eduskeptic

I have been teaching for over 30 years. In that time I have been through seven superintendents and about ten principals. Six of those principals I worked with in a teacher/principal relationship. The other four, or maybe five, I worked with as head of the Teachers Association. Some of these administrators were wonderful to work with. A few were, and probably still are, just plain rotten. Had I the authority to fire them, I would have. I’m equally sure that some of them would have loved to fire me too. I did carry on a professional relationship with all of them, either as a teacher, or as an association representative. I have been approached more than once over the years to consider becoming an administrator. I have chosen to stay in the classroom, for reasons I will get to in a short bit. In a recent article, Margaret Gaston wrote about the declining numbers of teachers pursing administrative credentials. It is an interesting article. In it, she says that only “… 48 percent of California principals say they plan to stay in their jobs until retirement, compared with 67 percent nationally, and only 22 percent of California’s secondary principals plan to do so.” Briefly, she notes that it is important to strengthen recruitment and retention of the administration portion of the school systems. A study by Ken Futernick of California State University, Sacramento, mentioned in the same article, points out that “…42 percent of teachers who leave the field cite ‘an unsupportive principal’ as a reason for leaving.” He says that 52 percent cite poor administrative support at the district level.

The job of principal, or superintendent, is vastly different from that of a teacher. The job of principal is one of administration, one of managing. In these days, at least in California, that job has gotten to be very complicated. Now, I think that anyone who wants to be a principal should be required to spend a minimum of five years in the classroom, if for no other reason than to get a basic understanding of what it takes to be a teacher, full time, in the classroom. Without that experience, school management shifts into the realm of magical thinking. Past that point, principals don’t teach, nor should they be expected to, any more than I should be expected to perform administrative duties.The principal has quite a full plate without attempting to be the “educational leader” of a school. I’ve not met one yet who is. I’ve met a few who thought they were. They weren’t.  I know teachers who think they know how to run a school. They don’t. Certainly, the principal must be the administrative leader of the school, the person who provides direction, support, guidance, and when necessary, discipline, for staff and students.The principal must keep up with the myriad of laws, deadlines, and edicts that govern a school and a school district, an Alice in Wonderland type of experience. I depend on my principal to keep all of that away from my classroom so that I am able to do my job, which is to teach. The principal at my elementary school somehow manages, in addition to everything else, to visit every classroom several times a year to present science lessons. He becomes the Principal of Science on these forays. It is an amazing effort, and something the children enjoy and learn from. He doesn’t pretend to be the educational leader. He’s a great Principal of Science though. Earlier, I said that I chose to stay in the classroom. The reasons are many. The principal at my school gets there before I do, and leaves after I do. His contracted days are longer than mine. His nights and weekends are full of school things, while mine are not. While I spend my days with the complexity of the behaviors of very young children, and other teachers deal with the craziness of middle school or high school students, the principal spends his days with parents, who are either happy with or disgusted with, something that happened at school/on the bus/at the bus stop/on the internet, legal issues about everything, deadlines for forms, meetings, money, clubs, curricula, student and staff problems, maintenance, and the district office.  If this person, the principal, doesn’t have adequate training for administering this mishmash of issues, he or she will fail. It is important for the principal types to have support and continuous training in not only in the business end of running a school, but in the people end as well. Teachers are not altogether easy to manage, even under the best of circumstances. It’s a difficult mix to master, and when it isn’t, some teachers, especially the young ones, leave the profession as a result. The screening process for gaining an admin credential should be rigorous, just as it should be for teachers. We cannot afford poor quality on either side of the equation. The last thing a teacher needs is a principal who is incapable of being honest, human, supportive, and knowledgeable. Now, on top of all this, the principal simply doesn’t make enough money for me to have jumped into that pool. It is a complex and demanding job, just as mine is. It is not a surprise to me at all that the number of teachers wanting to go into the administrative ranks, or stay there, is less than robust. One thing that I want to point out, which is a different from what Margaret Gaston says in her article: school leadership is not vested in the principal, or any other single source. It is a partnership between teachers and principals. Educational leadership is in the classroom, not the principals office. Administrative leadership is in the principals office, not the classroom. The success of a school results from a working relationship between the two.

