The first district I worked was interesting; the high school was located in an upper-middle class area where many of the students had nicer cars than the teachers, yet the teachers earned far lower than their peers in comparable districts. Many of the kids were very entitled and it was clear that the parents and students got their way. I felt the administration was weak. Rules were not enforced as they should have been, and many of the students were pretty snotty. The faculty were somewhat uptight, but dedicated and hard-working.
For the past year and a half, I've working in a much larger, much more diverse school district. It is one of the largest suburban districts in Pennsylvania, with over 1,000 students per grade. I spend most of my day at one of the three middle schools and two hours in the middle of the day at the high school. The middle school in which I work is located in a blue-collar area with a large immigrant population. Many of the students come from broken homes, unemployment is relatively high among their parents, and substance abuse is more common in this district than the last, both in the students and their parents.
The nature of my job puts me in special education classes some of the time. Up until about two years ago, I felt I wanted to be a special education teacher. However, having experienced the inefficacy of most special education programs, I have decided to put my degrees to use and become a French teacher. I am currently attending a state university to obtain my teaching certificate.
Overall, there are a lot of problems with the American education system, at least based on my limited experience in Southeastern Pennsylvania, and these problems occur at all levels. Allow me to outline them for you!
1. Teacher Education Programs
I have been attending classes at night for the past two and a half years. In that time, I have taken approximately six to seven classes and have maintained a 4.0 GPA at the graduate level. Of those classes, approximately two of them have been useful: Educational Technology and Techniques of Second Language Teaching. The rest have been a waste of my time, money, and mental effort. I have learned (multiple times) about Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory, but I have not learned how to write an effective lesson plan. I have learned how to calculate the standard deviation of test scores among my classes (which can be done with one keystroke in MS Excel), yet I have learned no classroom management techniques. I know about the history of American education, Freud and his views of adolescence, moral development theory, cognitive development theory, social development theory, and yet no one has told me what to do when you encounter an angry teenager who disrupts the class repeatedly with cursing and spitballs because his dad got drunk and beat him up over the weekend and he has a reading-based learning disability that no one has diagnosed or addressed.
Philip Beauchemin, a teacher at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, wrote a letter to the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer a few months ago, and it was brilliant. He talks about how 'bad schools' generally have the worst teachers, and that was true at Overbrook until they got a batch of young teachers in under the Teach for America program. Here is what he says:
So, what's going on here? These young teachers had degrees in something real - history, English, math, science, etc. - instead of the usual degrees in secondary education. In other words, they actually were smart and knew something - and their students soon realized and respected that. There remains, nonetheless, this stubbornly held belief in college education departments, as well as in each new Philadelphia School District administration, that good teaching is some magical product that percolates from constantly updated "data" and can be imparted to teachers by way of professors, mentors, experts, and constantly rotating nomenclature. What an expensive and distracting myth that has been. ... [G]ood teachers are born of talent and intelligence, not made by methodology or the hugely wasteful and overfunded staff development that seems to obsess our present school administrators, just as it did their predecessors. The condiments keep changing, but the baloney remains the same.
Couldn't have said it better myself, Mr. Beauchemin.
2. Tenure
This may seem contradictory, as I want to become a teacher, and one would think that I would be all for tenure; after all, who doesn't love job security? But I see tenured teachers day in and day out, and trust me, it's not pretty. I'm not saying all tenured teachers are bad; they are not. However, it is easy to go along, never updating your lesson plans, losing the drive to be creative year after year when you know that unless you commit some act of gross negligence, your job is relatively safe. Teachers should have to perform to certain standards just as employees do in any other profession. If they don't perform to those standards, then those teachers need to be shown the door and a more qualified person needs to replace them. That being said, I am also against merit pay, which leads to my next point.
3. Accountability
Some people think that teachers should receive merit pay based on the performance of their students. That is a really, really bad idea. Obviously, a teacher should be effective at imparting their knowledge to their students, and they should be effective at assessing their students to determine if they (the teachers) have taught effectively. However, one thing I've learned in many of my useless classes is this: correlation does not indicate causation. If a group of children is doing poorly in school, many factors need to be examined. Do these children have learning disabilities? What is their home life like? Do they get enough sleep? Do they get enough to eat? Do they feel safe, both at school and at home? Do they have rotten teachers? If a group of students is doing poorly, it is not automatically the fault of the teacher.
Teachers need to be accountable for their actions, but students and parents/guardians do as well. Day in and day out, I see students in ninth grade come to class with no books, no paper, and NOTHING TO WRITE WITH. How is this possible? While I work in a tougher area, it's not like these kids are destitute - they just don't give a shit. There are no consequences for their actions, or in this case, inactions. But the teachers have their hands tied - if they fail the unprepared, lazy students, it then becomes the teachers' problem, not the students' problem. And how do you make a teenager care? How do you look at a 6'2" 15-year-old who wants to drop out next year and join the military and say, "You really need to read Romeo and Juliet, and it's also important for you to know Algebra and Physics." But somehow, we need to find a way, and parents/guardians need to help.
