with 733 school districts.
The top 10% of teachers in New York City earn $81,292 annually. New York City serves 1.1 million students out of more than 2.7 million in New York State in over 1,800 NY City schools out of 4,817 public school in New York State. There are about 70 thousand teachers in New York City. That means less than 7,000 earn above $80,000 and 62,000 earn less.
http://www1.salary.com/NY/New-York/Public-School-Teacher-salary.html
Lloyd,
You claimed that I was cherry picking data in saying the average teacher salary in New York State is around $80,000 (per the most recently available statistics from the NCES, from 2012-2013, the average teacher salary in New York State is $75,300). Now you are trying to deflect, obfuscate, and misinform by — you guessed it! — cherry picking data.
That would be bad enough, but what’s worse is that you chose an inaccurate data source for your cherry picking. Salary.com’s figures are derived by surveys and estimates, not credible data.
Fortunately, we have primary source data at hand–and I know that as a teacher, you surely taught your students the importance of seeking out primary sources and reliable data.
Every year, all NYS districts (with a handful of exceptions–more on that later) report real, actual salary data to the state education department, which in turn publishes an enormous database containing an insane amount of salary information. Thankfully, some poor bastards at the Syracuse Post-Standard / Syracuse.com take that database and convert it into something that’s easily searched and digestible. A direct link to their work is here: http://b5.caspio.com/dp.asp?AppKey=39083000e0cb28ae789b460580b1
The median teacher salary in Albany, NY, is not $51,170, as Salary.com claims; it is actually $76,215.
The median teacher salary in Brentwood, NY, is not $59,531, as Salary.com claims; it is actually $106,040.
The median teacher salary in Buffalo, NY, is not $50,973, as Salary.com claims; it is actually $50,104 (hey, they came close to getting one right!).
The median teacher salary in Jamestown, NY, is not $49,925, as Salary.com claims; it is $58,668 (note: this figure is from the 2013-2014 school year; districts may not report current data if they are in contract negotiations)
And, last but not least, the median teacher salary in beautiful New York City, my hometown, is not $62,751 as Salary.com claims; it ranges among its 32 community school districts from a low of $71,306 to a high of $80,470.
The most recently available data from NCES, from 2012-2013, puts the average NYS teacher salary at $75,300–it is higher today. The median salary is likely a bit lower, but still in the top 5 of all US states. All of this is to say that teaching is and will remain an attractive and sought-after job in New York State for the foreseeable future.
I am extremely confident there won’t be a teacher shortage, regardless of what panicked people whose livelihoods depend on head count at schools of education in New York State are saying. LeBrun’s is free to make the claim that people are avoiding the profession because of our mean reptilian governor and hedge funders, and I’m free to point out that he doesn’t provide a single shred of evidence that his claim is true.
You are not the expert to claim what sources are valid. You are just one person.
Lloyd,
Although I have several assistants, you are correct: I’m only one person. Fred LeBrun is one person. Diane Ravitch? One person. You? Also one person
We should be skeptical of the claims made by any one person, and hold it up against the best available evidence from the most credible and reliable sources.
On the flip side of your alleged attempt to make it seem that public school teachers are being overpaid is the fact that this is what teachers should be paid. Starting pay for public school teachers across the country should be $80k annually and then go up from there to twice or more. I actually earned about $80k in my last year of teaching but not because of my base pay. I earned that much because I taught summer school and gave up my prep period for an extra class. Instead of teaching five classes with a prep period, I was teaching six classes. The average class load was 34 students. To earn that extra money my last year of teaching, I went from working with 170 students to 204.
The actual time a teacher works is not only the few hours of instructional time each day. For every assignment, there’s about an hour or more of correcting per class. That means, if you teach six classes, you have about six hours of correcting to do that same day. Then there is planning and prepping for lessons that often includes creating material for the lessons and then there are the endless meetings that are often a waste of time in addition to reaching out in an attempt to reach parents/guardians of students who are not making an effort to learn what is taught. You know, the students that most if not all corporate charter schools are getting rid of because they are a challenge to educate and don’t test well.
To get ready to teach, many teachers arrive an hour or more before the students. In fact, I often arrived when the custodians unlocked the gates at 6 AM and was still there at 4 or 5 PM, and when I was teaching four sections of English and one of journalism, I was often there until the alarms were turned on between 10 and 11 PM. I wasn’t the only teacher on campus when the custodians went door to door telling us we had to leave because the alarms were being turned on. And I wasn’t the only teacher that arrived soon after the gates were unlocked at 6 AM.
