Middleschool Life

girloffscript:

mustamuseme:

How disappointing. Rigid “last hired, first fired” rules are a disaster for schoolchildren. They mean that across the country, teachers of the year will be pink-slipped simply because they are young. Yep—some of our very best teachers will be driven out of the profession. Meanwhile, older, incompetent teachers will be kept on. That’s unconscionable. We now know that having a bad teacher two or three years in a row in the early grades all but dooms disadvantaged children.

With a little imagination, there’s a grand compromise available: money to prevent layoffs in exchange for a requirement that seniority no longer be the only factor in determining layoffs (it could continue to be one of four or five factors). But according to an administration source, this was apparently considered and rejected by the president without any serious effort to determine if it could win enough Republican votes in the Senate. (White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel disputes this account.) It would take action to change collective bargaining agreements in some state legislatures, but this was true of portions of Race to the Top and proved to be a surmountable barrier.

The brutal truth is that teachers’ unions don’t care much about protecting young, great teachers (often union members, but less influential ones) who will get laid off soon. Instead, the unions and their lackeys in Congress and state legislatures will go down fighting for older teachers, even if they’re lemons of the year.

By the way, this is a perversion of the American labor movement. Who went to the union barricades in the mid-20th century chanting “Last hired! First fired!”? No one. Seniority systems might make some sense on assembly lines, but have no place in education.

I have mixed feelings about this article.  While I think the last hired, first fired option is not good … the article almost seems to imply that older teachers are not talented.  Many are incredibly amazing, and I’ve learned a lot from them.  Also, I am concerned about the cuts to education funding, but agree with the idea to cut funding for charter schools and am not really sure about how I feel about the “Race to the Top” program which provides funds to states that have the most accountability in their state education programs.   The whole idea of holding teachers “accountable” baffles me.  Not that I think we shouldn’t be expected to do the best job possible, I just know few good teachers who don’t want to be the best teacher they can be and don’t strive to as much as they can for their students.  Most of us went into this profession because of our love for children, desire to share knowledge, desire to change lives or be a role model, and most of all our desire to help others.  Those that don’t have that view, tend to be the “incompetent” teachers regardless of age, and if we kept teachers based on their ability to teach regardless of how long they had been teaching there this would not be a problem.    At the same time, how good can I teacher be with the stress of constantly worrying about their job security (I worked at a no contract school before, and with the economy being bad I was constantly worried about having a job)?

I’m rambling, but I’m interested in hearing other people’s opinions on this article. 

Also, if we fired a “more experienced teacher” where would she go?  People don’t realize teaching is a trade skill.  With an education degree, there are few other job options out there without going back and getting more education. With Master’s degrees and years of experience, older teachers are shut out of new teaching opportunities because they are too expensive. Our unions are no different than other trade jobs, such as plumbers or electricians.  

Any school can get rid of a tenured, experienced teacher if the right due process is followed.  Our corporation did that a few years back.  A teacher was ultimately fired for insubordination.  He would not provide lesson plans or complete certain parts of curriculum he was asked to do.  He’d been teaching for over 20 years. 

Do I think “last hire, first fire” blows?  Yeah, I do, but just because a new teacher has lots of energy and new ideas doesn’t make her better than someone who’s had steady results and routine—even without technology—for 30 years.  I didn’t know what I was doing my first two years.  I look back now and think, “God, I was terrible.  I didn’t grade those right at all. I should’ve handled that differently.”

Right now, the only thing I can think of is retirement incentives.  You want to keep the new people?  Then give the older ones a reason to go.  And really, they’re happy to.  Not because they hate the job, its because they hate to see the young people go.  There were people in my town who retired to save someone else’s job. 

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Great article about what teachers are stressed about. Seems as usual we are society’s scapegoats.

Scripted…

Instead of working on ‘real world’ stuff, I have to do ‘testing’ practice over and over. The reason we use it? Well - it seems that it does work to keep the test scores high.

It just makes me so sad because I have to skip rich learning experiences I’ve been trained to do - to stay on schedule. I would argue that they may not do as well on a single test  - but they’d learn alot more my way. I don’t have time to ‘sort’ polygons, make foldable notes, build straw polygons, spend more than a day on geoboard, etc…

I’m supposed to be teaching area of irregular polygons. They have a hard time with the regular ones. Assumptions are made that the kids filed this away when they done it one week a year ago and they come to me ready to apply what they’ve learned already and be moved on to the ‘next’ level. It just isn’t so…

So by the time I do a job of a quick ‘how you do the basics’ review - I spend the rest of the allotted time trying to make sure they can wade through a plethora of testing items and word problems with at least some success.

I’ll be glad when testing has passed so I can do some of the good stuff…