Thursday, November 5, 2009

Of Oversize Classes and the Company Line


I was sitting in a meeting with the Principal of my school yesterday, and today as well, and I found myself thinking about something I read in the Chicago Sun-Times last week. It seems a recent study by psychologists in California found that bosses who feel incompetent are more likely to bully subordinates. The study says, "If people feel incompetent and they happen to be in a high-powered position, that's when the aggression kicks in."

I cannot possibly say that this is the case with my current Principal or others I have worked with in the past, but I do know that as a teacher who has actively worked with the teacher's union regarding possible violations of the union contract I have regularly been subjected to bullying, browbeating, and endless lectures (as if I were some ignorant willful child) that make my eyes just glaze over and my ears tune out until the tirade is over.

One of the most consistent sources of friction between teachers and Principals is the size of classes. It is no secret that when you have too many kids in a classroom it becomes difficult to teach any of them. Teachers spend far too much of their time in a too large classroom dealing with discipline issues rather than doing any real teaching. There is a point of diminishing returns as the classes get larger. Smaller class sizes yield better results. Research supports this. Money concerns cause reasonable people to deny this.

It is no secret that public schools are dependent on public funding sources and the amounts available to pay for those schools and their staff are always in short supply (unless you are one of the lucky ones in a wealthy suburb or in one of the elite urban schools where the best and brightest are admitted to prepare them for a university education). It becomes inevitable, then, that the pressure to cut costs comes from on high to the middle managers, and in this case that means school principals. They are under pressure to employ the fewest number of teachers possible to educate the largest number of students possible, and in the process to preach the company line. This usually involves the above mentioned bullying of the union delegate in the school and any other teachers who dare question the wisdom or legality of decisions made regarding numbers of students in the classroom.

Over the years I have been told by school administrators that "A good teacher can control a classroom and get good results with 40 students in a room." Really? In what universe? The common argument in Chicago, vis-a-vis the union contract is "Although the contract says no more than 28 students in a classroom, 28 students times 5 classes daily is 140 students. As long as the teacher has no more than that 140 students they can have 35 students in one class while having 23 in another class. The realities of programming students sometimes dictates compromises on this issue." This argument comes from administrators who spend zero time in a classroom with 35 kids, trying to teach something.

What has happened is that the teachers and administration have become an adversarial pair, not unlike two competing political parties, and they constantly jockey for position. What gets lost in the process is what's good for the students. A teacher may actually need to spend some extra hours from time to time without worrying about whether they are getting paid for every minute. An administrator needs to acknowledge that stuffing as many kids as possible in a classroom is unconscionable. It does not meet the needs of the students. It makes the already difficult job of teaching children even more difficult.

There is much ado about failing schools and bad teachers. "No Child Left Behind" gives lip service to addressing the needs of those schools and their students while doing absolutely zero about realistically addressing those needs. Until policy makers are willing to admit that children in public schools have needs that will require hiring enough teachers to do the job, we will continue to have children graduating from high school who do not have minimum basic skills to compete in a 21st century economy. Until policy makers admit that money must be committed to this purpose, the middle level administrators and teachers they supervise will continue to be played off against one another and the losers will continue to be the students who go to these schools.

What our public schools often need is a few more caring individuals to work with the kids in smaller classrooms. What our public schools do not need is another MBA to run the system with an eye toward slashing budgets and making the schools operate more efficiently, as though the schools were another corporate entity. At the public schools of America our product is the future of our nation. I think that is a product worth investing in.


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