Readers of this blog or of my book, The Influence of Teachers, know that I believe that the harsh criticism of teachers and their unions is largely undeserved. I also believe it is hurting public education.
In the clamor, the voices of regular classroom teachers are difficult to hear, which is why I am devoting this blog to them. With apologies to Sigmund Freud, "What do teachers want?"
Some answers to that question can be found in recent surveys by Met Life and the Gates Foundation/Scholastic. I include some of those findings below.
Renee Moore, a veteran teacher who is certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, says it's all about respect. "Highest on my list," she wrote, "would be more respect for the professional expertise of teachers, particularly for those of us who have shown consistently, year-after-year that we are highly accomplished teachers."
That seems to be consistent with a Met Life finding that most teachers feel they are being ignored. "A majority of teachers do not believe that teachers' voices are being heard. Seven in 10 teachers (69 percent) disagree with the statement that "thinking about the current debate on education, teachers' voices in general have been adequately heard."
Ms. Moore continues: "By every means we currently have for measuring teacher performance, I am considered an excellent teacher; yet, when it comes time to decide what should be taught and how my students' learning should be measured, I have little or no say. This is also true for teachers as a group."
What form would respect take? "The reward for excellent teaching should be increased responsibility for the policy decisions that govern our work."
In other words, pay attention!
The Gates/Scholastic Survey of 40,000 teachers reveals that paying attention would also entail giving equal weight to teachers' assessments of student achievement. "From ongoing assessments throughout the year to student participation in individual classes, teachers are clear that these day-to-day assessments are a more reliable way to measure student performance than one-shot standardized tests. Ninety-two percent of teachers say ongoing in-classroom assessment is either very important or absolutely essential in measuring student performance, while only 27 percent say the same of state required standardized tests."
Another Board-certified teacher, Kenneth Bernstein of Maryland, calls for an end to micromanaging: "Treat us as a profession," he wrote. "That is, require appropriate training, which is not five weeks before turning us loose in a classroom. Give us appropriate support, which means do not overburden us with too many students in a class or too large a student load. And pay us as the professionals we are so that we do not lose so many of our gifted teachers because they cannot afford to raise a family on what they are paid."
I also directed my question, "What do teachers want?" to Anthony Cody, a veteran teacher in Oakland. High on his list was collaboration. "American teachers get a fraction of the time our counterparts overseas get, and most of the time is filled with either top-down professional development or administrative staff meetings. We need dedicated time to look at student work, to reflect and engage in these processes."
The Gates/Scholastic Survey emphatically supported Anthony's point. "When asked about teacher retention, nearly all teachers say that non-monetary rewards like supportive leadership and collaborative working environments are the most important factors to retaining good teachers. Fewer than half of teachers say higher salaries are absolutely essential for retaining good teachers and only 8 percent say pay for performance is absolutely essential."
Money matters less than collaboration!
According to the Gates/Scholastic survey, "Teachers are skeptical of current measures of teacher performance, with only 22 percent indicating that principal observation is a very accurate measure. At the same time, more than half of teachers indicate that student academic growth (60 percent) and student engagement (55 percent) are very accurate measures of teacher performance -- much more so than teacher tenure, which a significant number of teachers said is not at all accurate."
The Met Life survey reveals a crucial nuance: the newer the teacher, the more likely they are to want to collaborate. "Regardless of their specific path to teaching, new teachers are strong proponents of collaboration. Although teachers across experience levels agree on many of the topics in the Survey, new teachers (those with five years of experience or less) emerge as having a particular affinity for collaboration. New teachers strongly agree in greater numbers than do veteran teachers (those with more than 20 years of experience) that their success is linked to that of their colleagues (67 percent vs. 47 percent)."
And the newbies are ready to collaborate with anyone who shares their concern for student learning. "New teachers are also more likely to emphasize the importance of collaborating with other groups to improve student achievement. They are more likely than veteran teachers to say that strengthening ties among schools and parents is very important for improving student achievement (95 percent vs. 85 percent)."
These are hopeful signs, because our teaching force is growing younger by the year. In 1987 the modal "years of experience" was 15 years. In 2007 (the last year we have data for) the mode was one year!
The comments of all three veterans indicate their agreement with another Gates/Scholastic finding: they want the freedom to innovate. Here's how the survey put it: "To keep today's students engaged in learning, teachers recognize that it is essential for instruction to be tailored to individual students' skills and interests. More than 90 percent of teachers say that differentiated assignments are absolutely essential or very important for improving student achievement and engaging students in learning. Also, showing a clear understanding of the world students inhabit outside of school, 81 percent of teachers say that up-to-date, information-based technology that is well integrated into the classroom is absolutely essential or very important in impacting student achievement."
