Nancy Bailey writes here about the public wringing of hands over the teacher shortage.
This is an excellent post. She takes no prisoners and names names.
Who created the teacher shortage?
Start with Betsy DeVos. Nancy feels sure that she would like to replace teachers with computers. She cares. Right.
Then there is Teach for America. Big corporations fell in love with the idea of sending in raw recruits to America’s toughest classroom. They chose Wendy Kopp of the nation’s queen of all teachers, even though she never taught a day in her life. They still pour millions into this “destroy-the-teaching-profession” operation.
Let’s not forget the media! In addition to the teacher bashers who get face time on TV, like Campbell Brown, Jonathan Alter, and John Stossel, never forget the covers of TIME and Newsweek that insulted every teacher in America. There was that Newsweek cover that said, again and again, “we must fire bad teachers,” as though the nation’s schools were overrun with them. And the TIME cover complaining about teachers as “Rotten Apples.” She forgot the memorable covers of Michele Rhee, who promised to sweep the human debris out of classrooms and show the world how to fix all schools.
Behind all this teacher bashing is money. Replacing teachers, who may be low paid but nonetheless cost more than a machine, with technology.
What a hoax!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
Agree with, “What a hoax!”
So terrible that we have to spend our time fighting to do our jobs, because of the DEFORMERS.
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Sigh. Not to excuse DeVos – she’s definitely part of the problem. But why does she get all the political blame? Did time start last January? What about Obama, Duncan and King? What, we had eight glorious years of praise and support lavished on public education and public school teachers, then Trump and DeVos went and ruined it all?
I know I sound like a broken record, but we cannot get out of the mess we’re in if we fail to properly attribute the blame for it where it belongs – both parties. If anything, the Democrats are worse because at least we don’t expect Republicans to be our allies – they are pretty open about their disdain for all things “gubmint”. But the Democrats tell us pretty words to our faces and stab us in the back.
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I agree, Dienne. I go further back to W (and I know some on here go still further back than that), but the Democrats — starting with the late Senator Ted Kennedy — as well have been devastating for the teaching profession…with not a single well-known example standing up for us.
If I had to pick someone to start with, it might be Bill Gates. But it also might be W.
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YES.
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Who cares when it started. Does every discussion have to be prefaced with a list of all the bad actors? Nancy appropriately notes that teacher bashing has been going on for a very long time. She is not doing a blame game piece; Devos gets mentioned because she is the current iteration of bad policy. Nancy rightly focuses on the issue from another angle. If these people were really interested in alleviating the teacher shortage why hasn’t there been active recruiting of those who have lost their jobs for bogus reformster rationales. There is a lot of talent out there sitting on the sideline.
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TFA recruiting is down, which is probably because the economy is better, which tells you something about TFA recruits- not their first choice for employment.
That’s okay but the truth is when better-paying jobs become available they don’t flock to TFA, which probably means for some portion of them it’s a fall-back or resume-builder when they can’t get what they consider a “better” job. That’s not really reflective of the passionate commitment to students we’re always told about.
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Young people considering TFA may also have heard from other people that working in charters is a thankless, stressful job with no future. That is why they want to create an alternate “certifying” track to try to exploit and retain people in a dead end job.
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Honestly I’m on a school committee and it has been a real eye-opener. A lot of parents are just terrible. I certainly include myself in that- I’m no prize- but one thing I don’t do is blame the school or the teachers for every failing or problem with my kids.
If ed reform were honest and brave they would address this- many parents treat schools as if the school is supposed to take their child and churn out some kind of finished product. There’s a REAL lack of accountability here but I don’t see most of it as coming from teachers.
Even simple things- showing up. The school requests children show up regularly and on time. This somehow gets twisted around as the school’s fault when it doesn’t “happen” but it’s not something that “happens”. It’s 100% the parents doing- they GET THEM to school. That seems like a minimum amount of parental effort to me- they sure aren’t going to learn anything if they’re not there.
