Peanut-Butter Politics

Jonathan Alter suggests that the principals across the country who evaluate teachers and decide which teachers are given tenure can't figure out who can teach and who can't. I was a principal or 28 years and let me assure you, Jonathon, that I had plenty of tools at my disposal to assess the performance of teachers under my charge. The teacher evaluation systems are fine. If we want to fix education, we need better teachers. Are they out there? And we also need to transform the jobs that teachers do into more manageable endeavors. One should not need to be superhuman to be an effective teacher.

Dear Mr. Alter,

Using your bias (Bad Teacher Unions), Texas should have the very best schools, because the teachers here have no union protection. Sadly, our schools have the same issues as the rest of the country - poverty, lack of health care, etc, etc, etc. I know why all the pundits pick teachers as the critical unit - no one has the cojones to hold parents or students accountable. After all in your mind you realize you can fire a teacher, and you can't fire a parent or a student. Teaching is the hardest job I have ever had, and I have been a military officer and a corporate vice-president. The number of teachers that washout after 5 years is 50%, and the remaining 50% are reduced by half in the next five years. Let me suggest that your article is simply regurgitation of simplistic thought that both political parties cling to because the real work would actually require politically distasteful measures. A Teacher.

Alter doesn???t ask why new funding initiatives have historically failed tin general to drive or achieve real educational change. Ironically all the talk about change these days seems to have little to do with strategic changes in the nature of public education. Do we do the tinker change thing, improving the status quo, or do we enter different thinkscapes exploring how complex forces may require new kinds of school? Should we explore and implement new strategic ways of learning given that we are now encountering socioeconomic and cultural realities the current education system was never intended to support and sustain? With your permission we would like to add another dimension to your concerns: funding education is clearly a political reality but we not really funding the future, or, put in another way, should the US be content in funding improvements to status quo schools or should we, in part, with highly innovative pilot programs, be financing our future?

Creating better teachers to improve test scores was clearly important for 19th and 20th century learning, but ---given the White House vision of needing to educate to a future comprised of an emerging post-industrial economy, emerging energy alternatives, a new green-collar work force???how does teachers producing higher student scores on state standardized tests alone prove to be a viable mechanism to create sustainable energy systems or to enable our children to compete in the new millennium. A world where creativity, intelligent resource entrepreneurialism, innovative thinking, and forging new ways of working arguably requires systemically different ways of educating in order that our children participate effectively in crafting this new world. We may be a bit dramatic, but can???t we argue that all the best teachers on earth and 100% test scores cannot???by the very nature of our present system???enable and mobilize the White House???s vision of new millennium learning? There is no doubt we need good teachers, but to what extent do we waste their truly needed value by putting them in a system whose lack of strategic thought may ill-prepare our students to thrive in the new emerging economy?

Funding new educational models that leverage the most valuable parts of our existing education system???in conjunction with new technologies reflecting how Generation Green students actually live, learn and experience the world, outside of school???has, in our mind, a greater probability of driving real education change than continuing to fund a system unable to address the needs of 21st century students and their innovative participation in helping communities create a new economy illuminating the distant horizon of America???s destiny.

Teacher effectiveness isn???t analogous to fuel economy standards, Mr. Alter. President Obama isn???t asking Detroit to hire better auto workers, he???s asking them to design and build cars that match the needs of our country???s air quality, economy and foreign policy. In the education ???industry??? students who match our needs would be the product, not the teachers. Unfortunately the R & D department, the Ed Tech companies like McGraw Hill, make profits from designing network software and tests, not educating students. If the engineers in Detroit design cars that don???t meet our needs, and don???t upgrade the manufacturing line to properly construct the cars, do we blame the construction line auto workers? Of course not. Was the UAW to blame for the Corvair? The auto workers who build Mercedes are unionized, and so are the German teachers who educate students who do better than American students.

More effective teachers are essential for improvement in education. However, any measure of teacher effectiveness must take into consideration an essential variant, the students. Public School teachers work with rich, poor, gifted, abused, exceptional, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, violent, bi-polar, and brilliant children, often in the same class. Any room may have students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, junior rheumatoid arthritis, learning disabilities, emotionally impairments, English as their second language, and on the autism spectrum. How do you hold a teacher accountable when a student has been enrolled in 15 schools by 6th grade or has missed 40% of the school year? Developing accurate methods to measure teacher effectiveness will be as easy as nailing pudding to a stump. Mary, teacher since 1978

Good Lord! Does Mr. Alter ever write anything but this same stuff about teacher unions being to blame! This is the third or fourth article of its kind from him. All spout the same mantra about unions being at fault. Does Mr. Alter ever burn any shoe leather interviewing actual teachers and school administrators for opinions about what is troubling education. His articles find some think tank opinion, study, or book that seem to justify his rant. All of this from a guy whose bio seems to indicate that he has never attended a public school nor spent any appreciable time in one. Teachers who try to teach in dangerous schools could tell him a thing or two about the difficulties of their profession. Alter's articles on education reflect shoddy journalism. Do some real research Mr. Alter!