Teachers earn a monthly salary. They are not paid by the hour. If a teacher is paid $80k annually, that means they earn about $1,530 dollars a week for a 52 week year. If we only focus on the 40 working weeks when teachers are in class teaching and at home planning and correcting, then teachers are paid $2,000 a week. In 2012 The Washington Post reports that teachers work 53 hours per week on average. That means the average teacher that earns $80k annually is being paid less than $38 an hour for their work educating the nation’s children. But what about teachers starting out at the bottom of the pay scale who are putting in the same hours as the teachers at the top of the pay scale who have been in the classwork for thirty or more years?
National salary data on teacher pay reported that the average salary for all k-12 teachers was about $45,000. (updated May 26, 2016). That means a beginning teacher working 53 hours a week is paid about $21 for their work.
But what about teachers that worked more than 53 hours a week like me who often worked 60 to 100 hours a week? Before my last year of teaching, I was earning about $68k. I had almost thirty years on the pay scale with a master’s degree. I wasn’t at the top of the pay scale but I was much closer to it than a teacher starting out.
That translated to $17 an hour when I put in a 100 hour week. And you dare to disparage all teachers for the few in New York City that finally reached $80k a year when there are about 15,000 school districts in this country where many teachers earn a lot less.
And here is the actual pay scale for teachers in New York City’s public schools from the primary source.
Base pay for a starting teacher in their first year with only a BA is $51,650. After 22 years of teaching with a BA, a masters and 30 additional credits, that pay climbs to $108,811, the top of the pay scale.
Click to access salary.pdf
Lloyd,
On the subject of teachers’ salaries, consider the situation in North Carolina. The entry salary was recently raised to $35,000. But the top salary is capped at $50,000. What profession pays so little to its experienced practitioners?
The lovers of for profit at any cost publicly funded often fraudulent and inferior autocratic and opaque corporate charter schools, like Tim, want to make public school teachers look overpaid so Tim focuses on only the highest teacher pay in New York City that 10% of the teachers earn while the rest earn less. Tim, where is the balance in your biased accusations that are supported with misleading cherry picked facts?
Tim, here’s the quote from the end of Lloyd’s post from John Ewing:
“Even if there is no shortage right now, it’s pretty clear we’re headed for trouble.”
The shortage is definitely coming. I live in Michigan which has some respected teaching programs. They are all under capacity. Eastern Michigan University, a leader in teacher ed programs, is nowhere near its usual applicants pool. The shortage is out there.
I believe UCLA has a freshman norms survey and in this year’s edition, they noted that interest in pursuing education degrees was at an all-time low.
You are right that populations are flat and declining in many places which means that teachers are not necessarily replaced upon leaving the field for whatever reason. Definitely true in Michigan where the state is grayer and poorer than it was 20 years ago.
But, see, here’s the crack-up about right-wing ideology on schools. They kill the pensions, the benefits, the working conditions and create evaluation processes that are burdensome and non-sensical. Then the Republicans say that they can’t wait to get the “bad teachers” (which apparently is nearly all of them) out of classrooms. And replace them with what? They act like there’s this army of awesome teachers chomping at the bit for jobs.
There isn’t. I see young teachers leaving the field all the time. And it isn’t because of seniority and layoffs. They see quarter step raises. Worsening benefits. 401(k) plans. Little respect. Even promising young teachers don’t see the point in staying.
And I know you love charters, Tim, but the pay there is awful and turnover is tremendous. When my school has an opening, charter teachers are calling constantly to get in. And my district just had a sizable pay cut imposed on us!
Alternative certification isn’t happening because it’s good for kids. It’s happening because there’s no other way to staff classrooms soon. We can’t even find subs. When I started 20 years ago, there were young subs who had just finished student-teaching and were looking for jobs. 90% of my subs are now retirees (and not from the teaching field).
Maybe things will correct, but the trend is leading to a shortage.
Tim your entry shows what a troll you are. We can’t find enough teachers in my district and many classes have had subs all year. Special Ed is VERY hard to fill. Why would anyone want to go into this field anymore? I would love to see you teach in the Bronx for a year. A week. A day. I bet you are sitting in your cushy Manhattan office surrounded with panelled walls and “assistants doing your biding”. You need a reality check.