But innovation is not high on the list of those running the show. As Anthony Cody noted, "Modern 'education reform' has redefined the purpose of schools to be to raise scores in tested subjects. As teachers we feel responsible for so much more, and we find other things we value -- critical thinking, creativity, compassion, civic engagement, even knowledge of history and science -- crowded out when we are coerced by threats of school closures, pay cuts or the loss of job security if our test scores do not rise."
And while Moore, Bernstein and Cody did not speak directly to the question of higher and common standards, my hunch is that they tilt in that direction--as long as teachers play a significant role in their development. Here's what Gates/Scholastic said on that point: "Teachers see the role clear common standards can play in preparing students for their future, but want clearer standards and core standards that are the same across all states. Nationwide, 74 percent of teachers say that clearer standards would make a strong or very strong impact on student achievement, with only 4 percent saying they would have no impact at all. 60% of teachers say that common standards would have a strong or very strong impact on student achievement, with only 10 percent saying that they would have no impact at all."
So what do we know? What's the answer to my question? What do teachers want?
Aretha Franklin said it best: R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
It takes different forms, but that's what they want -- and it's what they deserve.
Your thoughts?
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1) Better entry-level pay. I have to write three professional level exams just to be considered eligible to become a high school teacher. I don't think $30,000 is worthy of my skills.
2) Let me decide what is best for the students of my class in terms of textbooks/material to use for teaching.
3) Give me a decent classroom budget for supplies. I am sick and tired of having to buy my own supplies for teaching.
4) Get rid of physical textbooks and implement DRM-free PDF-based textbooks. I find physical textbooks to be a huge waste of taxpayers' money (which includes myself). There will be no more "I forgot my textbook" coming from a student. :/
5) Give me a say in course curriculum - I am the expert. Politicians and "education experts" should NOT be setting curriculum. I use Texas' recent History curriculum revision as an example.
6) Give teachers who have superior tech skills and know how to use it to their advantage in the classroom more pay. Technology, when used wisely, really does enhance education.
7) Treat me as a professional, because I AM ONE.
8) Stop experimenting with students AND teachers.
9) Stop cutting pay for teachers that enhance their own education with a Master's degree or a Ph.D.
10) Get parents to actually give a shite about their kid's education.
More of what I want...
11) I'd like this emphasis on just English and Mathematics to end. There are other subjects, like History, Geography, Economics, Government, that are just as crucial to a student's education.
12) Hire people to do school ground duty or hall duty - I don't have time for this shite. I am busy enough just being a teacher.
13) Fix these bloody schools. I have never seen schools in such disrepair as I have until I moved from Canada to the USA. Pathetic IMO.
14) Stop the teacher union bashing, because it is becoming quite pathetic already. Yes, Republicans™... We know you hate public education. Unions are their to protect their members from higher ups that are on a vendetta to get rid of good people just because they don't like them.
15) Give all classrooms whiteboards with NON TOXIC dry erase markers. Chalkboards are just so useless in this day and age IMO.
16) Back me up when I discipline a student for misbehaving in class.
17) Get rid of the "police-like" environment that I've seen in some schools. Holy shite!
18) Stop building these MEGA schools. I think any school over 1000 students is way too big. Students AND teachers get lost in them.
19) Stop wasting so much f***ing paper! E-mail me a PDF.
Just my guess …
Motivated students.
Students who come in the door wanting to learn the information and skills that I got into the profession to teach. Students who are not coming to me because they are required to.
I had such students here:
http://www.sudval.org/
Using math as an example, many students seem to lack number sense because they have not spent enough time w/ basic addition/subtraction and multiplication facts. Math is all about patterns, yet students fail to see the connections because of the weak foundation. Higher order thinking skills develop after the basics are solidly in place.
I think a teacher can introduce many topics later on and have students meet w/ success if students are well versed on how numbers work.
Having said that, those students that grasp the concepts more quickly, need to move on at an accelerated pace.
1) Elementary school level - Everyday Math
2) Middle school level - Connected Math
3) High school level - Discovering Math
By the time a kid reaches Grade 9 they are functionally illiterate in Mathematics.
Believe it or not, there are pre-service teaching programs in California such as San Jose State University that actually offer courses in classroom assessment which work closely with student teachers to improve their classroom assessment practices according to nationally recognized standards of validity, reliability and standardization.
To measure student performance in today's classroom a new generation of teacher leaders is needed. Folks who get what the "game" is all about and who can actually construct better asessements than the so-called "experts" according to nationally recognized testing standards. I like the finding--now it's time to build capacity in the teacher education system to support the next generation.
Where is the story on real world preservice programs and professors and cooperating teachers that are innovating at PUBLIC universities and colleges around the country?
