So since I am in the mood to offer up so many thoughts as of late about how to re-shape K-12 education (heck, who isn’t doing it these days) I thought I’d chime in on the silliness of the manner by which we choose to pink slip 194 teachers in a district with about 900 educators.

We did it by seniority. Merit played no role. (Don’t worry, this is not a post about the budget cuts… though they will certainly see some action, I am sure, going forward.)

I repeat, quality of service played absolutely no factor in the decision making process of who got to keep their job and who got to canned. It all came down to one simple question: when were you hired.

And these are the deepest staff cuts I’ve ever seen.

No one asked, how well did you work? No one asked, to what degree did you serve the needs of the students? No one took into consideration things like work ethic, degree of content knowledge, extra-curricular duties, ability to differentiate for various learning styles, and on and on and on.

Chronology slapped down worthiness.

Add it all up and it means that this past week I had a chat with an ELA teacher I greatly admire, one who is but a few years into her career – and is a real dynamo with a bright future – and told her I’d be happy to write her a smoking letter of rec if ever she wanted one.

Best I could really do.

I mean this is a teacher we should be fighting to hold on to. I know it. The principal knows it. Heck, even the folks in the district offices might know it.

But rules are rules and length of service in public education trumps quality of service.

It’s folly. Plain and simple. No one lets a better employee go so that they can keep an older employee.

BTW, this is not ageism at play. Some of the best educators I know have multiple decades under their belt. Matter of fact, the leading ELA teacher on our campus (in my opinion) is a lady right across the hall from me and she’s at year 32 in our district.

Do you know what I was doing 32 years ago? Lemme tell, ya, it wouldn’t make momma proud.

Just think about what would happen to an institution’s degree of impact if they sustained such a silly policy over the long haul. I tell ya what would happen, it would inevitably crumble over the course of time due to erosion as a result of such poor decision making. (Anyone ever hear of a small industry once based in Detroit?)

Essentially, okay, I get that we are going through a fiscal crisis that is pretty much unprecedented in our lifetimes. But at least make the most intelligent moves you can make. We are compounding the impact of the budget cuts by not better adapting our policies to meet the needs of the current times. Truly, these types of decisions are handcuffing us from being able to do the best job we can possibly do at one of the most important jobs that there is to do in our country.

Society is counting on us to do it well.

And these are the rules by which we determine who gets laid off?

If merit plays no role in determining who stays and who goes, at some point the institution of public education will crumble.

This week, a few stones in the edifice fell. And it’s a sad thing to watch.

Think about the immense accomplishment of safely putting a human being on the moon and then returning that person back home to planet earth. Truly, it’s almost unreal when you think about the size and scope of the achievement… and yet, we did it.

But to listen to teachers in America today say, “There is no way to measure teacher effectiveness,” you’d think that interplanetary travel was nothing but a puny science activity compared to the beast that evaluating the professional work a 7th grade English teacher in Anaheim, California would be.

I just don’t buy it.

I mean right now I can fire off an email through a mobile, handheld device from the center of Detroit, Michigan that could be read in China, forwarded to South America and then replied to by a person in Israel all within a matter of minutes, yet gathering reasonable insight into the professional performance of the math teacher down the hall is entirely unachievable?

It’s not.

And we should stop saying it is.

Obviously, this opens up a whole can of worms as to “how” we can measure teacher effectiveness (because that is the real question) so over the course of the next few days, months, and so on, I will speak to a variety of the “how it can be done” aspects to this conversation.

Not that I actually have all, or even any of the answers.

But I do know that the first thing we all must recognize is that yes, it can be done. It is not impossible. It is not beyond human capability. It is not a smaller feat than inventing the wheel, discovering fire, harnessing electricity or slicing bread.

So how about we ask that all teachers in this country take a deep breath and admit the obvious: it’s possible. Truly, before we are able to measure teacher effectiveness, we are all going to have to calmly acknowledge that yes, indeed it can be done.

