Ed reform ground zero in DC & a Story from the Trenches

Folks, ground zero of the education reform battle is right now in Washington DC, where all hell has broken loose because Michelle Rhee laid off 388 employees, including 229 of the city's 4,436 teachers (5.2%) and -- EGADS! -- did it based on merit (or lack thereof) rather than seniority.  I continue to be in AWE of Rhee's conviction and courage -- it is very risky in many ways to mess with so many peoples' livelihoods...

 

There is endless discussion of attracting more talented people into our school system, especially teachers, but far less talk about an equally important but far more touchy subject: removing bad people from the system.  The teacher unions have so contorted the debate that if you say "there are teachers who suck to need to find another line of work", you are accused of being anti-teacher (forgive the perjorative language, but "ineffective teachers" doesn't convey what I'm talking about).  Of course, exactly the opposite it true: incompetent, mean and/or angry teachers not only hurt kids, but drive out good teachers, so favoring removal of teachers who suck is in fact a 100%pro-teacher point of view.

 

To understand the kind of incompetence -- and, in some cases, pure evil -- that I'm talking about, read the Story from the Trenches at the end of this email, sent to me by a friend who was a TFA teacher in the South Bronx a decade ago (I sent this around at the end of July and posted it at http://edreform.blogspot.com/2009/07/story-from-trenches-send-me-more.html).  I have no doubt that most of the 5% of the teachers in Washington DC -- the bottom 5% -- that Rhee just dismissed are just like those described in my friend's story.  Here's a excerpt:

I was first reminded of the art teacher in our school. She was truly a caricature of bad teaching. Like something out of the movies. She spent almost every minute of every day screaming at the top of her lungs in the faces of 5-8 year olds who had done horrible things like coloring outside the lines. The ART teacher! Screaming so loud you could hear her 2-3 floors away in a decades old, solid brick building. When she heard I was looking for an apt, she sent me to an apt broker friend of hers. I told the friend I wanted to live in Washington Heights. "Your mother would be very upset with me if I let you go live with THOSE PEOPLE. We fought with bricks and bats and bottles to keep them out of our neighborhoods. Do you see what they have done to this place?" This same attitude could be heard in the art teacher's screams, the administration's ambivalence towards the kids we were supposed to be educating and the sometimes overt racism of the people in charge. The assistant principal (who could not, as far as I could tell, do 4th grade math, but offered me stop-in math professional development for a few minutes every few months with gems like "these numbers you see here to the left of the zero are negative numbers. Like when it is very cold outside.") once told me "I call them God's stupidest people" referring to a Puerto Rican woman who was blocking our way as we drove to another school. She also once told me I needed to put together a bulletin board in the hallway about Veteran's Day. I told her we were in the middle of assembling an Encyclopedia on great Dominican, Puerto Rican and Black leaders (all of my students were Dominican, Black or Puerto Rican). "Mr. ____, we had Cin-co de May-o, and Black History Month, and all that other stuff. It is time for the AMERICAN Americans."

 

Not everyone in the school was a racist. There were many hard working teachers of all ethnicities who did not reflect this attitude at all. But the fact that the leadership of the school and a number of the most senior teachers was either utterly disdainful of the students they taught, or has completely given up on the educability of the kids, had a terrible effect on overall staff motivation. And many of the well-meaning teachers were extremely poorly prepared to make a dent in the needs of the students even if they had been well led. The Principal told more than one teacher there that "as long as they are quiet and in their seats, I don't care what else you do." This was on the day this person was HIRED. This was their first and probably last instruction. He never gave me a single instruction. Ever.