Where Have All the Teachers Gone?

Once more into the breach it would seem. As a teacher in a public school in a large urban district I find myself routinely annoyed at the bad things said about us in the press, on the TV, by the politicians (federal, state, and local), by the local Board of Education, and most often, by the administrative officials who oversee the schools in the district. So I read something. I get annoyed. I write something in response. Seems as if it's a never ending cycle, a cycle informed by underlying political motives and misinformation.

There are a lot of factors that go into this ongoing argument. The American people don't want to pay the taxes necessary to legitimately support public education. A lot of the people with power to make things happen in America really don't care about the fate of public education because poor people's kids go to public schools. Rich and powerful people send their kids to private schools. It becomes a sort of "Let them eat cake," kind of situation. "We pay out of our own pockets for the education of our children. Why on earth should we pay for the education of their children. Let them pay for the education of their own."

Public schools are now, as they traditionally have been, funded by property taxes. Some communities rake in more in property taxes than others. Some school districts have more to spend per student than others. All districts are not equal. By the same token, some students have more advantages than others. Some have parents with college degrees and kids benefit mentally, socially, and economically. All of these factors play into how well the student does in school. Some students have parents who dropped out of high school, some have disabilities, and some have to deal with gangs, crime, and ghetto mentalities run amok just getting to and from school every day. Some of them are successful in spite of all this. A great many are not, and are condemned to life in the neighborhoods that are seen on the news when there has been another shooting.

To make things more complicated, school districts like the one in Chicago offer magnet schools, schools for the gifted and talented, college preparatory schools, and schools for kids with special interests. The best and the brightest are siphoned off from the neighborhood schools to attend these special schools. They are held up in the press as shining examples of how to achieve success in education. Well duh! Give me a school full of kids in the 99th percentile and I suspect they are all going to succeed. The kids left in the neighborhood schools are kids who never did particularly well academically. Then the teachers get blamed for the failure of these kids when in reality they are working their butts off trying to help these kids succeed.

With the constant budget crisis, and the so-called crisis of failing schools, there is a lot of pressure placed on school districts to improve success rates and to cut costs one way or another. Everybody has an idea about how to improve schools and how to cut costs. Very few of these people with ideas have ever worked in a school. A great many, for whatever reason, hold up the American business model as something to be emulated in public education. I'll go on record here as saying this is insane.

This is an American business community where corporations go broke, but executives get million dollar bonuses and golden parachutes. This is an American business community that responded to responded to a 2% shrinkage of profits by laying off 6% of their workers and telling the remaining workers that there would be no raises forthcoming in the near future and by the way, you have to take care of your own healthcare and retirement henceforth. Profits soared. Stockholders benefited. Unemployment remains at 10% for the nation, and with that many people out of work purchases of things that keep the economy chugging along lag. Eventually the whole thing comes tumbling down. As my mother always said, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." The American business model would appear to be a recipe for civil unrest, not a shining example for school systems to emulate.

This brings us to the efforts to "reform" the schools. Frankly, a lot of the reforming of the schools involves "reducing expenditures" not any real reform that could result in more students being successful and becoming productive citizens. A lot of the efforts have actually tried to emulate the business model. They have tried to squeeze as much as possible out of the educators with as little cash as possible. Charter schools and privatized schools partially funded from public coffers are both business answers to public school problems. What has been discovered is that charter schools that have selective enrollments (much like the magnet schools mentioned above) achieve wonderful results. Others do not. They all save money, however, because they operate outside the normal union restrictions on hours, salaries, and benefits. What? They pay people less, require them to work extra hours for no extra pay, and they slash benefits packages. Are these better schools? No, just cheaper, with employees who are left to fend for themselves when it comes to vital issues like retirement.

Now the current worldwide economic crisis has shrunk tax receipts significantly and the money available to operate public school systems has shrunk with those tax receipts. The answer to the budgetary woes is to fire more teachers, replace experienced teachers with inexperienced teachers who won't have to be paid as much, and to raise classroom size. In the ongoing clash between teachers and administrators, the mantra of the administrators has routinely been "If you were a good teacher, you could teach a class with 40 kids." Really? I dare you to try. The simple truth is that kids learn better when the student to teacher ratio is lower. The Chicago Public Schools recently made a big deal about the rising standardized test scores. Now they want to can experienced teachers, replace them with less expensive, younger teachers, and make them teach classrooms with 35 kids/class.

Is this a recipe for continued success? I think not. Kids are not a packaged, mass-produced product. A school is not a factory. The success of the kids depend on well-trained, caring educators who are not so overtaxed by sheer numbers of students that they have no time for individual students. The success of schools depends on appropriate management of those schools, and that means that the lean and mean model of the business world should not be followed. This is the future of our nation and the world. Write your Congressman. Call your Alderman. Descend on the Board of Education at their next meeting. Let them know that there is a crisis in education. It is a crisis of vision, of management, and of money. Want better schools? Save teachers' jobs.