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With so many additional reasons attached to why poor students have a lower attendance rate and a weaker parental involvement, savvy school “reformers” have had a heyday attaching penalties to those school which do not get a specific attendance rate or a specific percent of parent involvement. It is simply one more way to keep low-income-serving schools in the “red” zone, ripe for closure as gentrification ramps up.
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As so often with you, Chiara, well said.
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To that let me add the overall disrespect given the profession. What will end a shortage? Competitive wages comparable to those given to university peers that go into law, business, or finance. Many would love to teach but simply cannot afford to. There is a strong correlation between the growing inequity in wages in those professions from the 1970’s through today and the” increasing decrease” in those who go into teaching.
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The flip side of income is expenses. College debt costs are crushing.
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I’m betting that there is not a teacher shortage in Finland, where teachers are respected as the professionals they are, and paid well.
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Presumably this is good news for new graduates entering the profession. Should be relatively easy to find teaching jobs.
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I was also thinking of the students growing up in our school systems in the era of testing and other federal mandates. Teachers may not be as inspiring as they have many restraints put on the way they teach or what they teach. They see tired, stressed teachers, running from meeting to meeting. Not to mention the number of students we see who are not available to learn due to a trauma background, health issues, students living in poverty not getting their needs met, or a lack of appreciation for education. Inspiring our children has never felt so difficult.
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I’ll say. Once upon a time teachers said, “Today we’re going to read an amazing story!” In our current era of mutant education they say, “Today we’re going to ‘describe the logical connection between particular sentences and paragraphs in a text to support particular points in a text’.”
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LOL. Yes.
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The teacher shortage is due to massive campaign that has been bashing public school teachers for the past decade. In addition to TFA, the media and technology, there is another more dystopian reason. There has been deliberate collusion between corporations and many politicians to starve public schools of resources and test students ad nauseum with a goal of making public schools fail in order to privatize them. Despite an improved economy, more than half the states continue to slash education budgets to deliberately cripple the efforts of public schools, Many members of both parties have demonstrated repeated partiality to charters and/or vouchers and disdain for public schools. If the public remains passive to such unethical behavior, ALEC, assorted billionaires, hedge fund managers and corporations will continue to crush our public schools without any regard for the students that attend them.https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/11511/
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Well said!
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If I were a young person going to college today, I don’t think that I would consider going into teaching.
I loved teaching, I loved my special ed kiddos.
But what teaching has become, no, that would not attract me.
(Not to mention the ever- decreasing resources given to special education in many states and districts, and the expectation in many states that the special ed kids will pass the same tests as the other kids. No kids should be subjected to this testing regimen. None of them. Get rid of those tests.)
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Excellent point. We need to consider not only how discouraged teachers have become, but our students as well. How disheartening for those of our students who have to sit through tests well beyond their capabilities. As an educator I don’t encourage parents to have their child opt out, but I certainly do as a parent.
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I agree the public pillaging of teachers is demoralizing, but so is the job itself. My job went from fun, creative, and rewarding, to meetings, goal analysis, testing, more testing, explanations of interventions, and off-site “experts” choosing when, how, and what I should be teaching every minute of the day. New programs were implemented, often with minimal training, then tossed out quickly for a newer, shinier program. And the employee review process was onerous and time consuming, with little benefit for the teacher to reflect and improve, just more hoops to jump through. I loved teaching, was good at it, respected by parents and colleagues, loved my students, but found myself getting so demoralized by the couldn’t-wait-to-get-out-of-the-classroom-crew from downtown demanding full implementation of their latest craze without ANY input from me – the expert IN the room, with the experience, training, and full knowledge of the students in my class. There was zero respect for me as a professional, despite stellar reviews from my administrators. Now my son wants to be a teacher and I’m not encouraging him to do it.
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“New programs were implemented, often with minimal training, then tossed out quickly for a newer, shinier program.”
Those “programs” do not institute themselves. It takes willing adminimals to be the instigators of those programs.
Along with willing GAGA Good German teachers who put personal expediency over justice for the students.
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Well said, Ms. Walsh. Your experience is that of millions of teachers now. Thank you for your service, and for speaking the truth here. See my note, below.
