Vicious Cycle of Teacher Recruitment

When I started teaching, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, NYC would hire anyone. I'm sure of this, because they hired me. I hadn't ever taught in my life, and I hadn't even taken an education course. But I had a college degree, I majored in English, and I passed a basic writing test over at Court Street. That was good enough for them to give me a job and pay me something like 14K per annum.

Years later, I watched Rudy Giuliani explain on TV that he didn't want to give teachers a raise because a lot of them "stink." He didn't cite any stats or figures, but in his mind, such as it was, that was good enough. Then we had Michael Bloomberg, who degraded us on a regular basis and sought to make us at will employees. After that, of course, came the new evaluation system. I can't think of a single working teacher (excepting the shills at E4E) who supports it.

Every day teachers wonder if there's gonna be a drive-by. Will the Boy Wonder come in with his little iPad and make up things that never happened? Will he tell you face to face the lesson was wonderful and then trash you in the actual evaluation? Worse, will he walk in while you're having a bad day? Will he make it a point to observe you on a half day when only eight students are present? This is what teachers walk around thinking about. I go on Facebook and read teachers say they will pay for the education of their children unless they pursue careers in education.

So, fewer people want to go into teaching. There appears to be a shortage in NY State. Perhaps we ought not to continue draconian "gotcha" plans to rate teachers, you conclude. Maybe Cuomo is coming to his senses. Well, you conclude wrong. Sure, there is some sort of temporary moratorium on rating teachers by VAM junk science. But it only applies to certain 3-8 teachers. We high school teachers are rated by the same nonsense we've suffered through for years.

Here's what NY Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia has decided--she'll let teachers from out of state teach our children without meeting certification requirements. OK, now I'm not saying that meeting the requirements makes anyone a good teacher. Still, it's hard to see how failing to meet them makes anyone a good teacher either. It's certainly unfair that those of us who live here and know the area are held to a higher bar than those who don't.

But what's the inevitable outcome of a policy like this? Well, for one, it may keep them from having to  raise compensation to attract people. That's bad for those of us who have to work for a living, and despite the inane chatter about putting "students first," it doesn't benefit our kids to have lower-paying jobs either.

Another issue, though, is probably further opportunity to blame teachers for education failures. What if teachers from Utah are ill equipped to deal with kids from New York? Inevitably, this will lead to tinhorn politicians to keep up the chants about how public school teachers suck, how union sucks, and how taxes suck and therefore teachers shouldn't be paid. Then, instead of making the field more competitive, they can lower standards even further and hire people even less equipped to do the job.

Then the op-eds can cry for more charters, more TFA, and more McTeachers who get thrown in the trash after a single use. It's ridiculous.

We need a reasonable standard for teachers, reasonable working conditions for teachers, and reasonable compensation for teachers. If the reformies don't wish to be reasonable, this shell game will go on forever. That's no way to place children first, and in fact it's no way to treat them at all.

The Shocking Teacher Shortage

It looks like Governor Cuomo's plan of painting targets on the backs of all teachers has not worked out as well as planned in NY State. Evidently there is a shortage, and to ease it, the geniuses in Albany are relaxing standards. Their thinking, evidently, is people from other states will be anxious for the chance to judged by Governor Cuomo's matrix, and potentially be guilty until proven innocent. After all, there aren't many opportunities like that in the United States.

Another point of view, of course, is that Governor Cuomo is bought and paid for by Eva Moskowitz's BFFs at Families for Excellent Schools, and that he pretty much jumps at their beck and call. Maybe that's why he was so happy to appear at Ms. Moskowitz's field trip, you know, the one where she boarded all her students on buses and dragged them to Albany to lobby for her own political cause. If you or I did that, we'd be fired. But of course we didn't, so that's not why there's a teacher shortage.

There's a teacher shortage because we're tired of being used as punching bags. We're tired of being vilified in the press, and by every tinhorn politician that takes suitcases of cash from DFER and FES. We're tired of hearing people like Cuomo enact rating plans to fire teachers, call them "baloney" when they fail to fire enough teachers, and revise them for the express purpose of firing more. We're tired of being judged by test scores which the American Statistical Association correctly asserts have little or no validity.

We're tired of being told the only way to teach is like this, like that, or like whatever Bill Gates wakes up and decides children other than his own must be taught. We're tired of endless testing and being forced to teach nonsense that does not help our children. We're tired of underlying assumptions by people with no credentials or credibility that the children we serve lack "grit" and must be treated with "rigor."

I'm particularly tired of so-called leaders who create problems and then try to solve them in ways that don't address the problems at all. When I started teaching, pay was particularly low. The city didn't bother addressing the huge disparity in pay between the city and surrounding suburbs. Instead, there were ads in the subways and on buses to try to attract teachers. There were intergalactic recruiting campaigns. It turned out, though, that people from other countries and universes just couldn't afford to live in NYC.

