If we kept the good ones...

Like Miss Dennis, I called John Stossell to task a few posts ago. She revisits her fury again in yesterday's post, and compares him unfavorably to CNN's Anderson Cooper and the NYT's Michael Winerip. She includes a quote from the later, which I think relates to my last post:

"By far, the issue getting the most ink is the need to reduce the time it takes to dismiss bad teachers - a pet peeve of the mayor's. While this is clearly a problem, the far bigger problem is holding on to good teachers. Last year New York City had 3,567 "regular" teachers leave, the most in memory, 936 more than the year before, and 1,100 above the previous three-year average. These are not retirees or troubled teachers - they're certified teachers in good standing."

Winerip is right: the problem of getting rid of bad teachers gets far more coverage than does the problem of retaining good ones.

What no one I've read comes to terms with, though, is that getting rid of bad teachers is easy. The trick lies in recognizing them before they have tenure. You'll have a difficult time convincing me that a teacher can fake being "good" for the one or two or five or ten years it takes to achieve tenured status, and then suddenly flush those abilities down the nearest sewer.

A couple of examples, one from each extreme of my teaching career. There were many others in between:

First, my eighth-grade math teacher. There one year, gone the next. That's forty years ago (Ouch-who knew it would take turning so many calendar pages to finally hit my prime? Or have I?).

Second, a science teacher at the school I last taught at. There one year, gone the next (and not to another school, not with the evals she had). That was two years ago, so it's still just as easy.

So how in the world do we end up with bad teachers holding tenure, and thus protected by the easy-to-bash, easy-to-hate unions?

Part of it is irresponsible administrators, who, for whichever of myriad reasons, look the other way. Or human resources people who practice an inexact science (or art, or whatever it is), and inflict less-than-sure-choices on building admins who prefer not to second-guess their superiors.

But part of it is also the pressure to fill the vacancies created when good teachers leave. Look at the NYC numbers that Winerip cites: over 3500 "certified teachers in good standing" must be replaced. Why?

Some of them, I suppose, retired, as I did. But honestly? I retired two years earlier than I had originally planned. I got tired of the politics and the bureaucracy, got tired of the writing on the wall that said that no matter how good you are, you're going to fail in or around the year 2014 and it's going to be a slow, miserable slide until then, and so I juggled some accounts, rolled some into others, sold a house, and bought my way to a different life. But when so many analyses show that close to half of all teachers leave within the first five years, I don't believe the problem is the three percent or so who complete long careers and move on.

Part of it might well be psychological. Not everyone can handle administrators who make superficial observations (thank you, Fellow-ette).

I think NYC Educator also makes a valid point in his post about teacher pay: if we want the good ones, we have to pay them. That will remain difficult as long as we refuse to accept that some of the money to do that has to come out of our own pockets.

Some truly excellent teachers, having burned the candle at both ends (and the middle)for a few years, find they can no longer do it. That problem won't be solved with more money, but it might be alleviated with more time (which of course costs more money, but not as obviously as salary).

And Joanne Jacobs references the unwillingness of Millenials to tolerate busywork, which much of day-to-day educational paperwork is. Now don't waste too much time looking over your shoulders, but guess who the new young teachers are? If it's busywork you hand them, they'd rather do surveys on MySpace. You want attendance recorded two or three different places? Ummm... No. Unless you find a way to integrate it so they only have to do it once. Same with grades.

And please be careful about those staff-development "opportunities." Darren said it very concisely here:

I know what might help make me a better teacher. And it's probably not the same thing as the two teachers on either side of me need to help make them better teachers.