Teachers & Teaching

 

The other day I was on Twitter and this tweet appeared in my time line...It's weird how the algorithm works.  In any event, it got me thinking about teachers and teaching...

What would happen if educators stopped working outside of their contracted hours? Should this be a thing?

— 𝕊𝕔𝕠𝕥𝕥 ℕ𝕦𝕟𝕖𝕤 (@MrNunesteach) October 25, 2022

Teaching is a noble and honorable profession. The honor in teaching is not merely in the title, but rather in the execution of the job's requirements. Like many other noble professions, the noble component is due to the fact that fruits of their labor benefits others and society more than those who perform the labor. The policeman, the fireman, the nurse, farmer provide to society more than what they get in return. But not every cop, fireman, nurse, and farmer are noble or honorable. Nor is every teacher.

Much of the honor in teaching is because it's critically important to individuals and thus society as whole.  Moreover, teaching is one of the few services that lasts well beyond after the service has been rendered. How many of us hold a particular teacher in high regard and point to them as a source of importance long after you were in their class?    Beyond the obvious aspect of providing students with knowledge and skills, teachers motivate, inspire, and nurture young minds. Many teachers do this because they love their students and truly want them to exceed despite the numerous and daunting challenges that come from parents, administrators, and society.  Yet, having good teachers can mean the difference between a successful and fulfilling life, or the opposite. 

Teaching is also hard. Being a good teacher day in and day out requires so much effort. I have worked many jobs in my life (asphalt, warehouse, sales) and teaching has left me the most exhausted, frustrated, and discouraged. Creating and crafting lessons that are engaging, rigorous, and relevant for  a class of students with wide ranging skills and knowledge is time consuming and difficult.  Dealing with and managing the unrelenting expectations from parents, administrators and the public often feel overwhelming.  However, when you add classroom management and dealing with behaviors, along with seemingly pointless bureaucratic tasks, the difficulty of teaching feels almost unbearable.

With all that being said, I believe the most significant improvements in education can only happen by improving the quality of our teachers. What happens in the classroom and how it happens is paramount to educational outcomes.  Of all the other inputs in education, except for family, teachers and their ability are the most important factor when it comes to student learning. Unfortunately, too often, education initiatives, regardless of the intention, rarely do more than rearrange or reconfigure the less important and critical components. Many times these initiatives force districts to spend exorbitant amounts of money to the education industrial complex, purchasing new texts, software, or other programs.  Ironically, yet not surprisingly, they rarely bring about the promised changes. These initiatives typically have a short shelf life and are replaced with the next big thing in a couple of years.  Or, they don't work or solve the problems they claimed to solve. Obviously, this cycle leaves many teachers and administrators cynical and jaded. More importantly, it erodes any belief in educational improvement.

If we took all that money we spend on the "next big thing"  and used it to enhance and improve our teacher's pedagogy, we would be saving a great deal of money.  Better still, we would make vast improvements in our educational quality and effectiveness. The problem is that we have systems and structures in place that work against better teaching. These systems and structures, like many things in education, on the surface purport to be helping, but once you dig a little deeper and analyze their outcomes, it is apparent that they are contributing to the problem. 

There are many variables that help diminish the effectiveness of teachers.  To be sure, some of the most detrimental are a result of poor leadership at both the site and district level.  Poor leadership often promotes faulty initiatives or bumbles the implementation of good initiatives.  In fact, I would say leadership is close second to teaching in terms of overall impact in education.  I make this claim because I have seen great teaching overcome bad leadership, but great leadership is limited in its ability to fix poor teaching. With that being said, the variables that I find most plague teacher effectiveness are the systems that train new teachers and the union system that insulates them once they become a teacher.

Most teacher education programs are inadequate in equipping teachers with skills and knowledge to do their job. Instead, most are indoctrination factories with Marxist undertones and plenty of social justice theology. The result is that young teachers are armed with all sorts of information regarding inequalities, inequities, and injustices but very little in thorough understanding of the psychology of learning. My teacher education program had two communist sympathizers (this isn't just rhetoric...literally communists) who promoted Castro's Cuba. Another professor spent most of the time instilling the importance of providing anti-American narratives. When I pushed back, I was singled out and punished by forcing to rewrite a paper. The program contained minimal amounts of pedagogy or applicable skills. I felt pretty unprepared when I began my career and I felt bad for the students in my classes those first few years. After I taught for a number of years, I became a master teacher, working with prospective new teachers.  As I would mentor these teachers, I noticed that not much had changed. In fact, it had gotten worse.  They were unprepared to build curriculum, implement lessons, or create assessments, let alone analyze their results.  They had all sorts of knowledge regarding group projects, jigsaw activities, and using technology but very little in the skills to use those activities in a manner that achieved a curricular goal.  It's as if the goal was the activity, not the learning or understanding the activity was supposed to yield.

