Teachers' unions

Children in this country who haven't already done so will be going back to school on Tuesday, where we will trust them to those most demonized and maligned of people, those villains we blame for every problem in American society, America's school teachers.  Well, perhaps we don't despise all teachers; the Catholic schools have those nice nuns who take vows of poverty and chastity.  But the public school teachers in Wisconsin, the ones who think they're somehow entitled to raise families or to even buy houses (and perhaps on a single single income, no less!) have been called every vile name in the press recently, from nazi to terrorist to thug and other names too ugly to write out, all because they have peacefully demonstrated for the right to keep the labor unions they're had for over half a century.  People accuse teachers of not caring about children and caring only about their paychecks.  These accusations come from people who have never taught and would never want to teach, yet imagine they know what teachers think.

I don't belong to a teachers' union, and I understand why some teachers feel frustrated with their unions.  What I don't understand is why some  people believe that teachers' unions are bad.  Yes, they support the Democratic Party, which certain hate radio blowhards might not like, but there are also plenty of business groups that support the Republican Party.  Why don't the teacher-bashers object to that?  Can't we agree that in a free country, voters should have a choice between two (or more) political parties?  Teachers' unions are not anybody's enemy, especially not children.  

What other large membership organization represents the interests of children or the people who work with them on a regular basis?  The National Council for Teachers of English, or the  National Council for Teachers of Mathematics?  Not the American Academy of Pediatricians.  They are a small group, compared to teachers, and their members don't normally spend more than fifteen minutes per year with any given child.  The American Library Association has a subgroup for children's service, and that doesn't have as many members, either.  Is there a parents' union or a children's union that the teachers' unions are always fighting against?  Of course not.  It's the teachers who work with our children for hours every week and put in extra unpaid hours evenings and weekends on their behalf, who know their strengths and weaknesses, their fears, their dreams, their struggles, who work to help them achieve success and fulfill their potential.

This is not an easy time to be a teacher.  These people do a job most people wouldn't wish to do, often undoing the damage of incompetent parents and heartless politicians.  So before you say something negative about people who teach public school for a living, read this editorial and watch this video. 

What do teachers know?

All of us who have children of our own have faced (or will face) occasional run-ins with teachers who seem ignorant or downright wrong about something.  Few famous universities' reputations are built on their schools of education.  I attended UC-Berkeley, which many people consider to be the best public university in the United States, and with the exception of one or two professors, I was very disappointed in the instruction I received in their school of education.  There are some really great education professors and departments out there, (see this) but many people see those teacher training programs as a waste of time. We don't generally expect our Best and Brightest to go into education, especially not education of children.  Our society doesn't encourage it, nor are we willing to pay them to.  Just ask yourself which job you think the most intelligent person in the world should have:

A.  President of the United States

B.  Brain surgeon who operates on your cerebral tumor

C.  Civil engineer who designs the bridge you drive across every day

D.  Defense attorney when you are charged with a crime you didn't commit

E.  Education professor who teaches teachers how to teach.

See what I mean?  


It's not easy for a busy teacher to keep up to date on new developments in educational philosophy or teaching methods.  Many teachers rely on the same methods that worked for them when they were in school ten or twenty years before, or the methods that worked for their education professors when the professors were in school thirty or forty years before.  Of course those methods worked for them.  These were children who decided they wanted to be teachers when they grew up.  

Teachers don't have much opportunity to get together to talk and learn from each other about best practices.  When I taught, I naively thought we would have such exchanges of ideas at faculty meetings, but I soon learned that those were mostly when the principal droned on and on about attendance statistics and teachers tried to sit in the back and catch up on their own paperwork.  Too many teachers see each other as competition, and if they have reputations for being better than their coworkers, they may not want to share their secrets of success.   So-so teachers rarely have the chance to leave their own classrooms to visit model teachers' classrooms, because they're busy all day, and arranging for a substitute to come in and relieve them for an hour has its own share of headaches.  Principals have too many pressing demands on their time to spend more than a few minutes in any teacher's room every year evaluating that teacher's professional skills, and few districts now have the funds for professional development support staff.  Students, especially by the time they reach ninth or tenth grade, probably have a better understanding of what a good teacher does than any new teacher.  Parents, if they have friends and family who have also raised children, might well get more useful feedback on what they're doing wrong or how to be more effective than a teacher gets.