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“Things One and Two”
The teachers got a DunKing
With Duncan and with King
A teacher-bashing VAMming
Barack Obama’s Thing
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If only Obama knew how stultifying the Brave New Education he helped launch is. I’m sure it’s the antithesis of what he got at Punahou, and what his daughters got at Sidwell Friends. He was bamboozled by Duncan, Coleman and the other slick edu-fraud salesmen. I don’t really blame him for not doing a deep dive into education; he had a lot of balls in the air.
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Obama had to raise money to run for president. He was the inaugural speaker at the first meeting of DFER in a NYC penthouse. He sold out public education for campaign contributions from hedge funders.
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“It takes two to Tango”
The tango is a dance
That puts you in a trance
And tango takes a couple
Who both are very supple
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Why should Obama get a pass for the damage he did? We have to be willing to call out even those politicians we admire when they institute horrible policy.
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Thank you for posting, Diane. You’re right about how I should have included TIME’s Michelle Rhee piece. I’ve tried to put her out of my mind. I guess I succeeded!
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Don’t let it be forgot that Amanda Ripley of TIME turned Rhee into the savior of American education. She wrote that dreadful cover story.
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“Ripley’s Believe it or Not”
Let it not
Be forgot
Ripley brought
Rhee to spot
All we got
Was the rot
In the pot
Salem’s lot
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Salem’s Lot, complete with broomstick
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I nominate SomeDAM poet for poet laureate
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Outstanding piece, Ms. Bailey. Thank you.
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Years ago, I attended Indiana University, where I took a double major in English and Psychology and completed all the work required to receive what was called, then, a “lifetime certification” to teach high-school English, which I did for three years before taking a job in educational publishing so that I could actually support my family. For twenty-five years, I wrote and edited textbooks for use in K-college English classrooms. The list of my textbook publications (and online educational materials programs) runs to twenty-five pages, single spaced. At one time, it was difficult to find a K-12 English classroom in the United States where one or more of my textbooks was not being used—books on writing, literature, grammar, African-American studies, and much else.
The Hindus say that in the latter part of a life, one must quit the things of this world and devote one’s self to things of the spirit. I decided to do that. At the end of my career, I returned to my first love, teaching, which would give me an opportunity to apply in classrooms what I had learned from several decades of applying myself assiduously to learning how to teach English language arts. Teaching and nursing are the two holiest of professions.
In order to get a teaching job in Florida, I had to
–Pay for and take SEVEN tests prepared and administered by the Ed Deform simpletons at Pearson
–Complete a 20-page online application form
–Submit letters of recommendation, and
–Provide body fluids for drug testing
On the job as a teacher of English, Film, and Debate, I had to
–Prepare, in the first year, an 800-page binder documenting every aspect of my teaching
–Submit to three formal evaluations and countless informal ones every year
–Complete a yearly Individual Professional Development Plan
–Complete 300 hours of utterly useless online ESL training that seemed, from the factual inaccuracies and grammatical errors throughout the materials, to have been prepared for five-year-olds by people with severe cognitive deficits
–Fill out several thousand 504, IEP, ESL, and PMP (progress monitoring plan) updates
–Prepare Data Walls and materials for Data Chats—exercises in pseudoscientific numerology
–Attend a summer AP English institute
–Proctor absurdly designed, punitive, soul-destroying standardized pretests, benchmark tests, and test tests
–Serve as a crossing guard every morning and afternoon
–Attend parent-teacher conferences weekly, sometimes daily
–Deal with parents who wanted to sue me because I insisted that their 11th-graders put end marks at the ends of their sentences
–Attend ”trainings” (“roll over, sit up, good boy”) for people with IQs of 65 on gang violence, bullying, drugs in school, blood-borne illness, test data, test data, test data, test data, test data, and more test data
–Prepare, for each class, a two-page lesson plan form and have these in binders for review whenever an administrator entered my class
–Keep a log of every parent contact—emails, telephone calls, meetings
–Post my grades and attendance both in a paper book and online
–Coach extracurriculars (speech and debate, theatre)
–Chaperone dances and numerous other evening events
–Prepare materials for and be present at parent nights
–Prepare to teach 22 or 23 classes a week (one year, for FIVE separate preps)
–Print and post reports of my ongoing data stream, in particular formats, with charts and graphs
–Grade, grade, grade, and grade some more. If I assigned my 150 or so students a single paragraph to write, I would have a novella to read and respond to. All day and evening, every Saturday, spend doing this, and often on Sunday as well.
