MetLife, the insurance giant, released an annual report last week about principals’ and teachers’ job satisfaction. Basically, they’re stressed out in their jobs, and they believe their biggest challenges originate outside the classroom: budgets, parenting, community issues, etc.
According to some newspapers (The Washington Post, for example), the lead story is that teachers are less satisfied with their jobs than they’ve been since MetLife started taking this survey in 1984. Valerie Strauss wrote on the Answer Sheet Blog: “It’s no wonder so many teachers have low morale. They say that modern school reform—with its emphasis on getting rid of bad teachers, assessing teachers by student standardized test scores, and rewriting tenure and collective bargaining laws—essentially demonizes them.” Those words, referring to today’s school reform efforts driven largely by for-profit corporations, are Valerie’s own, by the way: the word “demonize” never actually appears in the report.
Elsewhere, the New York Times didn’t cover the release of the report this year, which is fine since last year’s report found an even bigger decline in teacher morale than this year’s. Neither the two major Chicago newspapers nor the Baltimore Sun covered the report this year either, although WBAL-TV (NBC affiliate, Baltimore) ran a brief story about it.
The most likely reason major news outlets played it down is that it would upset their advertisers. Note that coverage in the Post was on a reporter’s blog, not necessarily endorsed by the editors, and coverage on WBAL-TV made no connection to teacher evaluation systems. But the connection is obvious to anyone who has even chatted with a teacher. It’s just that even suggesting a connection between teachers’ low morale and the fact that some companies are working hard to get as many teachers out of the public schools as they can so they can bring in their own teachers will get a lot of those corporations mad. And then they might pull their advertising from the papers that reported on the obvious link.
Demonizing teachers will get us nowhere
I think Valerie Strauss was too polite. We’re not just “demonizing” teachers; we’re giving the whole teaching profession boarding passes on a train to hell. We have in Maryland, for example, several perfectly good teacher evaluation systems, a few of which from some of the largest school districts in the country are used as national models. And then we have lawmakers in Annapolis who have already voted to replace those systems with schemes that are untested.
This is what happens when non-educators run education policy. So what’s the Maryland State Department of Education supposed to do? If they don’t follow the law, as Maryland’s elected officials made, they don’t get the money for next year’s budgets. If they do follow the law, teacher evaluation systems become less effective and less supported by evidence and data.
In other words, the real news in this report is not the low morale educators have or the reasons they have it: that’s been going on forever. The real news this year is that most of the challenges come from outside classroom walls, like Annapolis or Washington, and school leaders are going to have to learn how to deal with it and keep their schools humming.
Now, in fairness to our elected officials, lawmakers wouldn’t have made laws on their own that require a “substantial” portion of each teacher’s evaluation to come from statewide standardized test data, which purports to measure student growth but doesn’t actually do so very well. They had input from officials at the Maryland State Department of Education. The buck can only be passed so far, and eventually, someone in education has to take responsibility for the new state laws about teacher evaluation.
We need school leaders, such as Montgomery County’s superintendent, Joshua P Starr, to work with teachers—and teachers to work with districts—in putting forth an effort in Annapolis that can stop the madness. I realize this is not directly related to instruction or providing an education for our students, but throwing away years of work on a teacher evaluation system that is highly effective was not the intent of Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, or any other law; it is the intent of outside corporations that seek financial gain from our public schools.
The MetLife report has its own first point:
Among responsibilities that school leaders face, those that teachers and principals identify as most challenging result from conditions that originate beyond school doors. A majority of teachers and principals report that their school’s budget has decreased in the last 12 months, and even greater proportions of teachers and principals indicate that it is challenging or very challenging for school leaders to manage budgets and resources to meet school needs. Teachers and principals also rate the responsibilities of addressing the individual needs of diverse learners and engaging parents and the community in improving the education of students as significant leadership challenges.
If we can’t make this work in Montgomery County, Md., my prayers are with the teachers in St Mary’s County, who must use the student growth data as 50 percent of their teacher evaluations. Unlike Montgomery County, they signed on, along with 21 other systems in the state, to the Race to the Top agreement. Start printing those boarding passes. You’re going to need a lot of paper.
