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.