–And somehow find time actually to interact, one-on-one, with my unique students, each with their enormous, unique needs, proclivities, interests, and potentials
And that’s only a partial list. I worked FAR, FAR harder as a teacher of high-school English than I did as an Executive Vice President at a billion-dollar-a-year publishing company.
And all for a salary less than what a checkout person at the local grocery makes.
Who wouldn’t want to do this?
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The Education Deformers, with their data walls and standardized [sic] tests, and their incessant teacher-bashing, have made my beloved field–the teaching of English–into a nightmare that I would not wish on any young person.
Except that I do. Teaching is the most sacred of professions. This is the profession of the Buddha, of Lao Tze, of Zhuang-zi, of Socrates and Jesus of Nazareth, of Hildegard of Bingen, of Teresa of Ávila, of the Baal Shem Tov, of Rumi, and of our own beloved Diane Ravitch. Teaching and nursing are the most holy of professions, and the Ed Deformers, with their numerology, blaspheme down the stations of the spirit.
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Your description of what was required of you should be emblazoned across the front page of a major newspaper. I thought I was going to have a panic attack.
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The list above is far, far from complete. For example, I also had to post for every class, on a whiteboard, an Essential Question, Higher-order Thinking Skills Question, Student Outcome, Bellwork, Academic Vocabulary List, and Home Learning (homework).
What has happened is that over the years, every time some administrator had a brainstorm or read something in an Ed Deformer publication, a new requirement was added. No one every actually tallied up the time involved.
Add to this responding to about 10-12 emails per day from administrators, all of them marked URGENT!
Oh, I forgot department meetings.
I could go on. . .
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When I started teaching at my last job in a low income high school, I noticed this acronym on one of the teachers’ blackboard that I had never seen before–SWBAT. She was horrified that I didn’t know what it was and hadn’t been putting it on my own board. (I was hired at the last minute and missed orientation week). Every day we were to list exactly what we expected the students to be able to do by the end of class. Students Will Be Able To… We called it “swibot.” Now, I had always found it handy to write a short list of what I wanted to accomplish on the board, so I didn’t forget anything or could readjust on the fly, but SWBAT was the required heading for every teacher’s blackboard. That along with “Do Nows” and “Exit Slips” were a few of the devices meant to make sure we used every second productively.
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A person has to be a complete idiot or an unthinking automaton to assume that every lesson by every teacher in every class can or should be described using such simple-minded formulae. These mandated formulae are symptomatic of a much more general phenomenon–utter lack of respect for teachers and THEIR learning and judgment. Teachers are routinely talked down to and scripted by administrators whose own learning goes no deeper than having picked up a few acronyms in “education school.” How profoundly unthinking and uneducated one has to be to believe that every piece of writing by every student on every topic can be reduced to a formula like R.A.C.E.–restate the question, answer the question, and cite evidence–to give but one of many thousands of possible examples. But there are K-12 schools all across the country run by administrators who mandate such universal formulae, picked up from the work of some grifter Ed School EduPundit with NO subject-area expertise whatsoever. It’s a wonder that kids learn anything under such circumstances. All this would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
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The rationale of standardization is that it sets the stage for computers to teach.
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Yes. But teaching is transactional. This the deformers do not understand. It is the transmission across the generations, from older people to younger ones, of what they care most about in history, music, art, literature, mathematics, the sciences, philosophy. A computer can teach just about as well as a Talking Emo Doll can parent.
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“[I]t sets the stage for computers to teach”
because in the universe inhabited by the technocratic Lords of the New Feudal Order, dealing with people is far too messy.
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