The key to good teaching is excellent pay that will keep teachers in the profession instead of losing them to high paid positions anywhere else. Next, pay teachers as much as a principal and maybe the right people will be empowered to do what they do well, teach. Yes there are many bad teachers and the reason for that is that there is not a lot of qualified teachers standing in line at most inner city or other impoverished schools waiting to get a job.
A good teacher at a high risk school is one who has no discipline issues - good teaching comes in second.
Please don't use the Teach for America example - these poor souls burn out fast. By the way, how long did Erin Gruwald (stay in her high risk classroom?
Mr. Alter - go back to school and do your research!

If the short answer is "unions," here's another question: Then why don't we see significantly better results in places where teachers are not unionized, where there is no tenure or union protections, and where removing "bad" teachers is a relatively straightforward process (aka most of the Deep South)? Perhaps the answers aren't as short and simple as we would like to make them.

Some teachers suck.. and some students suck... and some parents suck. That's life, deal with it.
BUT (and this is coming from a liberal) bring back useful discipline in schools and you won't have half of the problems.

Right now, schools are overloaded AND overfunded chaotic daycares.

Kids behave any way they please regardless of how it affects their education, their teachers ability to teach, or their classmates ability to learn. And if those badly behaved kids (who don't want to be there anyway) act badly enough, they may get a few days off via suspension. I'm sure they're just weeping in their fruity-Os while watching TV over the whole thing.

Meanwhile, we don't have the funding for school nurses, but we can have a full time emotional counselor??

It's simple.. bring back the paddle. No one wants to hear it, but it worked. And I can read, and write, and balance my checkbook! It isn't that we need to beat kids, it's that they need to know that the ultimate humiliation is out there as a possible consequence. The first time they face real consequences shouldn't be at the hands of the police as an adult.

As a teacher who taught in both the public and private sectors and is transitioning into a new career, I can honestly say the "teacher effectiveness" problem has more to do with the students than the teachers. Believe me, I know there are plenty of teachers who absolutely need to be taken out of the profession, however, these tips can begin to remedy the situation: reduce class sizes (jamming kids into a classroom and making them sit on the floor because there are not enough desks is ridiculous), put Special Ed. students in Special Ed. classes with certified Special Ed. teachers ONLY; start vocational school programs for kids who are continually disciplined (obviously the disciplinary tactics aren't working). These problems exist at many schools; the main difference between private and public school teachers is that the former get paid twice a month versus once a month, for the latter.

Would someone please explain to me why the secret to recruiting and retaining good workers on Wall Street is to give them extravagant bonuses, but the secret to recruiting and retaining good teachers is to impose punitive accountability measures? Here's a social experiment that might yield interesting results: trade strategies. Use stimulus money to give huge bonuses to teachers whose students perform especially well (and make Wall Street types earn their bonuses with good results). Teachers get lousy pay, with prep and grading they work long hours, they have to contend with serious problems over which they have little or no control, and society doesn't respect them. If big money were possible, you'd see different people choosing teaching as a profession, and they might indeed welcome assessment-based rewards.

Education should be a state issue, not a federal issue. Under Gw Bush, we got "No Child Left Behind." It sounds good, but it created layers of beauracrats and more money was being wasted and more students ironically were being left behind. It sounds like Obama wants to continue making the same mistakes that Bush made. What Obama should do is consult people who really know: teachers. Lawyers and beauracrats don't know anything. If politicians were smart (and they aren't), they would allow more local control of the school districts. In the school district where I am employed, we have a program for peolple in high school who are at least one year behind. They get into a small group at our area career tech center (formerly called a trade school) and they work on algebra, English, and reading skills that are required to be passed on a high school graduation exam. Also, they have time to work on subjects that they have not passed and they also take courses in a career path that might interest them. So far, the majority of these students catch up with their classmates and graduate high school with a diploma. Some go to college and some have a career in a technical field. The beauty of this is that it did not come out of some inefficient bureaucrat's office. A local principal was doing research on his dissertaion on his PhD and he discovered this program in a neighboring school system. So, schools can do better if politicians and bureaucrats can stay out of the way.

Social class is an important factor regarding education. Most teachers live on low wages. The urban areas are still dealing with the issue of poverty that no one wants to address. There are many students without computers. Who cares? The unions are not the problem. We need more money and better management for all schools to perform at a higher level. This recession has taken the life out of everyone and education is low on the long list of priorities. Where is the real investment in the future when kids turn into criminals and imprisoned at a greater cost without any return on investment?

I sincerely hope that President Obama avails himself of this unique opportunity. Teacher training is valuable when it's done correctly. The basics of maintaining classroom discipline and how to communicate material appropriately to a given audience are skills teachers need to learn, but it is also vital that teachers are well-informed within their discipline. As students progress in school, their teacher's knowledge of a given subject becomes increasingly important. Far more than a degree in education, prospective teachers need to be wel-trained in the subjects they intend to teach. This, more than taking a class on "Teaching the Gifted Child", will make them effective in the classroom. The best teachers not only love teaching, but they love the subjects that they teach.

A chunk of it (about $10 billion total) is reserved for innovative "Race to the Top" funds

Your hard earned taxpayer dollars at work. Sigh.