The failure of public education includes teachers among the usual suspects. Yet, we love and admire our teachers; when we were young, they nurtured and loved us.
The teachers we love and have loved are like snowflakes — individually beautiful, but calamitous in great numbers. Their labor organization zealously protects all teachers, even and, perhaps especially, the ineffective. And teachers know and privately admit there are ineffective teachers; they shrug their shoulders and blame school administrators.
But, when teachers and their organization successfully protect ineffective teachers, there is a cost, and the children — who teachers purport to love — must bear it.
We can still love our teachers, but we cannot love them for what they do as a group — not if we care about children.
This protection of teachers is significant. Teacher evaluation studies, including a recent $54 million study (the MET Project), found that effective teachers could advance their students a grade-and-a-half within a single school year; similarly, an ineffective teacher could retard their students by half a grade.
More important, these studies affirmed that both effective and ineffective teachers could be identified.
To identify them, school administrators must be able to objectively and accurately evaluate teachers. But it is in determining the details of that evaluation that we will find teachers at fault.
In Maine, teachers and their labor organization, with its powerful lobby, have ensured that it, and teachers, will decide how teacher evaluation will be determined.
The union and its teachers can be expected to protect all teachers. They will likely agree upon an evaluation system that will find each teacher satisfactory and, of course, find none who are not.
That faulty system cannot be avoided; it is now law. Changing it would require a new law, which isn’t possible because the teacher’s lobby can be expected to successfully oppose it.
Thus, we must accept the unacceptable: teachers will decide how teachers will be evaluated and, accordingly, our public schools will continue to be dysfunctional and our children will continue to be educationally impoverished.
This through-the-looking-glass situation is not unlike foxes being exclusively entrusted to approve hen house security — with easily foreseen consequences for the inhabitants.
We know our communities’ public schools face significant challenges beyond a scattering of ineffective teachers. They are also burdened with an abundance of economically disadvantaged students and with students whose primary language is not English.
Those are serious handicaps, but they are our communities’ handicaps and we must accept them. Impoverished and English-as-a-Second-Language students don’t guarantee school failure. Failure can be averted or mitigated by replacing the ineffective with the effective. Effective teachers cost the community no more than ineffective teachers, and those replacement teachers need not be super stars.
“Having an above average teacher for five years running can completely close the gap between low income students and others,” according to educational researchers Robert Marzano and Eric Hanushek.
Alternatively, when a class or a student is burdened with an ineffective teacher for two consecutive years, they will likely be retarded by a full grade; many will not recover, and if, and when, they graduate, they may be among the many who graduate yet who are functionally illiterate.
Under the faulty and newly legislated teacher evaluation system, there is one important difference: it will now be inappropriate for teachers to shrug their shoulders, and insincere for them to blame school administrators.
Teachers must find themselves at fault in the same way that otherwise decent citizens are at fault when they participate as members of a lynch mob. Although they were in the midst of the mob, supported the mob’s intent, they didn’t object, and later found themselves embarrassed by the outcome. They may want to believe because they didn’t personally tighten the noose, that they aren’t individually responsible.
But they are.
Richard Sabine lives in Lewiston. He has advocated for improved public education for many years, and is a member of the Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce Education Committee and the national group StudentsFirst.
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