How did our politicians determine that only 25% of our teachers deserve to be treated as professionals? | Eastern North Carolina Now

The Republicans will prove "tenure" is not the problem with our education system

    There are a lot of upset teachers in North Carolina these days, or so it seems, from media reports. The target of their ire is the Republican-led Legislature. At first glance many in the Elite Media tend to try to blame the lack of pay raises for the frustration. I think there is something much more profound going on. My thesis is that actually good teachers are dismayed that politicians are making major decisions that the politicians, for the most part, are not qualified to make.

    Imagine, for illustration purposes, that you were an oncologist  -  someone who knew, from training and experience, how to cure cancer in many of you patients. But suppose in order for you to develop a health care plan for you patients you had to fill out a form with about four dozen questions that you rated a, b, c. d, or e. Then after scoring your forms were ranked in order according to the "correct responses" and the top quarter of patients were afforded treatment and the others simply given placebos. I suspect you'd be a rather frustrated oncologist. And if you were a really good teacher today I suspect you'd be rather frustrated too.

    The politicians in Raleigh decided that only 25% of our teachers do a really good job that deserves being both appreciated and rewarded. The others can just root pig or die poor. Based on nearly forty years of experience as a teacher, principal, superintendent and teacher of educators I could write a book about how absurd this idea is. But suffice it to say: What politician is wise enough to determine that regardless of the kind of students a teacher has, and regardless of how competent the administrators who run their school are, and regardless of the classes they are assigned and regardless of how supportive the parents in the school's community are, there are only one in four who should be reward and the rest in effect told "suck it up." For Pete's sake, why 25%. Why not 75% or 50% or 5%?

    How do you compare how good a teacher of Advanced Placement students in a high performing school is to a special ed teacher in a school in a poor community where a "good turnout" for a PTO meeting is 12 parents, and none of your students' parents has ever shown up?

    Let me illustrate from my own personal experience. When I was offered my first principalship the superintendent offered me a job at a middle school. I turned it down because I know that school had a weak staff, uninvolved parents and students who were ill prepared in the elementary schools from which they came. He called me back and offered me a high school in the district. I took it. On the day I sat in the audience to watch the school board approve both my appointment I sat beside the guy who was being appointed to that middle school. Little did I know that within three years I would win "Principal of the Year" and he would be fired. The difference? The difference in our success was the school to which we were assigned. He was, in fact, a better principal than I was. The moral of that story is that where you work has a lot to do with how successful you are.

    Stick with me on this next one.

    I suspect that the absurdity of the evaluation and the "picking and choosing" system the politicians have imposed on our educators, as illustrated above, is not really what has them frustrated. Rather it is the fact that politicians who, for the most part, have no clue about what it's like to teacher school are making the decisions that impose such absurdities on teachers. And the same is true for school boards. Most teachers know that most of those school board members would not last a week doing what they do. Yet these people (and that is a much nicer term than I'm really thinking) make major decision for teachers, much as that absurd system I described for the oncologist make for cancer patients.

    So what's going to come from all this? The exact same thing that has come from most of the "great ideas" politicians have come up with to fix education  -  nothing much. Except maybe that we will prove that one of the greatest whipping boys of the decade  -  teacher tenure  -  will now be shown to not be "the problem" for what's wrong with public education.

    If you had one of the toughest jobs on the planet and you did your job very well and then you were told that you are #7 in your school and only six are going to get the reward, you would be frustrated too.

    If you're still interested in the changes our teachers are suffering at the hands of our politicians the best reporting we've seen on this new system is from Casey Blake of the BlackMountainNews.com Click here to read that piece.

    One of the politicians behind this asinine move said the reason they eliminated tenure was to insure that kids could read when they leave the third grade. Think about that for a minute. How is that going to work? It is absurd. If you're going to eliminate tenure for all teachers because "X" percent of our third graders can't read at grade level then why are you going to punish fourth, fifth, sixth etc. grade teachers? Wouldn't it make more sense to reform your reading program?

    The problem with tenure is not with weak teachers. The problem with tenure is with poor administrators and weak school boards that don't do the work to get rid of teachers who should be fired.

    Many excellent teachers will lose tenure and be subject to arbitrary and capricious decisions by people who don't know what they are doing. Wouldn't you be frustrated if you were one of those teachers? But the really good teachers will not be frustrated. They will find other work to do. And then what will that do to insure third graders being able to read?

    With politicians making decisions like this what chance do we have of ever fixing our schools?

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.