In an earlier post on this blog I wrote about the massive pink slip party that school districts engaged in, due to the rotten state of the economy. This overstimulated flurry of pink slips to classroom teachers, in California, went out to 26,000 teachers. I think now, as I thought then, that districts in general overreacted to the funding picture. It isn’t that they didn’t have reason to be very conservative in their outlook. In California, schools are funded by taxpayers, and our general fund fills based on how many children are enrolled, and then filtered by how many show up each day. Proposition 98 established a floor for funding the schools in California. In some circumstances, this floor can be sidestepped. Districts had to assume more than worst case scenarios in looking to the 2009-2010 school year, while hoping that some help would show up from the feds and the state. The President, and our Governor, said that stimulus money would soon reach the states, and the states would then begin spending it. I challenged them to prove their dedication to the schools, and make sure that the money actually reached into the school system to do some good. Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, was also stating that education was a priority, not to worry. So, the question arises, has the money done any good yet? I very much doubt that the President, our Governor, or Arne Duncan read anything on this blog and acted accordingly. However, in a small part of the entire national system. I know that the release of stimulus funds has reached into classrooms. Pink slips have been rescinded, and some teachers know that they will be teaching next year. One district sent out pink slips to about 500 teachers, going back a little over 8 years and laying off everyone back to that time. Last week, that district, due directly to a better financial picture as a result of stimulus funds, notified a good portion of the 500 that their pink slips were rescinded. I am hopeful that this type of action is going on throughout this state, and the rest of the United States. I do believe that it is important for the health of this country to keep our schools staffed with that dedicated group of individuals we call teachers. Overloading classrooms by laying off teachers is quite simply a very bad idea, in the short run and the long run. Thank you Mr. President, and our Governator, for releasing enough money for us to do our jobs in our classrooms. It remains up to us, the teachers, to make sure that this is money well spent.

Just a quick note here: Eduskeptic is now listed on technorati. I hope that this makes it easier for readers to find this blog and respond to it.  We’ll see. More to come later.

I just read a blog post at Converge Magazine online.  In it, the writer complains about “glorified babysitting” and the money she once made babysitting.  She made $5.00 per hour, per child.  She, and apparently some colleagues,  goes on to do some mathematical calculations that use this figure to come up with a theoretical teacher’s salary : 35 students x 5 classes x $5 per hour = $875 per day= $160,562 per year. I left a comment.  The writer, as a teacher, should know what a sentence fragment is, and shouldn’t use them in an academic post of any kind.  She further makes a common mistake that I see more and more of these days.  She refers to people in this manner: “…we are legally responsible for every student that is physically present…”.  People should always be referred to as who, whose, or whom .  It is a sign of either a hurried and unskilled writer, or an uneducated one when “that” is use to describe people.  While I would love to make more money than I do, actually, a lot more, I do not complain about what I am paid.  I made a clear choice many years ago to be a teacher.  If I had wanted to make gobs of money, I would have done something else.  I get very tired of hearing those in my profession complain about babysitting and not enough money.  What I do get is more time off than anyone else I know.   I have a great deal of respect for babysitters and child care providers.  Their jobs are difficult, with long hours and very little time off.  My advice to everyone who is profoundly dissatisfied with the salary for teaching is this: quit.  Go find another job.  You will not be missed.  Someone else, equally qualified, or perhaps even more so, will fill your spot quite nicely.  I do not babysit in my classroom.  I teach.  I simply do not permit anything to get in the way of learning.  I do recognize that this can be a demanding and sometimes very, very, frustrating enterprise, this teaching thing, especially for those who are relatively new to the profession.  The learning curve is steep and difficult.  The very first day in your classroom isn’t very much different from the very last:  at the appointed time, the bell rings, the door shuts, and you are in the classroom, alone, with your students.  The days begin like this, and end like this.  Teachers are mostly on their own from the start, and expected to do very well with whomever the students are.  Training is sparse, if at all.  Support is sporadic.  Expectations are enormous.  Responsibility for the students is absolutely incredible, and can be daunting.  Paperwork seems to eclipse common sense.  One thing is certainly clear here though: those of us who are teachers have chosen to be teachers.  We knew the salary schedule when we signed the contract.  It is completely ridiculous to complain about it.  Either come to terms with it, stop complaining, and certainly work for better conditions,  or quit.