Of course none of this should be taken to mean that teachers don't know anything.  Teachers don't know everything, as we may expect they should, but they know a lot.  One thing teachers need to study at every university I know about is developmental or cognitive psychology.  There are a number of different theories of psychology, usually at odds with each other, that help teachers understand how the brain works, how it develops, how children learn, what their needs are at any given age, and what happens when their needs aren't met.  A good university lets its education students explore and discuss all of these theories.  Because teachers learn about universal human needs, they can make judgments that go beyond "What my cousin Danny had trouble with."  Teacher know better than to ask seven-year-olds to live up to the same expectations they have of seventeen-year-olds, even if they might not all know better than to ask seventeen-year-olds to live up to the expectations of  seven-year-olds.

Here is some information about one theory of developmental psychology.   

http://www.learningplaceonline.com/stages/organize/Erikson.htm

   

What Makes a Good Teacher?

Everyone has something to say about how there are too many "bad" teachers in American schools these days, even people who wouldn't be caught dead teaching school themselves.  I have found that even teachers and principals can't put their finger on what exactly distinguishes a good teacher from a bad one.  Is a teacher who gives all A's better than a teacher who fails half the class?


I once had a colleague who would complain through lunch every day about her daughter's teacher.  According to this mother, the girl's teacher graded her unfairly, picked on her, and gave her a lot of grief at school.  What a terrible teacher! we all thought.  We suggested our colleague take up her concerns with the principal and see if she could do something about her daughter's teacher woman and perhaps put her on warning.  The mother's reaction was, "But she's such a good teacher!"  As confused as she obviously was, she's not the only one.  We expect principals to know what they're doing when they make hiring decisions, even though they often make some terrible calls.  My on-line friend Ebony Thomas, who teaches in Detroit, brought this article to my attention, and we both thought the author described the problem admirably: http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/08/29/confessions_of_a_bad_teacher/


Here are some qualities many people expect to see in teachers we call good:

• Ability to keep students under control and out of the principal's office (a top priority for Ms. P)
• Ability to produce high standardized test scores (another top priority for administrators)
• Ability to keep accurate records
• Ability to keep one's "cool" under stress
• Intelligence
• Knowledge of one's subject
• Love and enthusiasm for one's subject
• Concern and respect for children
• Love for children
• Ability to communicate with children
• Popularity
• Creativity
• Sense of humor

Here is the one quality I would name, that I thinks sums it all up: 

• Leadership.

As my friend Tina put it, the most important thing students need to learn is how to do things they don't want to do.  It doesn't matter how well the teacher knows the subject or how brilliant the teacher's lesson plans are if the teacher can't inspire or motivate the students to do the homework, study the material, and do well on the tests.  

In defense of teachers

Tomorrow is the first day of September, and for weeks I’ve been seeing school supplies on sale in the stores.  What does that mean?  It’s back to teacher-bashing time!

To tell the truth, the teacher-bashing season began very early this year.  Our new governor has done everything he could to portray teachers as lazy overpaid parasites and thugs with no interest in children and to turn the rest of the taxpaying public against teachers.  For teachers in Wisconsin and other states hit by the budget-cutting pandemic, this will be a tough year.  Many have chosen to retire rather than return to a hard job that has fewer rewards than ever.


As children, we had little exposure to any adults at work except for teachers.  We have no reason to deal  with marketing executives, tax attorneys, research biologists, insurance adjusters, or tool and die makers on the job.  As a result, we sometimes grow up separating adults into those who are our parents, those who are our teachers, and perhaps a hazy class of "all others" who don't hold much interest for the normal six or seven-year-old.  Some people might choose to be teachers because they lack the grades or the imagination to become anything else, but most people who go into teaching do so because they care about children.  A mathematician who could teach at the university level or go into business on Wall Street, but chooses instead to work for a fraction of the pay teaching eighth graders is not (now matter what some mischievous eighth graders may believe) an enemy of children.


