Another example of the limits of good intentions, and the very real hurdles new teachers face in driving student achievement in our toughest schools. Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks writes about Ed Morman, a mid-career switcher who entered the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, but is now admitting defeat and quitting the field.
“The [teaching] job was the hardest I’ve had, by far,” Morman wrote, “but the potential for job satisfaction was far greater than I’d ever felt before. I told the kids that I quit teaching because I needed to make more money. This isn’t true. … I quit because of the stress I felt. The main cause of the stress was the kids themselves. I could never rise above the feeling of humiliation that I felt each day when I tried to address 20 or 25 kids and might find none of them paying attention to me. I seethed when I asked a student to stop talking and heard the response, ‘Get out of my face.’ So often I stood in the classroom wishing I could be anywhere else.
“I try to get a class to come to order while one kid is jumping on a second, a third calls out my name asking me for a pencil, a fourth demands that I let her go to the bathroom and a fifth needs to go see Miss Smith, while a sixth needs a pass to the nurse’s office and a seventh starts making silly, repetitive noises. … One day a cheap calculator hit the wall just above my head. Another day, it was a Jell-O cup, whose contents dripped down the wall and stained the picture of Harriet Tubman I had hanging on a bulletin board. …I had a meltdown after seeing how poorly my kids did on a standardized test.
Typically Morman shoulders the blame himself for his failure. “One thing I absorbed from my otherwise inadequate training is that it was up to me to make a difference,” he notes. “And I did make a difference, but not enough to sustain me through the nonsense.”
A sad, achingly familiar tale.
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Last week, I posted a memo to Wendy Kopp, suggesting a new way to deploy Teach for America corps members—and get top veteran teachers in front of our highest need classrooms. The Teach for America founder emailed a thoughtful reply over the weekend:
Many thanks for all the generous sentiments in your blog entry, which I appreciate. As for your recommendation, as you might guess, I don’t think this would be a good thing for urban and rural kids. It is a rare person who has what it takes to excel as a teacher in a low-income community, and it’s not at all a given that teachers who do well in more privileged communities will do well in urban and rural areas. The most important thing for kids in low-income communities is that we recruit as many people as possible — whether new or experienced — who have the personal characteristics that differentiate successful teachers in high-poverty communities, and that we train and support them to be effective in meeting the extra needs of their students. The individuals who come to Teach For America are coming because they want to work with the nation’s most disadvantaged children (and it is unlikely that most of them would decide to channel their energy toward teaching in more privileged contexts), and in fact their motivation to level the playing field for them is one reason for their success. The recent Urban Institute study that looked at the impact of high school teachers in the state of North Carolina over a six-year period provides evidence that our strategy has a positive impact for kids; the study showed that the incremental impact of hiring a Teach For America corps member was three times the impact of having a teacher with three or more years of experience. Moreover, in addition to providing a critical source of excellent teachers for disadvantaged kids, our strategy of channelling the energy of the nation’s future leaders into urban and rural schools is important for the long-term effort to ensure educational excellence and equity. Teach For America is building a pipeline of leaders who are deeply committed to educational equity and deeply understand what it will take to ensure that children in low-income communities have the educational opportunities they deserve. Their initial teaching experience in under-resourced communities is foundational to their lifelong commitment to effecting the systemic changes necessary to ensure educational opportunity for all.
Wendy Kopp
CEO & Founder
Teach For America
A 15-minute call might save you 15% on your car insurance, but if the folks from Geico really want to save people time and money they may want to stock their call centers with Baltimore principals—they need just one-third of that time to reach a hiring decision on a teacher. This blog post from a Teach For America recruit hired to teach in the school district offers insight into how little due diligence goes into hiring decisions in some tough city schools. The “idealistic young man” describes attending a school district hiring fair in Baltimore where he is surprised to hear Chancellor Andres Alonzo announce that every school year in Baltimore begins with 850 vacancies.
“This huge demand for teachers resulted in a rather confused, chaotic environment. Some teachers were being hired on the spot after a 5 minute interview at best. The lines for each school were like a meat processing plant, simply looking if you were certified in an area of need, and then moving on.”
That night, the anonymous TFA recruit bunked with a couple of Teach for America Corps Members (CMs) and was surprised by some of the war stories he heard.
“The things we heard about some schools in the district were completely crazy. I should preface this by saying that I am not at all dissatisfied with my decision to join TFA, even after hearing how rough some of these schools can be. But, I think everyone needs to know what they are up against. We heard stories of teachers quitting in their first week. One female CM quit because a gang member she offended the day before fire-bombed her classroom, meaning he threw a bottle full of lighter fluid into her room (molotov cocktail). Her principal merely encouraged her to “put out the fire and call the police”. The other, a male CM, quit after a student pulled a knife on him because he didn’t like his tone!”
Perhaps if they take longer than five minutes, they might give those idealistic TFAers time to change their minds.
“Highly intelligent, talented students need special programs to keep them engaged and challenged. But experts say too often they aren’t even identified — especially in low-income and minority schools,” notes the Los Angeles Times.
“If you reviewed Dalton Sargent’s report cards, you’d know only half his story,” writes the Times’ Carla Rivera, who notes 80% of the gifted children in the U.S. receive no specialized instruction. “The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.”
“There is no federal law mandating special programs for gifted children, though many educators argue that these students — whose curiosity and creativity often coexist with emotional and social problems — deserve the same status as those with special needs. Services for gifted students vary from state to state. In California, about 512,000 students are enrolled in the Gifted and Talented Education program, which aims to provide specialized and accelerated instruction.”
Rivera notes there is legislation pending in the California state Senate aimed at training teachers to identify gifted students from low-income, minority and non-English speaking families, but it stalled last year after estimates found that it could cost up to $1.1 million.
Seems a palty sum for our nation’s largest state to pay.
The talented Eduwonkette scores the blog equivalent of the the talk show “good get” by having Bill Ayers guest blog a response to Sol Stern’s broadside. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But mixed up in Ayers’ innocuous sounding responses (”Stern favors teaching for social injustice?”) is, as always, the great unasked question: Who is the true progressive? The teacher, self-consciously teaching for social justice, seeking to empower students in her child-centered classroom, a well-thumbed copy of Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed near at hand? Or the “instructivist” who seeks to give the have-nots the intellectual capital they need to be full participants in society? How do we best serve our students, through opposition or access to power? Ends or means? Who is really “serving the interests of oppressor” here, Professor Ayers?
One might argue that education in America—hence the cause of social justice—has been set back decades by wrapping any number of ineffective pedagogical fads with the progressive label. What earnest young teacher, starting out in an inner city or rural school doesn’t see him or herself as progressive? Yet an emphasis on academic curriculum or direct instruction—sound, academic content and effective practice–is somehow branded “anti-progressive.” It takes a long time, and a fiercely independent streak, for a teacher to realize that perhaps they’re failing their students by accepting these narrow, dogmatic labels.
9th grade students in Philadelphia high schools are more likely than their upper-grade peers to be taught by inexperienced, uncertified teachers according to a new study highlighted by Education Week.
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