1) Meaningful training. Current teacher training is nothing more than touchy-feely nonsense, deliberately divorced from content. To give you an idea of how idiotic teacher training is, imagine taking a class in baking and being told to just make up recipes off the top of your head, with no pointers whatsoever as to what really happens in the oven. When your recipes turn out to be worthless, you're told to "observe" a master chef -- a sushi chef that is. Presumably his genius will just rub off on you.
2) Evaluation by people who know your subject area. This goes back to the divorce of "pedagogy" from content. Here's the "logic": I've been driving a car for 30 years. Therefore, I have 30 years of vehicular experience. An airliner is also a vehicle. Therefore, I am qualified to randomly enter a cockpit with a clipboard and evaluate the performance of airline pilots.
My own teaching boss was a former English teacher who knew nothing about physics and just about as much about teaching it. I'm glad I'm no longer a teacher.
At the same time some of the College of Ed course were great!
Here is a question for a fourth-grader from their state testing:
If seven times a number equals 57, which of the following expressions can be used to find that number?
Does anyone besides me see that the level of interpretation of this question would require that fourth-graders be taught this question? In other words, teachers have to "teach the test" rather than teaching math.
What makes a standardized test any better a gauge than, say, a portfolio of work?
I speak as a former teacher.
We need a population with literary and arithmetic skills. Calculus and microbiology can be left to those who have an interest and aptitude for them.
1. Commonsense laws. Eliminate unfunded mandates. If schools can't afford it, students can't have it. That would encompass all services now required by law which schools find it very difficult to provide to placate parents and avoid lawsuits.
2. Get schools out of the social service business. If students have serious behavioral and/or emotional problems, then mental health entities (in patient or out patient) should be required to serve them--not schools which don't have the personnel or expertise for these issues.
3. Return the power of discipline to school staff, and I don't mean paddling. I mean if a child is chronically disruptive to the class so others can't learn, the parents must be responsible for their own child. The parent can come to school and stay with the child to make the child behave or get outside help (see #2 above).
4. Stop wasting money on different curricula. Let's find some that are research-based and contain what students need to know and stick with that. New standards come out often and we have to change everything, and then almost always change it again just a few years later.
5. Safe working conditions, the ability to collaborate with colleagues, and support. We can't do good work in buildings that are falling apart, isolated in our classrooms, with little or no suport from administrators.
The US is rapidly becoming the most anti-intellectual and anti-science country in the world because we allowed religious fundamentalists to set the curriculum.
Student that do not want to learn should be warehoused in secure facilities so they get used to what prison will be like. Because any child that does not get a good solid education will be completely uncompetitive in the world that is rapidly coming, so they will either starve to death or end up in prison.
If parents (unlikely for most kids) or communities complain, then we should tell them to fix their cultural problem and when the kids are ready to learn and the community has brought them up to grade level (at their expense of time and money) the kids could rejoin the mainstream education.
Teachers should be able to teach without having to spend most of their time on crowd control and security.
Unless the kids of the US are highly educated, their peers around the world will smash them like bugs.
The world is very , very competitive. There are over FOUR Chinese kids for every US kid and most of those Chinese kids are now educated to much higher level than US kids. Every kid in China is REQUIRED to be fluent in BOTH English and Chinese. Every student in Chins is REQUIRED to have extensive real science education (not the watered down, pseudo-science taught in much of the US).
If China can afford to educate their kids to a high level, there is no reason the US can not do the same. It is merely a matter of financial priorities and choosing national priorities over basic greed.
If we need money then we can stop all our wars, remove all our soldiers from around the world, mothball most of our carriers (China has ONE the US has eleven)and reduce the military budget by 75%.
You have kids in college? Chances are they're being taught by an adjunct who makes $10-12/hr. with no benefits who teaches 8-9 courses per semester to make ends meet. So, that's all we can afford? How would you feel if your college-age kid were being taught by that instructor, Compromising quality doesn't matter, while you pay outrageously high tuition?
The huge sums of money being funnelled into education are not being used for instruction, they are going to administrative costs and infrastructure, not related to the core mission. What value is a multimillion dollar sports stadium or auditorium? How do our children benefit from administrators being paid millions of dollars per year? BTW, my parents generously paid for 100% of my college tuition, while my father was laid off during the recession of the early 1980s. He worked multiple jobs well below his experience level to make ends meet and my brother and I both worked to help out. Contrast that with my Aunt's family in the coal mining industry that went hunting/fishing every day whil being on unemployment for two years and never once looking for a job. They got a free education for their kids because they were "poor". Poor character, I would say.
Let's stop turning the conversation about educational reform into a conversation about teachers, since it keeps us from critically thinking about the system itself. It keeps us from improving the quality of the system.
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2011/03/07/want-to-improve-quality-listen-up/
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2010/05/09/time-is-more-than-money/