Firing Teachers: The Larger Picture

I was looking through a magazine for administrators and educators today, and found an article about a school district that has a new policy on how to deal with "ineffective" teachers. The "delicate" (as the article put it) subject of firing or "letting go" teachers is of great interest to me right now (the details of why are in my other recent blog posts), so I pursued the article. It was the statistics that intrigued--and worried--me.

The statistics showed, beginning in 2000 I believe, the ratio of teachers fired, resigned, or "not renewed" over the past few years in this school district since the implementation of this program to get rid of "ineffective" teachers. (The front cover picture advertising the article was, interestingly enough, a row of green apples, with one rotten one in the middle.)

The worrying part? For every one or few teachers fired or "not renewed" (two different categories, but beats me if I know what the difference is, besides maybe some hair-splitting, so to speak, jargon) the amount of teachers who resigned increased tenfold.

The pattern I'm seeing develop is this:

1. Certain people are in power. They have their own agendas which have nothing to do with good education or preserving good teachers for the betterment of the district. It's all about the politics.

2. In order to stay in power, these people have to make their aims look open, honest, and like everything they do is actually to help the teachers, while actually tying the teachers hands and refusing to let them do their jobs.

3. It becomes impossible for teachers to speak out against injustices, the students, and this means the troublemakers who take advantage of any situation, are allowed free reign to do whatever they want and intiimdate the teachers further, and, in general, a real Orwellian situation has developed.

You come up with a system to openly judge and fire teachers based on a set of criteria that is inflexible and works sound in abstracts but fails in the real application and of course you're going to see the number of resignations jump up--some are probably forced resignations, and the most are going to be teachers who, while they probably made excellent teachers, are afraid to having their records blotted by any kind of "incident" (which really, in reality, of course wouldn't be much at all to worry about), or getting forced out, or who just don't want to deal with the politics.

Teachers at my school are afraid to speak up for what they know is right because they know the administration can get back at them, for disagreeing--just like the administration is getting back at Mr. Collins for disagreeing with them. One of the rumors I heard said that Mr Collins was at an earlier board meeting to tell them, hey, we need more money, a large number of my students don't have textbooks, and he was given the runaround; Mr Collins then got angry, because the board had just been talking about spending a bunch of money on new sports equipment. But there's no money for textbooks for the classroom. Of course not. Sports trumps everything, as per usual.

There is a corrupt tyranny running everything that goes on connected with education these days. And yet so very few people ever seem to notice. Even me--this would only have remained yet another unvoiced, vague impression at the back of my mind, except Mr. Collins' situation has demanded the issue be looked at more clearly.

It's important that justice be done in Mr. Collins's case, but this also larger than him, larger than this district--it's about the general state of education today in America, how far things have deteriorated, what they're going to get away with next.

It's frightening, what's being done to teachers. Mr. Collins' case is hopefully helping to wake up my community.

But what about yours?