Data drives much of what we do.  Without data, the bits, pieces, and numbers of everyday life, it would be difficult to do much of anything.  Make a cake without the proper data to guide you, and you are more likely to end up with either an explosion or a boat anchor than a cake.  We depend on correct data to make, and alter, plans.  We collect it in many ways and forms, and use it in too many ways to count.  The education establishment needs accurate data for just about every thing that we do.  That data is constantly used to either support the idea that we are doing well, or are sliding quickly into oblivion. Verifiable data should be relatively easy to come by and probably just as easy to manipulate.  If it is verifiable data (numbers, names, places, tests etc.) then it is useful, even if we disagree with how it is used, or have different interpretations of how it should be used.   Considering that schools are, in theory, data driven, one could reasonably expect that our data stream is pretty solid, that we can point to numbers and results that actually mean something.  Maybe, maybe not.  Consider just one thing: the drop out rate at your local school or school district.  It is a number that can have rather large implications for and impacts on, schools and communities.  Finding this number is probably not, or at least shouldn’t be, very difficult.  Perhaps you could just call your local school and get it.  The question has been, and continues to be, is the information accurate?  The simple definition of “drop out” is not simple.  Who constitutes a drop out?  Is it someone who simply doesn’t show up anymore? What if someone moves but doesn’t enroll in a public school?  Dropout?  A student leaves your school for a private home school.  Dropout?  Joins the military.  Dropout?  It isn’t easy to define this one term.  How about the students in your class, or school?  Have they been with you from the start, from Kindergarten?  We are looking at test data for our second through fourth grades.  One question I have is simple enough: how many of the students we have tested have been with us from Kindergarten?  The answer: we have no way to figure that out, even with our rather expensive attendance software.  Would it be helpful to know?  Yes, it would.  For us to figure out who has been with us from the start, it seems,  would require an extensive exercise in physically looking at each child’s record and following it backward to the first date of enrollment in our district. Rather time consuming.  We need that data now, not a few weeks from now.  Perhaps a large district could devote the time to such an endeavor, but I have to guess that most districts that are small to medium in size just don’t have the money to do such a thing. If our small distict doesn’t have the capacity to figure out who has been with us since Kindergarten, how does an entire state, or the nation, figure out what the real drop out rate is? McKinsey & Co. has produced a paper that gives us, it says, “…an ideal vision of what a continuous learning system would look like” .  The State of California wants data that is real, accurate, and transparent, that gives us the ability to track students and educators alike, which they say we now do (students: CalPADs; teachers: CalTIDEs)  McKinsey & Co. proposes a comprehensive system that should lead to this goal.  I want the data too.  I want to be able to ask our attendance clerks which children have been with us from the start, who has actually dropped out, which is to say simply quit going to school in any form, and get information that I can use, instead of a statement that we can’t get that kind of information right now.  I’d like to be able to fine tune our teaching and curricula to benefit our students, and having in-depth, accurate, up-to-date information will make this task much more possible.  I would imagine that teachers, parents, and legislators in other states would like the same capabilities.  I’ll keep you posted.  Let me know what is going on in your state, district, or school.  Let’s compare notes.