A Few Words on K-12 Education

I've been intending to write on this topic for some time but never can get all my references together at the same time. So I've pulled together a few of them to put this post together and may write more later when the rest surface.

Questions Asked

When talking with groups of parents or teachers and the subject of a kid who has been in trouble comes up there is always one question asked. It isn't "who was his / her math teacher?" or "what school did he / she go to?" or even "who were his / her friends?" The one question is always "what is his / her home life like?" We all feel for parents whose children fell in with a bad crowd or were having a tough adolescence schools are seldom to blame for this. Nor can all parents be blamed when their kids have problems. But it is often the first thing that comes to mind. Just wanted to say that.

Test Scores and Teachers' Unions

I've seen something noted a few times in articles but can only find one source on it right now, and it is from 1996, but I know I've seen the same thing said more recently. There is a correlation between teachers' unions and test scores. It is this: test scores are higher in areas where teachers are unionized. This is the report I can find this evening, from 1996: "Are teachers unions hurting America's education," by F. Howard Nelson and Michael Rosen." It's a long pdf but there is a brief executive summary.

Teachers' Unions and Job Security

You often hear that unions keep bad teachers from being fired. Not so fast. David Macarary writes in "The Myth of the Powerful Teachers Union" (counterpunch.org 3/22/09):

Maher made a huge deal of the fact that, because of the union’s protective shield, less than 1% of California’s tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired. Although this ratio clearly outraged him (he appeared visibly upset by it), had he taken five minutes to research the subject, he’d have realized that this figure represents the national average—with or without unions.

In Georgia, where 92.5% of the teachers are non-union, only 0.5% of tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired. In South Carolina, where 100% of the teachers are non-union, it’s 0.32%. And in North Carolina, where 97.7% are non-union, a miniscule .03% of tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired—the exact same percentage as California.

An even more startling comparison: In California, with its “powerful” teachers’ union, school administrators fire, on average, 6.91% of its probationary teachers. In non-union North Carolina, that figure is only 1.38%. California is actually tougher on prospective candidates.

What is a good teacher?

The New Yorker had a really good article last December 15 on good teachers and what made a teacher a good teacher. Malcolm Gladwell write "Most likely to succeed." The short answer was described as "withitness." It's a good article and those interested in education should read it.

From a parent's point of view I've found there is no simple "good" teacher definition. There are, however, good teachers for my individual children, and what is good for one child is not necessarily good for any other. Parents, especially mothers, talk to each other about teachers. I try to find a parent who has a child similar to each of my children but a year or so older and quiz them about what teachers were good for that child and what teachers weren't, and use that information to try to steer my children, through whatever avenues are available to me, into those classrooms. Some children thrive in classrooms with a lot of individual activity, bright colors, lots of stimulation. Some children do better with a routine and fewer distractions. It doesn't make the teachers in those classrooms better or worse, merely different. If a child has a passion for science or history they will do better with a teacher that shares that passion. The key point here is that I view it as my job to find out who is teaching what grade, what sort of teacher he or she is, and whether or not that is a good fit for my particular snowflakes.

This requires there to be some uniformity to the teacher's roster from year to year. Of course, due to retirements, moves, etc., there are always a few new teachers and that stirs up the "mommy network" quite a bit. Parents of kids with new teachers get quizzed more than parents of kids with teachers who've been around for awhile.

Of course there are always one or two teachers that no one seems to like; I suppose those would be classified as "bad" teachers, though not everyone whose child was in that classroom complains about them. On the other hand, some award winning teachers are not sought out by all parents. It could be that the structure of that classroom is not well suited for that specific child or perhaps the subject matter stressed is not to that child's liking.

The point I'm trying to make is that spotting "good" teachers and "bad" teachers is not always clear cut. Issues of legalities, chronic absenteeism, ignorance of the subject matter or volatile personality characteristics are never good, of course, but outside of those there are great variations.

It always behooves a parent to know what is going on in their child's classroom and that entails going to parent / teacher conferences, volunteering in the classroom where possible and keeping in touch with other parents. That requires stable families, flexible work hours, and a social network. Schools can't necessarily do much about that.

To sum it up, things are not a simple as we would all like to think.

Full disclosure: I'm an official in my local union, and though I've never taught in a k-12 environment, I have taught a few college classes over the years.