Month: May 2016

Summer Jobs for Teachers

Every summer I see an ad for Worlds of Fun distributed to high school students. Included is an invitation to teachers. Just what I want. To work the Icee stand next to my student.

Imagine an ad that reads, “Doctors, applications now being taken for summer work at Walgreens pharmacy.” Or “Lawyers, add to your income by working community service with your convicted clients.” “College professors wanted for residential dorm managers.”

It’s no secret that teachers need to make extra money. But in earlier days the teachers I had owned ice cream businesses, their own painting companies, or coached for community leagues. No one would have dreamed asking them to take a minimum wage job because the community understood the importance of the teacher-student relationship. People understood the need for maintaining some respect and regard in the community because it affected what the teacher could do in the classroom. We were on the same page in the common goal of developing young people in a positive way. Continue reading “Summer Jobs for Teachers” →

Diane Ravitch…and all the rest of us

“Maine Teacher Wins $1 Million Prize, Advises Young People Not to Enter Teaching Because of Common Core and Testing

By dianeravitch

March 18, 2015 //

Nancie Atwell, a teacher of literacy in Maine, won the Varkey Foundation’s $1 million prize as the Global Teacher of the Year. This is like the Nobel prize of teaching. She was interviewed on CNN about teaching, and she talked about encouraging children to read and write, following their interests and passions. She is donating the $1 million to her school, which needs a new furnace and other improvements. When one of the interviewers asked her what she would tell a young person interested in teaching, she said she would tell them to go into the private sector, not into public school teaching. The interviewers were taken aback. Atwell explained that the Common Core and the testing that goes with it had turned teachers into “technicians,” making it hard for them to teach the best they knew how. She would urge them to find an independent school where there is no Common Core and no state testing.”

Nancie Atwell’s comments, which any seasoned teachers and most new ones recognize as absolutely accurate, were then criticized by male teachers as either misguided or irresponsible. As in nursing, a man’s experience in a female profession is not the same, but they feel free to think it is because, well, they have de facto the right to evaluate women’s work.

Ravitch, a leading contributor to the teacher status debate, articulates perhaps more clearly than most how teaching reflects the cultural resistance to women receiving professional equality. She joins over a hundred years now in the discourse about teachers’ low and undeserved status accompanied by studied determination to keep it that way.

Why is teaching’s low status so intrinsically intractable in our culture? Because it has always been a gendered servant role. Men were only teachers until they could move on. Allowing women to teach was acknowledged as a lower cost alternative early on. We will be looking at the foundational attitudes toward teachers and why, even after severe protests and costly effects of ignoring teachers’ professional wisdom, teachers will remain a servant class.

Not only overt historical development of public education but educational reform movements and research are primarily instituted by men: men in law, men in business, men in legislatures, men in psychology, to name a few of the fields. Most of the time men who have never taught or have never taught at the level they are trying to reform. While anyone can find reams of books, articles and other materials about what should be done in education, very few materials are available on the teacher’s actual experience or on ways for teachers to have professional autonomy and authority. This is because the teacher doesn’t have time to pursue writing books and articles and developing programs because they are teaching. So the reality is not that those who can, do and those who can’t teach; the reality is that those who teach, are; and those who aren’t, study it and mandate the latest “classroom innovation”. This amounts to not much more than hubby coming home and telling wifey how she can do better. A gross simplification? Perhaps. But see if you find very many exceptions to the management of education that do not smack of this attitude.

It has been long understood that the younger the child, the more women are prevalent in their education. Women became preschool and elementary school principals earlier than at other levels. With each level up, the number of women decreased while the number of men increased, until we have many male professors studying teaching and introducing
“reforms”, which earn the college lots of positive PR, until that comes under attack and the next horse on the carousel comes around.

In subsequent posts, I will list some of the historical milestones, educational reforms, and cultural contradictions and whether or not a woman educator with experience in the classroom was the originator. Hopefully this will help demonstrate that a teacher who thinks there will be an improved status change in our country should look elsewhere for professional fulfillment. This does not negate the influence that women have made; it demonstrates that there is a foundational commitment to keeping women out of any major authority in their profession. Like nurses, we can only dispense medicine if the doctor says so. And when we begin to become doctors, the status and pay in the field decreases and the amount of oversight increases.

My hope is that those who have an opportunity, will stop burying their talents in the ground without demanding proportionate respect, acknowledgement and compensation. And if that means not teaching, it may have to. History will show that there are as many pressures to remove teachers as there are pleas for them to stay underemployed. A teacher needs to face the fact that she is disposable and will never be acknowledged in any numbers as an autonomous professional; in fact, every attempt will be made to remove her ability to made decisions about using her skills.

Atwell appears to understand this, but she still gave away the million.

