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Sept. 22, 2011 Throwing the baby out with the bath water. During the presidential campaign of 1996, Republican candidate Bob Dole fired the first shot in a conflict conservatives are still waging: a battle to destroy teachers’ unions and to end the practice of tenuring teachers. Dole accused older, more experienced teachers of being “burned out,” of coasting toward retirement with no enthusiasm or commitment to their jobs. He blamed tenure, the practice of protecting experienced teachers (usually requiring three to five consecutive years in the same school system) from dismissal for personal or capricious reasons. The implication of Dole’s accusation was that the inadequacy of our public school system could be efficiently addressed by repealing tenure laws so that administrators could more easily dismiss incompetent teachers. Contemporary conservatives such as Governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Jon Kasich of Ohio have broadened the accusation to include teachers’ unions, claiming that these unions have extorted agreements from school districts that protect incompetent teachers. The fact is that teachers can be fired for incompetence even if they are tenured; it’s just more difficult. The contrived tenure issue is based upon a false assumption: that teachers begin their careers doing a good job and then become bad teachers because tenure allows them to. That assumption is nonsense. Bad teachers are bad from day one of their careers. In fact, most teachers aren’t very good on day one because colleges do a poor job of preparing them for the realities of teaching. As they gain experience, teachers who want to become better teachers almost always do. Those who remain bad would have been bad at anything they chose to do; their work ethic is poor, and the standards of performance they set for themselves are low. Such teachers are easy to identify and should be weeded out of the education system early. The fact that many are not is the fault of lazy or incompetent administrators, whose job it is to evaluate and dismiss incompetent teachers. If any bad teacher ever acquires tenure, the blame lies with the administrator who recommended him for re-employment. Administrators frequently re-hire bad teachers simply because it’s easier than finding a better replacement. There are two reasons why administrators, school boards and politicians want to abolish tenure. One is because non-tenured teachers can be easily intimidated into silence. The claim made by some in the media that teachers don’t need tenure because they are adequately protected by the First Amendment is delusional. A non-tenured teacher can be fired for virtually any reason, including the legal exercise of his First Amendment rights. All that is required to do so is an administrator smart enough not to give the true reason for the dismissal. State laws require only that a reason for dismissal be given, not that it be documented. That’s another way of saying that it doesn’t have to be true. The second reason is money. A school can often save $20,000 or more per teacher per year by replacing experienced teachers with recent college graduates. Tenure interferes with one of the most efficient ways for a school system to save a great deal of money. A key to understanding the assault on teachers’ unions can be found in the fact that all such attacks are being conducted by political conservatives, specifically by Republican governors and legislatures. It can be easily demonstrated that the reason for these attacks has nothing to do with the quality of the public school system. These Republicans would have you believe that union contracts protect so many incompetent teachers that the system is failing because of them. If that were true, then states that outlaw teachers’ unions, collective bargaining and strikes should provide a significantly better quality of education than states where unions are allowed, since their schools would not be burdened by the incompetent teachers protected by unions. That does not turn out to be the case. Missouri, my home state, not only does not allow teachers to strike or collectively bargain, it doesn’t allow them to unionize at all. [It should be noted that the National Education Association, which incurs much of the conservatives’ wrath, is a lobbying organization, not a union. Teachers in Missouri may join the NEA, but they can’t bargain collectively or strike.] In fact, Missouri has never allowed teachers to unionize. In spite of that alleged advantage, the quality of education provided by Missouri teachers is no better than the national average, and it is poorer than some states (such as Wisconsin) which do allow teachers’ unions. The fact that only conservative Republican governors are attacking unions is the key to understanding why it is happening. These governors’ anti-union agenda is driven by wealthy right wingers like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family because unions are the only fundraising medium that Democrats have to compete even partially with the corporate sponsorship of Republicans. The Republican Party has long envisioned a “permanent Republican majority.” The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 provided a powerful impetus for that achievement by removing all limits on corporate spending on elections. Since more than 90% of corporate spending is done on behalf of Republicans, a substantial Republican financial advantage accrued. All the Republicans need to do now to cement control of government is to remove the one significant medium through which Democrats can raise large sums of money: unions. The attack on teachers’ unions, perceived as one of the most liberal of large unions, has nothing to do with public education and everything to do with shutting all who are not wealthy out of the political process. Since the portrayal of experienced, tenured teachers as lazy, “burned out,” and a detriment to the education system is a key element in the Republican effort to privatize public education, it is essential that the public understand why replacing experienced, older teachers with younger ones will not improve public education. There are five reasons why forcing out older teachers and bringing in younger ones will not improve our schools. 1. Bad teachers were always bad. Part of the mythology created by conservatives who wish to privatize public education holds that bad teachers become that way because of tenure: once they are protected by tenure, they no longer need to perform, so they don’t. This view requires the assumption that few, if any, teachers are dedicated to their profession, that all, or virtually all, will shrug off their responsibilities as soon as the protection of tenure allows it. That assumption is refuted by the very fact that people go into teaching as a profession. It doesn’t pay as well as other professions; it is fraught with frustrations and stress that drive half of all new teachers out of the profession within five years of entering it. It follows that a high percentage of those who remain must be dedicated to their jobs. That doesn’t mean that they are necessarily good teachers, but if they are bad, it isn’t tenure that causes it. The conservative mythology also ignores the fact that almost all teachers get better with experience. Because departments of teacher education in colleges generally do a woefully inadequate job of preparing young teachers for the real world, most first year teachers are not very good at their