Teaching is a job that not everybody can do well.  Some individuals seem like natural teachers, and some struggle.   Even people who have what it takes to be great teachers have problems at first.  It takes good training and lots of support.  If you're not happy with your child's teacher, remember that he or she has a job most people would never chose, and you'll do your child no favors by encouraging disrespect.   Demonizing our society’s dedicated educators does not do our society’s children any good.  By declaring war against teachers, we send children the message that education is not an honorable pursuit, and the children will suffer the most devastating casualties in that war. 


We compare today's teachers to those we remember from the mythical "Good Old Days" and hold them responsible for solving so many problems our grandparents never knew.   Yes, high school students were more disciplined a century ago than they are now, but why is that?  A century ago, most children quit school by fourteen or sixteen and went to work on the farm or in a factory, or even started families.  A century ago, teachers were allowed to paddle children or send them home without facing legal ramifications, and children had a "healthy respect" for their elders' power.  A century ago, the moral values of our local communities had more influence than television or popular culture.   A century ago, we didn't have the same bewildering smorgasbord of child-rearing philosophies fighting against each other and competing for our loyalty.  


We may all remember one sainted self-sacrificing teacher we had when we were children and wonder why they can't all be like that now.  Perhaps she was a nun who took vows of chastity and poverty, or perhaps she was the old maid or widow who devoted herself to educating children for forty years to support herself.  Or perhaps she was a happily married woman with no lack for money but felt a need to do something useful with her time.  But the truth is that many teachers in the "good old days" were incompetent and left the profession as soon as a better job or marriage proposal came up.  Otherwise, the stereotype of the bad teacher would have never developed.  Today's schools do hold teachers to higher standards than at any time in the past.  We need good teachers now more than ever, but we are not going to attract our best and brightest to the profession by putting them down and cutting their pay.

Parents are our first teachers

The new governor in our great state has been trying in recent month to drive a wedge between public school teachers and taxpayers.  I guess he doesn't realize that teachers are taxpayers.  Public school teachers here in Milwaukee pay local property taxes at a higher rate than their self-appointed suburban foes.  It is a terrible mistake, and it hurts children, when politicians declare war on the people who educate the next generation.  Parents and teachers need to work together, because whatever lies the politicians may tell about teachers being both greedy parasites and slaves to their union leaders, both good teachers and good parents are in the same business, of helping children grow into the best adults they can be.   That is the most important, and most difficult, business in the world.


I have been both a parent and a teacher, and in both capacities I have met people on both sides of the relationship who do not do their job well.  The law holds teachers responsible for taking the parents' place (in Latin: In loco parentis) during the time children are in their care.  Then again, teaching is a parent's primary responsibility.   


While I can't take sides against either parents as a group or teachers as a group, I know that a teacher does need a license to practice, and bad teachers really can be fired.  Nobody ever got a teaching license by getting drunk at a party.  Teachers have to take classes in child psychology and teaching methods in addition to whatever subject they teach, and if they fail those subjects, they can't get their licenses.  Of course that's no guarantee that they can handle all the demands of the job, but parents can assume that their children's teachers will be at least reasonably competent.  I will examine the problem of bad teachers soon.  


As for the competence of parents, some are magnificent, and some are unfit.  The ability to have a child is not limited to the kindly and wise people among us.  Of course teachers want their students to have parents who care and do their job well.  They may hope a child has good ones and be concerned about a child who doesn't.  Sometimes, teachers will even become parents themselves, which means they really do understand what parents are going through.  I wish that more parents could set aside the distrust and pride that prevents them from working with school staff to assure the best outcome for their children.  Most teachers do care and they have a lot to contribute to their communities outside of the classroom. 

The War on Education

One of my facebook friends posted this picture, so I posted it, and then another one of my friends wrote about it in his blog, Nine Kinds of Pie.


I can't think of anything I would add to improve on what he wrote. 


Thank you, Professor Nel of Kansas State University.