Re: [Phys-l] Kozol fasts to protest NCLB

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

At 17:09  -0600 9/18/07, Larry Smith wrote:
> It is true that generally all teachers get the same raise, regardless of
> quality.  Maybe that needs to be examined with merit pay in mind,

The problem with merit pay in the public sector is that public 
payrolls are a matter of public record, and nothing, it seems to me 
can destroy faculty morale faster than seeing a colleague that is not 
considered meritorious by the other teachers, getting additional pay 
for what they believe to be spurious reasons. Often the teacher 
evaluations by administrators are done by preprinted checklists which 
require that certain actions be carried out by the teacher, 
irrespective of whether they may be appropriate under the specific 
conditions that may exist during the evaluation. There is often 
little room for subjective evaluations of how well the teacher 
connects to the students and gets them involved in the learning 
process, or in the effectiveness of a pedagogical technique that may 
be well-suited to the teacher's personality, but not specifically 
authorized by some higher authority.

> but while
> philosophically in favor of merit pay, it seems hard to carry out in
> practice, especially with the unions around.

I agree that it is hard to carry out in practice, but I question 
whether it is specific to unions. North Carolina, where I taught, has 
a state law forbidding public employees from engaging in any sort of 
collective bargaining, and yet there is no pressure for merit pay 
within the schools. I think that the proposal that I put forward a 
few days ago on this list could effectively deal with the issues of 
merit pay without running afoul of unions, primarily by involving the 
teachers themselves in the decisions about who would be "promoted" to 
higher teaching grade levels.

> However, I disagree that superintendents and principals do not control
> schools.  Other than the point I have already ceded, the principals and
> superintendent play a strong role in educational leadership and curricular
> reform--at least in the district I sit on the board of.
I certainly agree that superintendents and principals control the 
schools, but I am not sure that the way in which that control is 
often exercised is healthy for the schools.

We have come a long way from the days when the principal got that 
title, because they were the "principal teacher." The principal was 
not out of the classroom, but merely the "senior teacher" who was 
responsible for the operation of the school. In that position, they 
were definitely part of the faculty and were treated as such by the 
rest of the teachers.

Now we have a situation where administrators often have minimal 
teaching experience, often having been trained as administrators from 
the very beginning. And their management style is distinctly 
top-down. Decisions that have a large impact on how teachers are 
expected to or are able to do their jobs are frequently made with 
very little, if any, input from the teachers themselves, the ones 
most affected by these decisions.

During my teaching career, I was involved in several outreach 
programs where it was clear to me that the teachers who were going to 
be involved were not consulted about their involvement. They were 
initially not excited about what was about to happen to them, and 
were pretty sullen at our initial meeting. It took a while for me to 
win their confidence by assuring them that I was not being sent to 
"show them how to do their jobs" but to act as a resource to help 
them do what they already knew quite well how to do, and to commit to 
them that, if they didn't see that I was contributing to their 
classes, all they had to do was tell me and I would be out of there, 
which no questions asked.

Once over that barricade, which I believe created by their 
administrators committing to the program without consulting the 
affected teachers, things worked quite well. The teachers were not 
threatened by my presence and we eventually became good friends and 
worked well together, but it was not due to any efforts on the part 
of the administrators.

I am a firm believed that school administrations should always be 
drawn from the ranks of senior teachers, and that, with few 
exceptions most administrative jobs (at least those which are 
directly involved with classroom activities) should be part time, 
with the occupants of those jobs remaining in the classroom at least 
part of their work day. I also think those jobs should be temporary, 
with the incumbents only holding them for, say, three or four years 
and then going back to the classroom.

This rotation of these administrative jobs would, I think, have a 
salutary effect on the actions they would take as 
administrators--making them think about the effect of their decisions 
on how things will be in the classrooms when they had to go back and 
live with those effects as teachers. This model has been successfully 
followed by many private schools.

There is no simple solution to the problems in our schools today, but 
it seems obvious to me that one of the things that would help 
enormously, would be elevating the status of teachers in our society, 
by a) paying them what we think someone of stature in the society 
should earn, b) giving them much more freedom to conduct their 
classes as they think best for their students (not without guidance 
from more experienced hands and lots of professional development 
opportunities), and c) demanding that the schools of education start 
turning out teachers well-trained in the subjects they will be 
teaching *and* in how to tach those subjects effectively.

Hugh

--

************************************************************
Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Hard work often pays off after time. But Laziness always pays off now.

			February tagline on 2007 Demotivator's Calendar