And then, of course, there is the issue of quality. I was one of the people who saw a subway ad and took a teaching gig. I had no idea what I was doing. On my ninth day of teaching, my supervisor wrote me up and said I had no idea what I was doing. But I had told her I had no idea what I was doing when she hired me. To this day I wonder why she expected more. She wrote that I should try to be more "heuristic" when I taught. Naturally that cleared up everything for me. Doubtless with excellent advice like that every teacher will become instantly excellent, no matter how much they raise or lower the standards.

Cuomo is an empty suit, with loyalty to no one but Cuomo. He just said he won't support his party in its effort to retake the State Senate. This is they guy Hillary's people have representing the DNC for New York. He has no moral center whatsoever, does whatever the people who pay him say, and happily supports whatever the privatizers tell him to. And, oh, if the people rise up and say screw your ridiculous tests, he can always make some empty gesture, like a partial moratorium, and say, "See? I care what you think, sort of."

This is step one in addressing a teacher shortage created by Albany. There will be more. But until they start listening to teachers and learning why people no longer pursue this job, they will be empty gesture after empty gesture, likely helping no one but those who see education as an opportunity for profit.

Frank Bruni Waxes Poetic on the Teacher Shortage

It must be great to be Frank Bruni. One day you're a food columnist, and the next you're an education expert. Today Frank is all upset about the teacher shortage. After all, his own paper wrote a big story about it. Nowhere did they bother acknowledging that teachers are pretty much under nationwide assault, but hey, why sweat the details when you're writing for the Paper of Record? The fact that they print the column should be good enough for anyone.

As it happens, Bruni himself is a prominent teacher basher. He believes passionately in junk science rating of teachers and can't be bothered to do the most fundamental research. Who cares if the American Statistical Association says teachers change test scores by a factor of 1-14%? What's the big deal if they say use of high stakes evaluation is counter-productive? He knows some guy who likes it and that should be good enough for anyone. Bruni does other important work, like spitting out press releases for Joel Klein's latest book.

But now he's amazed no one wants to be a teacher. Naturally, being a New York Times reporter who has access to pretty much anyone, he goes right to the source, the very best representative of teachers he can muster:

Teachers crave better opportunities for career growth. Evan Stone, one of the chief executives of Educators 4 Excellence, which represents about 17,000 teachers nationwide, called for “career ladders for teachers to move into specialist roles, master-teacher roles.”

“They’re worried that they’re going to be doing the same thing on Day 1 as they’ll be doing 30 years in,” he told me.

This is what Frank Bruni interprets as vision. Let's make one thing clear--Evan Stone is not a teacher. He was for a few excruciating and clearly unrewarding years. But once he learned all he could from that dead end job, he started this glitzy new E4E thing and got his hands on Gates money. Now he gets to make pronouncements to distinguished NY Times reporters like Bruni. Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck actually teaching children. Naturally Bruni doesn't ask us what we think. After all, given our obvious lack of ambition, what could we possibly know?

Bruni has gala luncheons to attend, fois gras to critique, and he can't be bothered.  Still just because Evan Stone's E4E got 17, 000 people to sign papers in exchange for free drinks doesn't mean they actually represent those people. I happen to know, for example, a UFT official who signed the paper just to see what was going on at one of those meetings.

In fact, there's no evidence to indicate anything E4E says is based on anything beyond Bill Gates's druthers. Their support for junk science and calls to actually worsen already tough working conditions border on lunacy. Their acceptance of reformy money and embrace of a reformy agenda mean they do NOT represent working teachers.

Here's something no one told Frank Bruni--teachers who want to "get out of the classroom" make the very worst educational leaders there are. How many of us have worked under supervisors who don't love our job, who can't do our job, but who don't hesitate to tell us all the ways we do our job wrong? How many of us know the, "Do as I say, not as I do." mantra well enough it might be tattooed on our foreheads?

Yes, Frank Bruni, there is a teacher shortage. And yes, there are reasons for it. Some reasons are your BFFs like Joel Klein, Campbell Brown, and Gates-funded astroturf groups like E4E. They spout nonsense-based corporate ideas designed to destroy public education and union. You talk to them and can't be bothered with us.

Another big reason is mainstream media, which hires people like you. When people read nonsense like the stuff you write, they may not know that fundamental research is something you consider beyond the pale. They may not be aware that your piece does not entail talking to working teachers. They may think we don't love our jobs and we don't love working with and helping children. They may not know that merit pay, which E4E is pushing in one form or another, has been around for 100 years and has never worked. They may even think that Evan Stone knows what he's talking about.

But he doesn't, Frank. And neither do you. That's why you're a big part of the problem.