Monday, April 12, 2010

State of the Union

All over the country, teachers are coming under fire by their local governments, some with more far-reaching effects than others. In the state of Florida, a bill currently sits on the desk of Governor Charlie Crist that will determine the future of educators in that state. In true democratic form, the Senate shoved it though the line-up of other less controversial bills and rammed it all the way over to the House, who also passed it despite an overwhelming public outcry over the bill. When I first learned of the bill, SB6 or HB7189, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. The mere mention of the words “merit pay” send any low-income area teacher into panic mode.

The bill sounds good in theory, and there is no doubt that a simple one sentence summary of the bill would convince any intelligent person to vote for it: better teachers get better pay. The problem inevitably comes when you try to quantify something as subjective as whether or not a teacher is a good teacher. The writers of this bill decided that the best way to determine the worth of a teacher is to look at their output. This would be all well and good if teachers were factory workers or salesmen, but we all know that the teaching profession is a totally different monster. You can work your ass off with a kid, stay after hours and try every possible learning method, only to have them freeze and go blank on test day.

Last year, the administration at my school noticed that one testing classroom had low standardized test scores, and not one student in that room had made a gain in their score. The children were all products of different teachers, some honors, some not, but yet they all did poorly. After some research, it was discovered that there had been a fight in the classroom before the test. Keyed up and distraught, the students were still forced to take the test, yet clearly their minds were elsewhere. This snapshot of their abilities is not any indicator of what they could actually do, yet it will remain on their record.

Of course, this is an argument that is being made over and over again, not only in opposition to this particular piece of legislation but also to standardized tests in general. In various states, the tests beginning to fall by the wayside, replaced by subject area exams that actually test students on what they learned in the class, rather than general reading and mathematics skills.

The main purpose of the bill, according to legislators, is to weed out the bad teachers more easily while rewarding the good ones. It has received the nickname of the “teacher tenure” bill since it will essentially do away with continuing contracts. Continuing Contracts are not tenure; instead, they are 5 or 10 year contracts that assure the teacher that they will be gainfully employed in the coming years, and in this economy they are a wonderful security blanket to have. However, there seems to be this misconception that as soon as a teacher reaches this stage, they give up entirely. There was an episode of the Simpsons in which Lisa’s teacher is counting down the seconds until she finally announces “I just got tenure.” She then sits at her desk and relaxes, instructing the students to take care of themselves. While I don’t doubt that this (and probably even this exact scenario) has happened before, it does not happen often, or even rarely. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve walked into other teachers classrooms to see students running around unsupervised as the teacher surfs the internet, or even worse, has completely left the classroom entirely, leaving the kids all alone. That behavior is abhorrent and absolutely must be addressed.

Except, SB6 doesn’t really address it. Under SB6, as I understand it, any teacher who currently is on a continuing contract will remain unaffected. Only teachers hired after July of this year will be under the thumb of the new law. If the whole point of this law is to get rid of the bad teachers, yet the current bad teachers will not be affected, the bill is basically saying that they don’t expect the new teachers to meet their expectations. The bill will not help them fire Mrs. So-and-So who told little Jimmy that he was never going to make it in the real world, but it will help them fire Suzie Bright Eyes who just got her Master’s in Education and was given a low-level reading class.

Until the lawmakers begin to read educational studies and talk to actual teachers, educational laws will continue to miss the mark. The teachers unions have earned labels for themselves, often making the public look unfavorably on them and lawmakers reluctant to work with them. The unions are strong and willing to fight for their teachers, which is the entire point of a union in the first place. They are not, however, unreasonable. Yes, teachers who work hard should be paid more. But working hard should also include the amount of time and effort it takes to earn advanced degrees or specialties, and especially the grueling and very expensive National Board Certification. Working hard as a teacher does not mean that you always see results, and many of us do what we do for the personal satisfaction. Until every student is the same, every teacher cannot be judged the same, and I will bet you dollars to donuts that day never comes.

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