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.

TIME magazine just published this story called Morning the Death of Handwriting. It made me realize that the more deeply I think about my job as a teacher, the more acutley aware I become that I really can’t say for sure that I am doing the right thing — or teaching the right things — in my classroom.

Sure, my state has standards — and our nation is currently developing national ones — but let’s be honest… they are a “best guess”.

No one really knows for sure what knowledge we need to impart to our kids in order to best prepare them for the demands of the future.

We can guess. We can speculate. We can use expert opinions to rationalize our reasons, but do we know? Do we really know?

We don’t. And I am not sure why we do not acknowledge this more openly. I think exposing our sense of “fallibility” would make us more compassionate towards one another as we discuss these matters and more willing to listen to people who have different opinions than the ones we ourselves currently have.

Because at the end of the day, these are all opinions — only opinions — that we are offering as to what will matter. Cause as I said, no one knows for sure.

For example, I teach Orwell. But I can’t say for sure that the impact of teaching Orwell creates a better future life for my students in a way that leaps over what I could have imparted should I have chosen to teach Jane Austen.

And while I make an effort to incorporate 21rst century digital literacy skills into my classroom, I can’t say that I’m not participating in the education of my kids in an area that’s a total waste because it will soon enough be obsolete due to somebody (probably a pimple-faced teen with a whole lotta Red Bull running through their veins) already figuring out a better means of accomplishing the same task in less time with more accuracy and insight.

I mean I teach MLA style. Is there not a point at which papers will simply be hyperlinked to their reference source so that I do not have to have my kids go through the process of typing last name, first name and so on?

Once, doctors believed in leeches and bleeding. Today we believe in slashing the arts in order to drill the “core”. Will history view us one day in the same manner?

No one knows. People may say they know, people may shout they know, people may drum up all sorts of intellectualized justifications for why they know.

But they don’t.

We’re all just doing the best we can and if we took a moment to take the bullhorns out of our mouths and tried to listen to other people’s points of view as heard through this perspective of understanding, “Hey, they really don’t know what they are talking about anyway” our educational dialogue in this country would be much more civil.

And less dogmatic. And less infuriating. Wouldn’t it? (I am only speculating — I don’t really know.)

But I do know that the folks who have PhD.’s — they don’t know. And that smart-mouthed kid in 3rd period. He just might know.

And which of those two thoughts is more disconcerting?

Education is a best guess business.