It might not be easy.
It might not be quick.
It might not be cheap.
It might not be impeccably flawless beyond the pale of any and all criticism (because so many other things in this world have risen to that level so why shouldn’t measuring teacher effectiveness do the same? Author’s note: dripping sarcasm.)
But it is not impossible.

I do wish cooler heads would prevail for this national conversation. Before we can measure teacher effectiveness we are going to have to realize that splitting the atom, mapping the human genome and getting a taxicab in New York City in the pouring rain have all been done.

Measuring teacher effectiveness can be done as well. The question is not one of “if” but of “how”.

And like I said, more on that in the posts ahead.

How in the world can we expect all students to show the same amount of enthusiasm for all subject areas on their schedule? I am not sure we can.

And if you agree we can’t — read on. (If you think we can, then this post is probably not for you.)

I think about my own experience in school. For me, science class was always something I endured more than I enjoyed whereas creative writing was an after school club for me that I choose to join which had me up til late in the night working for no real academic credit other than the pure pleasure of the discipline back when I was in high school. And my grades reflected my interests. In the humanities, I smoked it, in math, I was a decent student, but certainly not exceptional, and in science, I was a “let me just do the least amount of work to get me over the hump” type of kid.

And high school for me was a long, long time ago. Before google, email, AOL, cell phones and DVD players. (I know for some people on this board, it was also before the invention of the wheel but hey, I’m just making a point here… no need to compare long-in-the-tooth tales.)

So why do we still mandate our curricular offerings as conceptualized from the perspective of pre-designed, non-differentiated, one-size-fits-all educational packages for today’s kids? (Well, for the most part, we do.)

I mean in middle and high school you’re forced to take X amount of math, Y amount of history, Z amount of science and K amount of language arts. (I ran out of algebraic characters… shucks!). Unless you show deficiency in math or the language arts, that is. Then you’ll take 2X of those (cause we know the subjects in which you do poorly are the ones where you want to spend double the amount of time, right? Geesh, reminds me of the old game show prize joke — 1rst prize is one week in the city of Detroit; 2nd prize is two weeks).

Is there not a link between choice and performance?

Is there not a link between allowing kids to be more self-directive about their learning and a connection to an improved dropout rate, higher grades, better attendance, more motivation to succeed and a sense of perceived relevance between a school’s curriculum and a person’s own life?

In an iTunes world where we no longer have to buy the whole record in order to buy the song we want to own, how come our schools are not doing more to accomodate for today’s kids by reinventing our curricular offerings as conceived through this type of ‘iTunes” philosophy?

Why? Because I guess it’s like mom always said when I got too smart-mouthed and logical about matters and she just had to get back to running the darn house and didn’t have time to discuss it any more with me.

Why? Because I said so, that’s why!

And at the end of the day, no matter how intelligent my point — or poignant or thoughtful — Mom always won when it came to aruments like this.

iTunes… when will your brilliance more speedily bleed over?

I don’t think it’s any great Einstein-ian insight to say that public education is dependent on the community in many, many ways. And when the community surrounding and supporting public education is dysfunctional, flawed, lacking, and so on, it’s really hard to be productive, excellent, amazing and wonderful in our classrooms.

Not that it can’t be done, but it becomes exceptionally challenging.

It’s almost self-evident that the first ally in our aim to excellently educate the students of this country is always the parents. For a kid that comes to first grade knowing how to write their name, read, identify letters, shapes, colors and has been socialized to working in classroom environments by having attended pre-school, teachers and schools can be rightfully expected to well educate that child. However, for the kid who did not have the “at home” pre-instruction to instruction, the kid who can’t write their name, doesn’t read a lick, struggles with elementary numbers and has no b.g. with books nor has been socialized yet to the demands of working well in a classroom environment, our schools are just not set up well to serve that kid — especially when mixed with other kids that are both above and below their individual level.

And then, as these students move up in grade level, the gap in skills and competencies — as all the data shows — grows and grows.

So yes, we need institutional change and yes, “there is something fundamentally flawed with the structure, management and compensation of the labor force in the public education system,” as was mentioned in another post on this ning but school readiness and community support are adding fuel to the fire and lots of us are quite sick of the fact that we’re viewed as if it’s all “our dysfunctional fault” that public education is in the state it is in.

