Feel free to ignore this and go to the slide show. After forty-three years in this profession, I would have to agree that all of these things in this slide show I have seen on an intermittent basis. What I find interesting today are these things. We have never had a more educated workforce. We have never spent so much money on education. We have never had better facilities and technology, and we have never had better salaries. Yet, we have never seemed to have less public support. I think we have lost the link between a public eager to support the goals of universal education and success. Charter schools and home schooling lead people to believe that the public schools fail daily. We have done a poor job of articulating what successes we have had while dealing with things that no one ever envisioned for public education. Think severely medically fragile kids. And people want to know why education costs so much. Having said the aforementioned, I will certainly agree with this. For the great work of twenty outstanding teachers, the shabby and subpar performance of one undercuts all of that, and this would only be five percent of the workforce. We need to get rid of them immediately. I see the bureaucracy overlaid on very good teachers as an impediment to securing their place as quality educators in the future. I see and talk to teachers every day. I dont really remember a time when retirement talk has been so prevalent. Here in Louisiana, the last two years have seen retirements increase by 25%. As a former superintendent, I worry about that. No doubt that teachers’ salaries, though better, have not kept pace with CEOs, athletes, or entertainers. No other profession has either, but I think we lag behind them, too. There is no secret sauce when it comes to student performance. Some keys to achievement lie in having a great principal and surrounding him or her with outstanding teachers. I certainly don’t see as much commitment on the part of parents and students today. Good teachers teach math and English; great teachers teach children. We are a profession that turns an implanted word or phrase into a seed of inspiration which then grows into aspiration; however, those seeds need to fall on fertile ground with the concept of patience and work leading to fruition. You cannot be an accomplished violinist practicing once every three months. Learning is no different. We are in the instantaneous mode predicated upon magical thinking. “Somehow this will all work out” is a poor plan at best. By the way parents, your kids are special to you, but they are pretty much like everybody else. They don’t need to be recognized for having the thirteenth best score on a spelling test. Oh, I forgot. We don’t do much spelling today. Something else, he isn’t ADD or ADHD; he is B-A-D. YOU need to straighten him out FIRST. Something that never seems to get much air play in the discussion of quality education is this, working conditions. Morale in a job can be more tied to working conditions than it can to salary. Todays school has teachers laboring under some very difficult conditions. Paperwork and bureaucracy are there, yet I am more concerned with the climate. Years ago the death penalty in a school system was assumed to be when a child laid a hand on a teacher. A student was expelled. Teacher assaults and batteries are not that unique or uncommon today. In some school you could replace the word student with criminal. There are some very dangerous and disturbed children walking in the hall alongside of other students and teachers. They aren’t mischievous; they are sociopathic. Discipline and student commitment have truly eroded beyond anything I ever imagined when I think about a time thirty or forty years ago. Our solutions to problems with discipline today are incredibly simple. When something goes wrong which would seemingly be inappropriate, we lower the bar and no longer consider that a problem. I told one of the assistant principals at a school where I was asked to substitute that I would suspend kids for three days for things the school system no longer considers a problem. As to the future, this has been documented as well. We no longer attract the best and brightest as educators, and I see no reason think that will change. Average SAT scores for prospective teacher versus prospective math and science majors vary greatly. This is a theory, not mine, but I have noticed it. The removal of barriers related to gender and race have opened up a wealth of opportunities for people, but much to the detriment of the public school. That bright young girl great in math is now an engineer, and the articulate black guy isn’t teaching English. He is arguing before the Supreme Court with young Hispanic woman as his co-counsel. Did you know that in Finland it is harder to get into an educational program to become a teacher than it is to get into medical school? The TOP 10% of the students go into education. As I re-read this, I sound less like Pollyanna and more like the prophetess of doom, Cassandra, yet I refuse to believe that things will not change for the better. There is always hope.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 17:15:42 +0000
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