I need my multiple assistants; these award-winning internet comments aren’t going to draft themselves!
Join the Revolution,
I teach in a highly diverse lower middle class suburb in Detroit. We lost an English teacher when her husband received a job transfer in October. She gave the school notice before Labor Day. We were unable to fill the position until after Thanksgiving. We had a long-term sub using other teacher lesson plans for five weeks.
Teacher pay in NYS is decent. It is higher than many other professional jobs in our region that also require masters degrees. Yet we still hemorrhage teachers like there is no tomorrow, especially newer ones that don’t have years invested in the retirement system. There is obviously way more going on here than simple economics. I don’t think raising the salaries of teacher in NYS, unless salaries doubled or something, would do much to improve the situation unless lots of other things change, including reduce the among of micromanaging by the state.
And, hey, if you know of any certified health or Spanish teachers that want to teach in the relatively affordable upstate region with a starting salary of $52,000, there are positions open. Warning – each of these classes went through 3 teachers last year.
All I can say is I’m 57, retiring in June and may have gone two more years until my wife retires.
No way that’s happening with all the BS that Cuomo, King and Duncan have rained down on us (or would that be reigned with King Andy?)
Sad to leave the kids, ecstatic to leave the crap regulations, APPR and lemming administrators and colleagues behind.
I’ll substitute teach knowing full well I can just say no at any time!
I’ve got a real bad feeling about public education in NY, and what’s really scary is that it’s worse in the South.
Good luck youngsters, you’ll need it.
I can’t believe New York is worse than North Carolina, although I agree New York’s policies are terrible. At least, some of the Regents have a foundation in public education, and they have the potential to bring some evidence based suggestions to the table.
Sorry if you misunderstood me, I meant the South is even worse than NY, which is hard to comprehend.
Sorry. I need some ‘close reading.’ I missed “in.” Anyway, enjoy retirement. I retired from NY six years ago, and my life is a lot less stressful. I do miss my students though.
Ha! No more close reading for this cowboy unless it’s a menu!
Oh my goodness, how eloquently and honestly written. The man knows. Let’s hope he keeps writing and outing the political establishment and its role in demonizing education and demoralizing teachers………….GOOD article.
Remember when Rosie Ruiz took a subway shortcut to “win” the Boston Marathon? The win did not last. The honest victory went to those who prepared well and then took on the long grind, the aches, pain and time to run the entire 26 miles course. So it is with current education reformers. They want the title of Winner, without doing the hard work. They want results that others get without doing what they do to get there. They try to run on shortcuts. They do not invest in the social supports that other countries enact to mediate the effects of poverty. They do not invest in mediating poverty itself. They want professional performance without professional development. They want to shortcut teacher development. They want to shortcut developing responsible young people through no-excuses behavior management. They want to shortcut the long slog of teaching for deep learning through test preparation. They are unwilling to engage in the behaviors they prescribe for others: persistence and use of evidence.
http://www.arthurcamins.com
Agree with Tim re: the problems with inferring teacher shortages from declines in education school enrollment.
As W. Edwards Deming observed, one of your best recruiters/salespeople is a satisfied employee/customer. Right away rheephormsters get it wrong.
The rheephorm response to any difficulty is to pile on: make teaching less attractive and less professional and less effective in terms of genuine teaching and learning. And has anyone inside the rheephorm bubble ever heard about student debt?
But, of course, one simply must throw bucketfuls of $tudent $ucce$$ at outside consultants that never set foot in a classroom because, er—it’s all about the kids?!?!? And don’t forget the vendors of t-shirts and beanies…
Then there’s California.
Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-pol-sac-cap-20160208-column.html
When finished with the above, read George Skelton’s follow-up piece of 2-15-2016.
Interestingly, the first piece has 83 comments and the second 417 [when I looked], quite a few for any LATIMES pieces.
Never fear, though, for on Rhee World where Happy Thoughts fill the ether, there is no teacher shortage. Nothing to see here. Move along.
😎
P.S. Arthur Camins: very well put!
Puts me in mind of something written by a genuine American hero:
“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” [Frederick Douglass]
When it comes to education, rheephormsters are precisely those that want the crops without plowing up the ground.
Prospective teacher shortages?
I’m sure Wendy Kopp is glad to hear it.