Twelve Steps of Recovery*

With thanks to AA

We admitted we were powerless over educational insanity, and our lives are unmanageable.
We came to believe that we could stop being victims of our own ideals.
Turned our careers over to our common sense.
Made a searching and fearless admission of how we were being dehumanized.
Admitted we could no longer accept these conditions.
Were entirely ready to begin a new vision of our role in education.
Decided to create our own profession.
Made a list of all people we were no longer responsible for.
Made amends for not being honest about our inability to be superpeople.
Humbly dedicated ourselves to a more realistic approach to our professions.
Sought to continue daily in a rational approach to our role in education.
Having experience sane living as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other suffering, overwhelmed, mind-numbed, brainwashed, and soul defeated teachers who deserve better.

* Originally published in 2005 by Shirley Fessel on spaces.msn.com

Since the time I wrote this, it occurred to me that the major omission is the systematic attack on public education that is not acknowledged as creating this insanity.

In future posts, I plan to address the lack of women’s voices in this predominantly woman’s profession and how the political agendas in America, serving greed, systematically stripped teachers of their professions. Those outside the classroom do not know the story. I will also be looking at the skills that teachers are currently burying that they could transfer elsewhere with mental and physical health benefits for themselves.

I want to quote here an excerpt from a more recent post by a teacher who has left the profession, showing the current end result of testing on teachers and students. In urban areas, it is even worse. When I left in 2008, urban children were being tested up to 5 or 6 times a year in order to make money for testing companies, which then led to textbook changes and increased textbook sales. We are only narrowly escaping the gun lobbyists desire to sell guns to every teacher, a money sign on every trigger. It is the final insult to the teacher-student relationship by those in power who do not care and see education as a way to make profits from tax monies.

“So why did I leave? Clearly, it means a lot to me to be a teacher. People assume that maybe the kids were too much, or the parents were a lot, or the pay was too low, or any number of reasons that have been trivialized on memes and complained about on Facebook. Taking a hiatus from teaching didn’t have anything to do with any of those reasons….. Jan 2016 Import 015

The solitary reason that I chose to leave teaching has to do with the politicized environment of education. People may wonder what politics have to do with teaching, and the answer is everything. When policies are made, the impacts come into our lives and change them drastically. Over the past few years, there has been widespread ‘educational reform.’ These reforms have increased the importance of spreadsheets, columns of data, evaluations by inexperienced observers, and the accounting of data in every teacher’s life. The focus has gone away from people; students, parents, teachers, staff, volunteers, and onto data. The most important elements of teaching cannot be quantified onto a spreadsheet and put into a power point. When data is given importance above all else, time and resources are directed as such….

About five years ago I gave a presentation at a staff meeting dealing with recognizing childhood hunger in the classroom. Oregon leads the nation in childhood hunger, with about 30% of children living with food instability; they don’t know when, if or what they will eat. I was teaching in a county with 25% of our children living with childhood hunger…

I have offered to give this presentation every year since then (with different principals and different schools), and I have consistently been told no, there is not enough time. Not enough time. For one-third of our children. There is not a place in my heart in which this is acceptable.

We are in a people business, not a numbers business. It is not that teachers do not value data and information systems. We absolutely do, so that we can know where each child is in their mastery of the concepts that we have taught. Record keeping, evaluation of scores, and calibration of lessons based on the data are important parts of being a teacher. Data is just not the entirety of what it means to be a teacher. Teaching and learning are about more than test scores. There are so many more verbs that describe good teachers other than data collection. However, this piece of our profession is now emphasized above all other traits and qualities. It is more important to value the child, work with the family and teach at a pace that makes sense for the learners than it is for teachers to know yet another way to compare data on spreadsheets. Current teachers are doing all of this and it is too much, and too unnecessary. The only educational reform that should be considered should be designed by experts; our experienced teachers, parents, community leaders and students.” -Elona Schreiner October 22, 2015 “The One Reason I Quit Teaching” wordpress.com

Elona is being charitable. It’s been more than a few years: it’s been decades. Unfortuately, those who legislate and lobby and profit do not care what any teacher thinks. Since the 80s, it was decided that education, and especially teachers, were an educational free for all football, and we’ve been kicked around ever since. And when we don’t submit to being kicked around, well, we are replaced by a myriad of options: homeschooling, temporary teaching certificates, union busting, and online K-12 isolation.

That is why we need to face the fact that we have no leverage. Our schools are not appreciated or acknowledged for their strengths. It is time to stop accepting the heaping coals of criticism. It only enables the abuse. The same chauvanistic message husbands would criticize wives with (even those who “help you babysit the children” not “our children”- I heard a principal actually say this to a teacher in 2005 when he asked her “Who will watch the children?” ) will be hurled at us: but what about the children? To which I say, “Yes, what about them? You have created an impossible task, what I call making bricks without straw, and I am not going to pretend it can be done anymore. You take responsibility for what you have created. I cannot participate in dehumanizing the students anymore.”