We need better support! No matter how we are organized or re-organized, until we are better supported by the parents and community we are going to be extremely hard-pressed to meet our objectives because this lack of support is very much a weight on our back, an almost insurmountable albatross in many ways. Without real support from outside the school walls and halls, it’s spectacularly difficult to create the kind of wholesale change we’d all like to see. Sure, anomalies and success stories will always disprove any sweeping stereotypes but on the whole, turning around Washington DC, Oakland, Philly, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and so on is going to take the communities of Washington DC, Oakland, Philly, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and so on. Without the parents, without the local business owners, without the support of the alumni and the local governments, schools are going to be hard pressed to achieve the results that we all want to see.

When Barack said “parents” during the campaign, he knew exactly what he was talking about. We need the parents to be more involved, dedicated and committed.

Let me clear… I LOVE CLASSIC LITERATURE!! It’s why I became a writer and a teacher. Books have been nothing less than a spectacular and irreplaceably special part of my life. They’ve shaped my career choice, my social circles, my overall outlook on life and the manner in which I am raising my daughter. However, no one takes value from books they do not read — it’s that simple — and being that I teach in a school where we sport a near 50% drop-out rate, the ol’ “my way or the highway” methodology when it comes to text selection overwhelmingly results in kids saying, “Okay, I’ll take the highway.”

And it’s happening in Chicago, Oakland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, Tuscon and on and on and on…

Sure, kids are cutting off their noses to spite their collective face but on the other hand, thousands of them come into our nation’s classrooms every day with a salty, bitter taste when it comes to the thought of reading and if we, as educators, remain so immovable (as we overwhelmingly have in the past 20 years) when it comes to embracing the idea that a kid must first view a book as an object which potentially holds great pleasure and possibility for them, as opposed to only great shame and punishment, then we are complicit when it comes to the miseducation of America’s youth.

For the teachers who think they are defending the honor of the canon by remaining intractable when it comes to getting kids to first like books — something legions of kids today have never had anyone do for them — before they ask them to wrestle with deep, meaty texts, well… it’s a recipe for not only academic, but societal, disaster.

BTW, I am in no way, shape, or form alone in this quandary. As a matter of fact, I’d venture to say that there are SCORES of teachers across our nation who are facing the very same hurdles I am on a daily basis. They are asking themselves, “How do I take kids who overtly make no bones about the fact that they do not like to read and get them to first and foremost, engage openly and honestly with a book, start to finish, reading the whole darn thing.”

Just having kids complete a book — that’s right, just reading one whole book — is a success that a huge amount of middle and high school ELA teachers today across our country are not enjoying. Nathaniel Hawthorne is great but he’s not being gulped down under the covers and being read by flashlight long after mom said, “Go to bed,” and at my school, the English teachers routinely laugh at the idea that more people do not read The Scarlet Letter than do when it is assigned.

And what can they do, fail the kid? Well, get in line. Turns out that kid is already failing math, science, and history.

But there is another way. It’s called winning his heart. The YA books that are being trashed on this board for not being of “high enough literary merit” is how I do that.

I tell you this, hundreds of pages of adolescent literacy research clearly illuminates the immense benefits, if not outright, fundamental necessity for, engagement in the classroom. However, nowhere have I ever seen any research which supports the idea of dis-engagement as an instructional strategy. And when you are staring out at 37 teens armed with no prior history of almost any sort of positive interaction with books and all you are provided with is the canon, it’s a freakin’ tough road to hoe.

That’s why we build bridges using relevant, accessible, gripping, popular (goodness, did I just validate popularity — gawd, I must be a heretic!) YA novels.

And for those who disagree, all I can say is I hear that inner city Detroit has a few teaching positions open. Go bring your theories of high fallutin’ literature as a sole academic diet to where the rubber meets the road — particularly in urban America — and see how well you fare. Suddenly, Speak, The Outsiders, Monster, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid provide a whole new meaning to the term “being a text with literary merit”.