jobs. As they learn how to manage students, to organize the material they teach and to present it in a way students can understand, they improve. Those who don’t improve don’t care to. They expect little from their students or themselves, and they spend their careers looking for the easiest way to get through each day. They started bad and never changed. If they last in one job long enough to get tenure, that is as much an indictment of the administrators who evaluate them as it is of the teachers themselves. Forcing out older, experienced teachers in favor of those just out of college means the replacement of some teachers who have improved with those who haven’t yet had the chance. That is hardly a recipe for improving the overall quality of teaching. There is no evidence that the new teachers will improve in greater numbers or at a faster rate than their predecessors did. 2. Older teachers have a better work ethic than younger ones. This is generally true of people in all professions. The director of the machine maintenance department of a factory once told me that he never hired young people when he could get older ones. The younger ones, he said, invariably had poor attendance, were habitually late for work and expected to get regular and frequent raises regardless of the quality of their work. It has been my observation that teachers are not substantively different from other workers in this respect. All other factors being equal, the replacement of older teachers with younger ones would likely reduce the effectiveness of the education system merely because each passing generation witnesses an overall decline in the willingness of workers to work. 3. Experienced teachers know more about their subject matter and how to teach it than new teachers do. Teachers tend to learn more about their subject matter as they teach it if only because they have to answer questions about it from students. I received a certificate to teach chemistry after taking the same college chemistry courses that chemistry and pre-med majors took. I finished at the top of all of those classes, yet I found that my understanding of chemistry expanded significantly as a result of teaching it. Answering questions from bright, inquisitive students requires an understanding of the subject thorough enough to explain it from a variety of perspectives, something I didn’t have to do on a college test. The new teachers who would replace the old would lack that advantage, and it would take years for experience to win it back. 4. Older teachers manage students better than younger ones do. Young teachers, who are only a few years older than the high school students some of them teach, haven’t learned how to manage a classroom, how to control the behavior of students. Many of them tend to value being popular among students. They want to be the students’ friend instead of just their teacher. That tendency renders classroom discipline destructively inadequate in the classrooms of most young teachers. Half will get better at it; the other half will leave the profession within five years. Under the best of circumstances, young teachers will take years to manage their classes as well as the older teachers they replaced already did. 5. Young teachers will develop the same self-defense strategies that undermine the effectiveness of older teachers. One of the first things a new teacher learns is that failing too many students leads to trouble. Parents will complain to school board members and administrators who will pressure teachers to find a way to give better grades. Unfortunately for the quality of our system of education, the teachers usually do. Some teachers “dumb down” their curriculum so that students find it easier. Of course, that leads to the lower test scores that then become the bane of those same teachers. Other teachers assign lots of graded home work. Some students actually do it; others copy it from those who did it. Even those who actually do the homework often learn little from it. Homework usually consists of writing answers to the questions at the end of a chapter. Those questions include key words which can easily be found italicized or boldfaced in the chapter reading. The student needs only to copy from the textbook the paragraph surrounding the key word, and he gets full credit for the answer. He doesn’t have to understand it or remember it; in many cases he doesn’t really even have to read it. Math homework often consists of dozens of problems that are worked in exactly the same way as the sample in the book. The student needs only follow the illustrated steps, precisely the same in every problem, to get the correct answer and full credit. He need not understand anything about why the problems are worked that way. Most teachers give bushels of extra credit points, usually for busywork that has no relevance to the material under study. I’ve seen teachers give extra credit to any student who would show up at the gym on Saturday to watch the cheerleaders rehearse, who would bring a box of facial tissues to school for class use, who would complete a crossword puzzle about musicians and composers (for a math class), who would use popsicle sticks to build a replica of an Indian village (copied from an illustration already in the text), who would use rocks, glitter, Christmas ornaments or other mundane objects to make a model of a biological system illustrated in the text. What almost all extra credit has in common is that it allows students to improve their grades, sometimes dramatically, without learning anything more about the subject under study. Some teachers may do these things because they’re too kindhearted to fail students who deserve to fail, but the great majority do it to insulate themselves from criticism for failing too many students. It is a defensive strategy which allows the teacher to claim that he has high expectations of his students while rewarding them for not meeting those expectations. The kids don’t learn much, but parents and administrators are happy (until achievement test scores suffer accordingly, a consequence administrators usually profess not to understand). Young teachers face the same criticism from parents and administrators that their experienced colleagues do, and they will adopt the same strategies to protect themselves from it. Those strategies make grades meaningless, allow students to get good grades without learning, and probably undermine the effectiveness of our education system more than any other single factor. The lesson taught by the five observations discussed above is that replacing older teachers with younger ones to save money, silence outspoken teachers, or whatever rationale is given, will damage the quality of public education, not improve it. It is not my intention to defend the quality of the public schools. I am probably a more severe critic than the people who want to destroy the system or privatize it. The purpose of this essay is to point out that, while I believe that public schools can be dramatically improved at relatively little cost, replacing older teachers with younger ones won’t accomplish that. The manufactured issues of tenure and teacher “burnout” serve to distract attention from reforms that actually would improve public schools and to disguise the motives of those who would destroy the system entirely by privatizing it.
For a thorough analysis of what’s wrong with the public schools and how to fix them, download The Fish Stinks from the Head Down from amazonKindle.
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