Andrea Gabor reviews research produced by the Education Research Alliance of New Orleans about veteran teachers, those who taught before Hurricane Katrina and returned.
“ERA’s analysis provides an important before-and-after-the-storm glimpse of the city’s schools from a unique perspective—the small group of pre-Katrina teachers who returned to teaching following the storm, and who have remained in the classroom for over a decade. As New Orleans looks forward, the views of these returning pre-Katrina teachers are key; they are the survivors.
“In the wake of the mass firings following the storm, the teachers who returned to New Orleans and were still teaching at the time of the study, in the 2013/2014 school year, almost surely represent the city’s most experienced educators—and those with the closest community ties. While teachers with greater than 20 years of experience made up nearly 40 percent of the teaching force before the storm, that number has dropped to about 15 percent, according to another ERA study. Conversely, the number of inexperienced teacher with less than 5 years experienced now make up the majority of teachers, up from about 30 percent before the storm….
“Indeed, important characteristics of New Orleans reforms, including a high-rate of school closings and at-risk students cycling through multiple schools, are more likely to adversely impact high school students who, unlike their younger peers, are more likely to resist no-excuses culture of the non-selective New Orleans charters, and eventually to drop out. New Orleans also has done a terrible job of keeping track of kids who “fall between the cracks.”
“Education reformers like to say that “teachers are the single most important” school variable in a child’s education. As with so much else in the ed-reform debates, this is misleading. For surely, school stability and culture, which is controlled by school leaders—in the best cases, by cadres of teacher leaders—is as important as the role of individual teachers. School culture also helps determine just how much influence teachers have over curriculum, discipline and other policies. In my research, both quality education and teacher job satisfaction are highly correlated with schools that include teachers in such key decisions.
“In New Orleans, with a teacher cadre plagued by high turnover and sparse classroom experience, veteran teachers should be treasured. That so many say they have less job satisfaction than during the pre-Katrina years, suggests that they are not, which is surely a failing with implications far beyond just teacher morale.”
Ed reform is having another big event.
Guess what public schools get out of it?
You guessed it- ed tech! Our schools are only good for buying product. Other than that they aren’t even mentioned.
They won’t be satisfied until every district spends half their budget on tech product. Just one more way to weaken and destabilize existing public schools, but this one supports a brand new industry!
Ask yourself before you buy why they are pushing this so hard. Ask yourself why no one is even permitted to question whether this stuff adds value equaling investment for students and the public. Ask. Don’t let vendors of products tell you what you “need”
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/05/12/four-things-to-watch-for-at-new-schools-venture-fund-summit-next-weeks-big-education-reform-confab/
That’s the goal, to transfer much of the budget that is for staff into tech. Tech companies are pushing tech to replace traditional instruction.
Chiara, you are so right. The amount of useless tech that our district has bought and continues to buy boggles my mind. We appear to have no immunity to the blandishments of tech salespeople. We try to use the stuff for a year or two and then we fall for another sales pitch and buy a whole new round of “better” stuff that will soon be tossed out like the last batch. We are shoveling money to Silicon Valley when we should be hiring more teachers and building better buildings.
My experience may be different than the experience of ed reformers but I’ve been a public school parent for 25 years and I went to public schools and I have never seen a situation where parents prefer inexperienced teachers.
The opposite is true in my son’s school. They say “she’s new” or “he’s new” as meaning “less desirable”.
Is this effort to devalue experience connected to anything in the real world, or is it another economic theory?
Oh, it’s directly connected to the real world: new teachers have lower wages, little or no institutional memory (which might lead to resistance to so-called reforms that hurt students and teachers alike), no rights (as probationary teachers, they can be let go for any, or no, reason at all), and, if they are younger teachers, less likelihood of having experience with unions and their importance.
A veteran teacher is a potential obstacle to so-called reforms, in addition to just being too expensive; a new teacher is a potential temp, which is the employment model so-called reformers lust for.
As a “right to work” state, Louisiana like all of the south and much of midwest offers few protections to workers. Employers have all the power in these states, and unions can’t do too much other than throw a tantrum that gets ignored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
I’m guessing zero parents would prefer a new teacher to one with a few years+ in the classroom. Ed-reformers, like all right-wing & neolib anti-public-good politicians, wish voters with their pesky opinions, so annoyingly typical of participatory democracy, would just STFU.
it is a necessary step on the way to moving toward having low-paid no-job-security computer facilitators in place of teachers
What a surprise. Not to anyone who
Participated in real research, out of Harvard, on thr real PRINCIPLES OF Of
LEARNING!
Fourprinctples that ensured learning, were provided by the-administration. That supported classroom practice.