There's a new law in Florida that has a largely negative impact on teachers, especially ones hired after this month ends. This puts all new teachers on a performance pay scale and does away with professional contracts. Your professional contract is what allows you to keep your job without just cause. Even with this protection, we still see teachers getting fired over holding a red cup in a picture. But, the problems within education are not limited to any given bill. There are just too many people with a disincentive for children to learn. These people, not the teachers, are the institutional problem. If everyone within the system had student achievement as their main goal, we would get better results and would be able to better allocate our resources.
One big problem is that we don't share... At all... Did you take an algebra course in school? Think for a second about this course. And I'm choosing this course because it is one of the most taught and most hated classes across the spectrum. It's taught to a lot of kids every year. There were, just in the state of Florida, 210,004 students who took the Algebra 1 End of Course Exam. That's just Florida, so there's easily millions of kids that took Algebra 1 just this year. And millions of kids every year take this one course every single year.
That's a lot of kids that are just taking this one course, and that's just those kids in the USA. With the numbers in mind, you would think that we would have figured out how to teach Algebra 1. You would think that, with a few cosmetic alterations, that we would know what we want to teach in that class. We could say that by the time a student is finished with Algebra 1 then should know A, B and C and this is the best way to teach it and here's a video of 10 teachers teaching that lesson.
So, when a new teacher comes in to teach, they are given all of these resources, right? Nope!!!What they are given to teach is a textbook and a list of state standards. When it comes to actually teaching and saying things in front of kids, they give you absolutely no direction. The fact that people are still writing lesson plans for Algebra 1 is amazing. There have been thousands of such plans already written! If we would simply share and select the best lesson plans available, then we could put together a rock-solid set of Algebra 1 lesson plans that a new teacher could just use! Of course, there's always wiggle room and some thought for experimentation, but to have a baseline to work off of would be best and incredibly helpful.
Where does this problem come from? We have a great incentive for our children to learn, but we also have an incentive for other children to not learn. Schools are ranked and graded now based on how their students learn. Larger and richer districts have the resources to help their teachers and to give them more resources so their children can do better on the state tests. Why would they then go out of their way to help students in other schools that they will be measured against? We have a strong disincentive to share. So, many districts use resources to produce the same materials. If we shared, one district could create materials and others could use, even buy, the good materials. Many times they are simply not available.
I don't think textbook makers care that much either. Any textbook presentation can show how much better students do with any given textbook. But I can guarantee that there's no such thing as a randomly assigned, double blind, peer-reviewed study on textbooks. We typically don't do that in education anyways. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen it. A big problem is actually having children to do a study for. You usually have to simply work with a given few students, and they you can't randomly assign two different texts so the teacher then has to write two lesson plans and then teach to both halves of the class in different ways at the same time.
Also, weeding out bad teachers is something that principals simply don't want to do. There's a certain value in a teacher that has been in the building for a long time even if they're not effective in the classroom. They could be a good coach or something like that, which does greatly improve the overall experience for students and the community. Can you imagine a principal trying to fire a well loved coach because they were a bad teacher? It simply wouldn't happen. In fact, short of a school board firing someone for terrible crimes, there's just no way to get rid of someone if they don't want to go. About the best they can do is give them terrible assignments and hope it annoys them enough to quit.
Another big problem is that kids can't test out of classes. The 13 year schedule just isn't the best path for many students. All students could have the opportunity to take the ACT as an 8th grader (or some other similar test) and test out of math, English, and other classes as appropriate. We should have clearer benchmarks for what a students should need to know to graduate high school. Some students are entering the ninth grade with more skills than the kids who earned a diploma three months before.
I think that's part of the “big lie.” A high school diploma means nothing. There is no criteria, no standard that all kids need to meet. If you come to school for a while, you get a diploma. We all know this as educators, but students and some parents are just out of the loop... The uneducated in our society have no idea what opportunities education opens up. Kids of educated parents do everything they need to to make sure their kids are ready when they graduate from high school. Kids of uneducated parents don't. They just don't know how. I read a book called “Outliers” recently that described this phenomenon in detail.
And I'm tired, so this won't have a strong conclusion. But don't conclude it. Keep the conversation going, because this voice is soon to be silent. Good night.
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