The pay is low, the pressure is high, and we are all expendable

It seems like with every progressing year, professional educators become increasingly less respected.  Sure, pay has come up during the past 10 years to reasonable levels for entry teachers, but after that increases occur at a snail's pace.  A teacher with 30 years of experience might indeed make no more than 40-50% more than a teacher with 0 years of experience.  Mid-level administrators make a percentage more than teachers, but when all days and hours of mandatory work hours are counted, it's not much more.  At my school there are at least a dozen teachers who make more than me and they get 2.5 months off in the summer.  I don't begrudge them that, but my point is that the pay is pretty low for management, much as the pay for experienced teachers is still too low to expect to recruit the best and brightest from America's universities. 

There are teachers, I like to think those such as myself when I was in the classroom, who do it because they love it.  I gave up a lucrative career in another field and resigned on good terms with a quality employer to become a teacher.  Others have done similarly or simply went to college passionate about education and continued that passion in their work. 

On the other hand, there are those who came into education because of convenience, last ditch efforts, or because someone told them it was great having summers off.  Still more came because they were laid off from their previous job and this seemed like something stable.  If that ever were true, it no longer is.  Now, educators are expendable in the eyes of society.

Today, all of us educators are expendable.  This is evidenced by:

• "Accountability" systems which focus on firing people whose standardized test data indicates their "ineffectiveness," while measuring every child in America by the same yardstick, regardless of situation.  That's it, let's just fire all the teachers.  I'm sure hiring those new uncertified schmucks who worked as car salesmen or chemical engineers for 15 years will do what the experienced and trained professionals could not do to the government's satisfaction.
• The first thing out of people's mouths when a school isn't doing well is "Well, they should fire [insert staff member such as teacher/principal] because they just cannot cut the mustard!"  Yeah, why don't we bring the CEO of a company into the classroom and see how he or she does in a classroom.  I've seen many an educated professional eaten alive by a room full of high-school students.
  
• The mass media, which only covers teachers who have done something stupid.  After all, if you only watched the mainstream news, you'd assume that all teachers/principals are child-molesting, drug-dealing slugs who do nothing but suck off the tax-payer's teet and ruin a generation of kids.
  
• School board actions/statements.  Because clearly if we want to recruit high-quality teachers, let's assault them right up front with the plan for how we will fire them if they don't make the grade.  As we know, that's a great way to hire the best and brightest... with threats!  Last time I worked for a company, it seemed like the best way to hire the best and brightest is to make your company MORE appealing than the others, not less.  I'm confused by school board/superintendent attitudes.
  
• Legislation, such as No Child Left Behind (which should be more accurately named No Child and No School Gets Ahead).  Soon NCLB will require 100% of school children to meet all academic testing standards (which in and of themselves are moving targets that go UP annually).  That's not hyperbole.  Read the legislation.  The Feds will have to sanction every public school in the United States if this isn't fixed.
  
• As soon as a school is in trouble academically, the first response from the government is to cut funds and fire people.  Has that EVER worked?  Bring in new staff who are by-and-large less experienced and less qualified (and unproven) and then cut funds.  Genius.  Shouldn't we be doing the opposite?  Paying experienced and proven people to come in from other, more successful campuses to help out? What about professionals who have proven their ability to turn other campuses around and work with difficult populations?  No, let's just fire everybody and hope we'll find something better to replace them with.  Yeah, that's worked out so far, eh?
  
• Ultimately, no matter how hard you work, if your kids don't make the grade (as arbitrarily determined each year by the state through a statistical model that no human could possibly comprehend), you could face the axe, which is accompanied by a negative stamp on your career record.  Again, how does this encourage quality, highly-qualified and motivated teachers to go work at a school who is in academic trouble?  

Yes, we are expendable.  The pressure is tremendous and the pay, while not bad for those fresh out of college, is often not competitive with highly-experienced, highly-educated professionals in other fields of work.  Every day we face new challenges and new mandates made by people who have never set foot on our campus and most of whom haven't been in a classroom since the middle of the 20th century. 