I emailed this to Mr. LeBrun with gratitude:
Dear Mr LeBrun
Thank you for your piece on the ludicrous report on the teacher shortage NY faces in the near future. Who indeed would choose to spend four years and take on a huge student debt to enter such a risky, distrusted, humiliated “profession” where expertise and experience are liabilities? Under this system, prospects of certification and tenure are virtually unattainable, especially if one teaches children who are challenged by poverty, disability, and/or language barriers. As a recently retired special education teacher, I grieve for what has happened to a once intrinsically rewarding profession, and for our vulnerable children who will face a revolving door of fearful and overstressed teachers.
I hope courageous journalists like you will continue to speak out and inform the public that our emperors have no clothes- that the “fix” for these manufactured crises will destroy public education.
Terry Kalb
” there is no gibberish like education gibberish.”
Indeed. When I participated as the NYC cohort for the real Pew funded National Standards Research on the Principles of Learning (conducted by the LRDC of the University of Pittsburgh) the question of WHAT DOES LEARNING LOOK LIKE, was introduced that first week.
It is so easy to bamboozle people, even smart, educated people with magic elixirs and pretty bulletin boards. But the evidence of learning is easy to spot when performance standards are in place… which is why this research disappeared…POOF!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
With the LCLB act waiting in the wings, and Pearson salivating to get the testing mania into the schools, the gibberish began… no evidence required, http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
Yes, teacher salaries are relatively high in NYS. This is balanced by the very punitive actions by the recent state legislature against NYS teachers. It’s anecdotal, but my former student teacher tells me her education programs are down about 40% in enrollment.
Yes- Dowling College on Long Island where many local teachers earned their degrees in education suddenly announced it is closing its doors for good this month.
If NY is having a shortage, they sure don’t want to make it easy to transfer in. I am from a state that uses the same fingerprint vendor that NY has.. I cannot get my fingerprints transferred to NY. Both the vendor and the state have told me it can’t be done. So I have to drive to NY before I move to get my fingerprints done by the same company so I can apply for positions. What a world.
The problem is not the number of applicants to teacher certification programs, but rather the quality of those applicants.
And you speak for every teacher certification program in the country?
Teacher shortage in NY?? Really??? Tell me where this NY teacher shortage is and I will go teach there because I haven’t been able to get so much as a per diem substitute teaching job anywhere on Long Island or in NYC in the past 6+ years. And I haven’t been able to obtain any permanent teaching positions in my entire 20+ years as a certified teacher because there has never been enough demand for teachers on Long Island and NYC, so my 20 years as a certified teacher has been spent in low paying dead end kinds of teaching positions including substituting in public schools, leave replacement teaching positions, and part time teaching in a low paying preschool, and I have spent 6+ of those years unemployed because the teaching job market has gotten so much worse that I cannot even get a substitute teaching position at this point. I have also read complaints all over the Internet from other unemployed teachers in my area, so how is it possible NY is suffering from a teacher shortage and how could NY be desperate for teachers when there are thousands of us right here on Long Island waiting for any teaching jobs to open up?? I am a well educated, qualified, certified, and experienced teacher who is willing and eager to work and yet I am struggling to survive with my family on Long Island on one income because every attempt I have made just to get on a substitute teacher list has been a brick wall because I don’t have “connections” and I don’t “know somebody.” There is an extremely disgusting level of “cliquey” educators in Long Island schools so you better “know somebody” if you even want a job as a lowly substitute teacher because the door is locked tight to all “outsiders” and no unknown teachers can get a foot in that door! And the cliquey teaching community in NYC is just as bad, including inner city schools, because if you don’t have a connection or “know somebody” then you have NO chance at getting any kind of teaching or substituting job in any NYC schools. I experienced just how cliquey Long Island schools and NYC schools truly are throughout the 6 years that I have been trying to get a substitute teaching job and I was repeatedly faced with the cliquey “we don’t know you” mentality. And when I walked into several schools in NYC nobody was even interested in a qualified eager teacher they didn’t know unless I had a connection or “knew somebody”. And when I walked into a school in Hollis queens I learned just how drastic this cliquey need to “know somebody” really is because the assistant principal in Hollis queens said, “we don’t know you, we can’t hire somebody we don’t even know…” When I walked in with my resume eager to just get on the substitute teacher list. So I would like to know where exactly this “teacher shortage” is because if somebody will give me a job I will gladly teach in any school!
Where is my comment posted?