As an administrator I have hired and worked with dozens of new teachers and can see the results are only getting worse. I think one of the problems is many teachers are going through online programs that are not very effective at developing new teachers. These programs are often shell courses "taught" online by some faculty member so distant and removed that these classes are mere hoops to jump through. The end result is that many teachers enter the profession lacking skills and knowledge to be a quality educator.  

There is an art and science to teaching and these programs offer little in either regard. There are a few teachers who are blessed with the art of teaching. Some just have it.  Most however, like myself, need to understand the science and mechanics of teaching and learning. Once they get the science of teaching, the artistic aspects can be cultivated. When combined, the art and science of teaching is a powerful weapon for learning. However, most never make it there because they never understood or developed the science of teaching.  Most likely, they are indoctrinated with progressive teaching models infused with social emotional learning or culturally conscious teaching that simply don't work.  The end result is poor pedagogy and less educated students. 

Once teachers are employed, there are a number of systems and structures that inhibit the growth of teachers. I wish teachers had to work a couple of years in the private sector to help provide some perspective. Most go from high school to college, to teacher education program, to teaching. That means school life and it's schedule is all they have ever known.  Working in an environment where results and performance are measures with which you are held accountable provide a valuable perspective that most life-long teachers never understand.  Too many teachers enter the profession that is largely controlled by a union that insulates them and ultimately disincentivizes them from improving their craft.

One of the most destructive forces in education is the teacher's union, especially the state and national organizations. If unions merely worked to increase wages and better benefits, their involvement would be less corrosive.  But they go well beyond that.  They advocate for all sorts of policies some of which have nothing to do with education and others that actually make it worse for teachers.  A good example is new approaches to discipline such as restorative practices.  Almost every teacher I know comments on the levels of disrespect and the lack of student discipline.  Yet many don't realize that their union is a huge supporter of this type of school discipline.  While unions attempt to protect their members, what they really do is protect the worst among them, create a culture of mediocrity, and promote policies that lessen the value of their profession.

The results of the teacher's union collective bargaining is that the system not only protects awful teachers, it also creates a culture of mediocrity and complacency.  When a teacher gets a job, they will typically have 4 observations in a year and half before a school must decide to grant tenure.  Once tenure is granted, the school basically owns that employee for their career.  And unless that teacher has sexual relations with a student or comes to school intoxicated, it is damn near impossible to get rid of a tenured teacher.  Teachers can be ineffective, or nearly awful, and there is very little schools can do.  When schools do decide to take action against an ineffective teacher, the amount of bureaucratic red tape and associated costs make most districts hesitant.  

Because teachers know that tenure protects them from almost any action from administrators, the only motivation to be effective is almost always self driven.  The problem with this is that most people are not entirely self motivated.  We typically perform to the level with which we will be held accountable.  When systems prevent real accountability, performance will never reach its highest level.  And while I get that many forms of teacher professional development is awful or not applicable, many teachers have an attitude that they do not need professional development (I have much to say about this at another time).  To be honest, teachers are perhaps the most sensitive group of professionals I have ever worked with and are most reluctant to engage in honest self-reflection.  Almost any constructive feedback is met with eyerolls, anger, and/or tears.  However, to be fair, I also realize that there are many administrators who are not very good at their job and the evaluative process is less than ideal.

Compounding the issue is the self serving and insulated echo chamber unions provide to its members.  If you ever go on social media and listen to teachers they are reciting the same ole clichés and rhetoric that reinforce their self serving perspective.  In other words, they believe their own BS.  Many mediocre teachers are hiding behind the hard work and excellence of a few.  They are enjoying the benefit provided to them by those who take the profession serious and work hard to be effective.  I have also noticed that the loudest, most pro-union teachers, are typically the worst of the bunch.  In fact, I would hazard a guess that most union leaders are the least effective instructors.

One of my biggest complaints against teachers is that they refuse to hold themselves to the standard they set for their students and especially the standards they measure their administrators (which I am fine with...leaders should be held to a higher standard).  If you ever attend a teacher staff meeting, take a look and see how many teachers are paying attention.  Most are on their phone.  Many are grading work.  When you confront them about this, they will claim that the meeting is pointless or of no value. It is ironic because that is exactly what their students say about their class.  Similarly, the same teachers who complain about the student's dress code are the same ones that fight against teacher dress codes. I had teacher one time brag about how much work they require their students to do on the weekend and in the same breath explain how they refuse to grade any papers on the weekend because of mental health.  But when you live in the union ecosystem, none of this seems strange, ironic, or hypocritical.

Eliminating tenure or drastically changing it would go far in improving teacher performance.  Creating a better system to evaluate their performance and provide accountability is a must.  The problem is that the unions don't like either of those ideas.  They would much rather be left alone.  Who doesn't?  But the job is too important to allow ineffective and mediocre teachers to exist for thirty plus year career.  If we could immediately fire the bottom ten percent of teachers and give the top ten percent a huge raise, the middle eighty percent would make huge improvements.

One last thought...If you are a teacher and you are angry about all that I said, my experience would tell me that you are probably part of the problem.