You know who I'm talking about.  You may be one of them.  If you judge how teaching and/or school should be by your experience as a student when you were a child/adolescent, then you are part of the problem.  It's 2010.  It's not 1950, 1975 or even 1999.  The world has changed, kids have changed and despite what the media would have you believe, the standards for graduation and testing have gone up tremendously.  The test you passed in 1975 or 1999 wouldn't get you to a diploma in 2010.  Teaching methods employed in 1980 would get you eaten alive in 2010 (and would also utterly fail to have any academic result).  It's a new world.  In this one, teachers aren't respected, they are expendable.  Principals aren't looked to for leadership, they are seen as enemies, looking for teachers to do something wrong.  All are subject to the chopping block when the pile of statistical test result data comes back.

So why do we do this job?  Why put up with the disrespect and belittlement?  We do it for the kids. We have to.  We do it because we love it.  As long as we keep reminding ourselves of that, we can at least look past the red tape and asinine legislation long enough to know that the result of our work is changed lives, while the results of that cubicle worker who crunches numbers all day are just more profit for corporate greed and the almighty stock-holder.  I'll continue to let that passion motivate my work.  I'll toss the TPS reports aside and get to the real work at hand: the kids.

Sometimes the worst turns out to be the truth

A little over a month ago I posted about one of the "good kids" at my school whose mother was brutally murdered. READ HERE I was torn at the time about how to feel about it.  Sorrow and empathy for the young man whose mother was the victim of a random violent crime, or horror that he might have done it and that it was quite the opposite of random.  My worst nightmare has come true.

Although the intent of this blog is to express my feelings without revealing my geographic location, name, and especially no identifying information about any student or my school, this story has now become national news.  I will continue to blog here on this personal forum, because it is my right to do so. I will not, however, confirm any information about my identity, my school and especially no information about students.

I have used the alias "Ahmed" to refer to the student whose mother was murdered.  As it turns out, Ahmed is responsible for the murder.  He was arrested this past week in what has become a very public murder case.  Not only because of the horror of murdering one's own mother, but because, as it turns out, he paid a classmate to commit the crime.  The murderer in this case was another student from my school.  Fortunately, a student I'm not well-acquainted with, but that doesn't make it any less gruesome.

The revelation of this information was initially rather anticlimactic for me.  In many ways I had mentally prepared myself that Ahmed might have done it.  I wasn't really prepared for all of the facts that have been unraveling throughout the past week.  (note: all of the follow facts are public knowledge that has appeared on TV and print media, I'm not revealing any confidential information)

The murder was committed for-hire for a paltry sum of money.  The victim was stabbed dozens of times.  Following the murder, Ahmed returned to campus and very nonchalantly walked the halls, joked with friends, posted on Facebook, texted friends on his cell, and behaved as if it were any normal day.  The case was only cracked when the hired killer made the mistake of committing a drug offense and was taken into custody for this offense.  At this point, various puzzle pieces began to come together for the police.

As the week progressed and the student body got word of what happened, sorrow, anger and other strong feelings came over many students.  We provided counseling services to students and teachers who had contact with the two young men, the murderers.

Finally, I think sometime on Thursday evening, it really hit me what a betrayal that this was.  How could someone that I trusted do something so horrible?  By no means did I know him extremely well, but I knew him well enough to have made at least a moderate character judgment based on my interactions as well as the experiences of others who had known him for many, many years.

In my initial post, I stated that if it turned out to be true that Ahmed committed this heinous crime, that I would question my ability to judge character.  That's exactly what has happened, but the net result of that is still unknown for me.  People always say things like "ya never know..." when it comes to situations like this.  In the future, I hope to know better and to know that my first instincts are most definitely not above questioning.

I'm ready for this to be a closed chapter, but I feel that it's a long way from that.  I'm sure that the trial will be months or years away and that no matter how much I'd like it to be a part of the distant past, that this case has changed and modified the way I think about students.  That being said, I know that 99.99999999% (hopefully more!) of teens would never even consider such an act.  Betrayal of trust is what most of the students and teachers at school have felt, in conjunction with their horror.  I think I feel the same way.

It's time to work hard to move on to educating students and to meeting the needs of all of my 500+ other students, knowing that we will all be stronger as a result of our experiences.  Those of you who are also working in the education field, I trust that you will join me in trudging forward as troopers, working hard to teach, to educate and to develop children into competent, responsible, well-educated adults who are prepared to be productive and moral people in the real world.

Thanks for reading.