Joel Klein vs. New York City teachers : The New Yorker

Joel Klein vs. New York City teachers : The New Yorker

This is a disturbing piece about the nearly 1,500 New York teachers who are paid to not work. I generally support our teachers' unions and think they're necessary to preserve academic freedom. I observed some countries during my time in the Peace Corps where the staff changed at high schools as determined by national elections. Tenure does and should protect and preserve academic freedom from these kinds of political gyrations.

However, the unions undermine their own position when they defend incompetent teachers at all costs. In order to improve education in any sane time frame there must be a mechanism to move consistently poor teachers out of the profession. One teacher in this article implied that poor teachers would realize they couldn't do it and voluntarily leave the profession. While this does sometimes happen, I think we all know there are folks who stick around for decades when they don't deserve to.

The difficulty comes in how to judge teachers. Do we trust administrator evaluations? Test scores? I'm not sure either of these are accurate measures, but to claim that there is no possible way to judge teachers fairly, and therefore all should keep their jobs no matter what, is intellectually dishonest.

Teacher man: a memoir - Google Books

Teacher man: a memoir - Google Books

I can't put this book down by the late Frank McCourt. A line struck me as I'm preparing for the first day of school on Tuesday. He writes of teaching, "If you don't learn to love it, you'll wriggle in a corner of hell." Love it folks!

By Sarah Fine -- Why I Left Teaching Behind - washingtonpost.com

Thanks to great teacher Christopher Greenslate for finding this piece:

By Sarah Fine -- Why I Left Teaching Behind - washingtonpost.com

Ms. Fine reports feeling "undervalued" as a teacher by the administration in her inner city school, friends, and American society. It seems the charter school she worked for sought to improve education without much input from the teachers. This hierarchical style of educational reform seems destined to fail.

More and more research seems to imply that children with less educated parents need more physical time in school to close the achievement gap. Some charter schools have figured this out and shown powerful results. The problem arises when schools, like Sarah Fine's, try to extend the school day and school year without increasing teacher compensation, reducing teacher pay to around 10$ an hour. No wonder charter schools have such a high rate of turnover.

The Obama administration has embraced (see the New Yorker abstract) the charter school model as practiced by the KIPP and Green Dot schools. I only hope they don't try to make these changes on the cheap, forcing more good teachers out of the profession. In this sense, perhaps Ms. Fine shows insight in her feelings about the value American society puts on education, learning, and teaching.