And how the people involved in the business of education view the importance of teachers in the process.
Every year, the teacher gets evaluated. Unless a teacher has tenure, which is getting rarer, the teacher can find himself or herself without a contract at the drop of the hat at the end of any one school year for pretty much any reason the administration can find cause for. Because of the outcry over teacher's unions "protecting that one bad teacher" - that one bad teacher in perhaps the twenty average or even good teachers who were being harassed into quitting and being fired on trumped up personal issues, unions have been neutered - heck, my father was a retired teacher, and he said that by 1992, the NEA and AFT were basically useless in doing anything more to protect teachers than not giving away too many concessions to administration and the local school boards every time a contract came up.
Over the past ten years, a growing number of teachers that have been entering the field have found they need to look for a new position or a new school to teach at within five to seven years. Somehow, just before they can get the protection of vesting or tenure.
The older teachers with tenure - the ones who might get the grace of a three to five year performance review, are finding that as schools are "consolidating", becoming charter schools, or closing, they're being pushed out for graduates or TFA teachers because their position just "disappeared".
The stress to be a teacher is enormous.
As for your point of "a three to five year period of failing students" - the reality poor performance of students can just as easily be linked to the local economics and population changes as it could be to teacher performance.
I'm assuming from your icon that you are in Canada, and perhaps you haven't seen the amount of school closings, students experiencing transfers between public schools to charter schools, then back to public schools that are happening in most lower income areas.
A huge chunk of the population of the US experienced a significant income drop suddenly five years ago. A large number of people lost their homes and jobs, and have had to move multiple times chasing work. There are still a lot of people have not recovered from this economic shock, and their children are still feeling the pinch. Small towns are still dying, and there are still clusters of depression in larger towns and cities.
There is often a resource war between students and school district resources that have very little to do with the teacher.
When a child is hungry, requiring medical or mental health, or school is the only "structure" in his or her life because s/he is left to his/her own devices for a significant period of time after it is over, that child isn't going to have the impedes to learn.
If a child was basically neglected for the first five or six years of his or her life, that child is going to have difficulty with school unless there is an intervention of some sort.
Children like this are usually identified as IEP within the first five years of school, and most school districts really don't want to work with students that have IEPs; shuffling them off to any number of cheap "trouble kid" warehouse programs - special education or schools that are basically a "time out" facility where the teachers are given only enough resources to be security guards, until they find the occasional program that might actually work for one specific student, or until the children drop out and off the radar. Guess where most of those under-funded schools are located?
We experienced this with my troubled stepdaughter after we got custody of at the age of 13. We dragged her kicking and screaming through regular school, special classes, gifted classes, two IEPs, Charter Schools (and that was a f'n waste of two years) until we finally got her to graduate with a diploma at the age of 20. We had to get a lawyer to get the school district to pay for the private school that had partnered with the district IEP programs for non-gangster kids with behavioral problems.
The problems she had were never her teachers - most of them liked her and she only had one teacher who was a burn-out and didn't try to help her as much as they were able. She was smart, but she had a focus and memory problem - lost books and forgot or never turned in homework even after she completed it. She just sort of got lost in the overcrowded classes, and since she had PTSD from the treatment her mom put her through, she would just give up after a few weeks once she started falling behind.
It was always at the administration side - "there wasn't enough resources", or "the vice principle mis-filed her records" or "she was so smart - she just had to try harder", or "well, we can see you're trying as hard as you can, but you need to pay for a tutor and a therapist, or pay more attention to her, or spend more time making sure she's doing her homework, or, or, or".
Here's the reality in most school districts that don't have a wealthy tax base to support it (like most big-city public schools). If an elementary school teacher begins any number of school years with 45 or 50 children in a classroom built for 30 children, and by the time the year is half over - by January - there are at least an additional 5 in number s/he has to try to teach with the resources s/he got in August/September, and at least half the class has been transferred to or from a different school or teacher with a different class syllabus. Those children have to be brought up to the level of the original class, and that will definitely have an affect on the class "performance" by the end of the year.
If the average teacher is supposed to be "Superman/woman" to the majority of his or her class just to be considered "good" by the school administration, then the average teacher will never be respected as a good teacher.
Oh, BTW - in the US, teachers or former teachers do not hold the majority of school administration positions. Those are held by people with "Management" degrees, who are far more interested in "resource management", and "budget" than they are in the actual service the school is supposed to provide. Educational "Quality" has a price tag to most school administration.
Interestingly enough, when a teacher does manage to make it into administration, the school tends to see a higher budget expenditures than those schools that come in "on budget", but they tend to have lower paid administrators, better class sizes, more happier, relaxed teachers, and shift their budget resources so that there is significantly more arts, after school and tutoring programs, and parental/family involvement programs than schools that are not run by teachers.
And they have better overall student outcomes, which means they magically have better "teacher performance".
But then, again, schools like this cost more. And usually don't last very long after the school board gets through with it, because the programs that work are "a waste of taxpayer money" because it takes time to collect student improvement metrics.
Which means School Administrators and other educational program "investor shareholders" aren't making as much money and the local business community can't garner as much financial "goodwill" by sponsoring the latest whiz-bang tech learning package that Gates Foundation, LearnZillion, or Leap-Frog is pushing to replace those expensive unionized teachers, field trips, and basic classroom infrastructure.
Teachers are not a valued commodity in the education business. But teachers will always get the blame when the business fails, because the policy makers and the budget weenies can never be at fault. What is the saying? A good mechanic never blames his or her tools?
Haele
= new reply since forum marked as read