Ignorance begets ignorance. Parents who don't give a shit about education raise children who don't give a shit about education. Many of these kids are so ignorant to the way life is, but then again, I think all 15-year-olds are to a certain degree. But when your parents don't force you to come to school on time, don't ask how your homework is coming along, don't take your phone and computer away when your grades suck, don't ground you when you are an ass, then you have entitled, unmotivated kids who will cheat and lie in order to get a D and go on to the next grade, having never learned a damn thing. And a teacher will have gained 8,000 more gray hairs in the process. It's never to early to teach a person to be responsible for their actions.
4. Special Education
Ah, special education - the bane of many teachers' careers. IEPs are the work of the devil. There is a very fine line between providing a learning-disabled child with much-needed help, and enabling a lazy child to get away with whatever they want. I have seen many kids with IEPs (individual education plans) get away with murder. They get extended time to take tests. They can take the test wherever they like. They have no deadlines to obey. They call the shots. And they learn nothing. How does this serve the student? If you require nothing of the student, you will get nothing in return. Are special education programs and IEPs necessary? Yes; but they need to be properly implemented, and that rarely happens.
5. One Size Fits All
Every few years, a new trend comes along in education. Whole Language. Everyday Math. Whatever. Trends do not fit students. Teachers are supposed to be experts at individualized instruction (teaching each student what they need to know in a way they understand), yet they are supposed to use these curricula that are developed by grad students at universities and textbook companies who have never set foot inside a real classroom to see how real kids learn. One approach for thirty kids at a time? I think not. There is a general 'feeling' that one gets for each class, in my experience. I think a good teacher needs to tune into that feeling and use it to teach their students. Some classes are more visual; some more auditory. Others may be more tactile, and yet others may require instruction on all three levels in order to really understand what is being taught. This is difficult on the teacher, but not impossible, and I think it comes naturally to good teachers. Good teachers seize on their students' strengths and use that to their advantage in the classroom. See that kid who doodles all the time? Have him or her make backdrops for a skit. The kid that won't shut up? They can read out loud. The kid that won't sit still? They can hand out and collect assignments. I've seen it work.
I could go on and on and on, but it's getting late, I'm tired, and I have to go to work at school tomorrow. Despite all my misgivings about the American education system, I still want to be a teacher, because I feel like I am going into the profession with my eyes wide open. Will I make a difference? I certainly hope so. Will I inspire a generation of kids to move to a francophone country and study the language and literature for the rest of their lives? Doubtful. But if they go to Paris one day and successfully find their way from the airport to their hotel, and they can make reservations at a nice restaurant, and they look back on their trip and it was great because they were able to communicate fairly well with the French in their native tongue, then I will consider that a job well done on my part. What more could I ask for?
Thought you might be interested in another letter I wrote to Inquirer on the subject-- don't think they published this one, or at least I never saw it.
ReplyDeletePhil Beauchemin, Overbrook HS (pbeauchemin@comcast.net)
Like many Philadelphia teachers, I read with great interest the column entitled Teachers are made, not born, offered by our union president, Jerry Jordan. Mr. Jordan rightly decries the inadequate preparation and support for new teachers in our city schools. Despite the fact that "in Philadelphia, the cost to recruit and train each teacher is roughly $17,000...only 30 percent of the teachers the district hired in 1999 were still teaching in the city in 2005." As Mr. Jordan correctly points out, "this is money and talent we can't afford to waste." And yet, according to those numbers, waste we do. So, the question arises: Is there any credible "data-driven" proof that all that money has as yet, or will ever generate meaningful improvement in the quality of our teachers?
Philadelphia continues to offer some of the lowest salaries and most dangerous working conditions in the metropolitan area. Apparently, we have concluded that significantly increasing teacher salaries is not an effective recruiting tool. Not to worry-- we can just keep losing talent to the suburbs, but make up for that with better recruiting and in-house staff development. And the huge expense of this recruiting and staff development can be paid for by-- get this-- keeping teacher salaries low. Perfect.
For decades, each school district administration has in turn been outraged by the failure of its predecessors, and then within a few years, declared some version of "Mission Accomplished" before moving on to the next challenge (in New Orleans or wherever). Instead of the endless parade of supposedly new ideas, perhaps it is time for an old fashioned one: Let's attract and retain more talented teachers with higher salaries, cut class size, then get out of their way and let them teach. When new teachers are the most intelligent and talented, we veterans can help them. When they're not, no one can.
Philip Beauchemin, Esq.
Teacher, Overbrook High School