My
friend and fellow Michigan teacher, Cossondra George, recently asked:

Do teachers have a responsibility to
be the gatekeepers of their profession? Can we settle for allowing our
colleagues to give students less than they deserve?

Teachers
ought to serve as gatekeepers for admission into the profession--and until that
happens, we can't lay claim to being fully professional. I'm all for raising
the bar for entrance to teaching (using better tools than SAT or Praxis scores),
and investing more time, resources and research on effective teacher development.

In
the meantime, however, we have teachers who are not doing the job well enough. Some
of them should be gone--tomorrow; others have plenty of untapped potential but
are floundering. No point in repairing the rusty gate granting access to teach
unless we pay attention to supporting teachers once they're in the field.

Struggling
teachers come in two basic flavors: #1) teachers who haven't had sufficient
experience or training to do the job well and #2) teachers who once had the
disposition and tools to be good teachers, but have checked out due to cynicism,
fatigue, bitterness and unforgiving working conditions.

The
first group is not necessarily easier to deal with. In some environments, "professional
development" is seen as an administrative duty, and early-career teachers
are threatened by the idea that their performance might be evaluated and found
wanting. Their daily practice is marked by the overriding desire to keep a low
profile. All teachers--from rank newbies to award-winning veterans--must
consider themselves collaborative learners and practitioners.  All of us are responsible for lending plans,
tips, materials and support to new teachers.

One
thing that can be done by accomplished veterans: asking newer teachers for their ideas, and approaching them as
full colleagues, rather than those who need help. I work with many first- and
second-year teachers who are pretty vocal about observed shortcomings in their
assigned mentors. Most faculties adopt a kind of pecking order. Flattening that
hierarchy--opening doors and sharing uncertainties--can help. Novice teachers
ought to be considered for leadership roles, such as curriculum writing or the
school improvement team, rather than dumping unwanted, time-sucking class
advisories or club sponsor roles on them.

The
second group of ineffective teachers is a different problem. I worked for
decades in a strongly veteran culture, which equated years of service with accrued
power and influence. I eventually discovered that many of the teachers
I saw as jaded burn-outs were once enthusiastic and creative, but had had
their mojo squashed by a culture of anger and perceived betrayal.

For a
teacher trained in the 70s, teaching to a mandated and scripted  reading program feels like being told that the
best lessons in their tool bags are useless, and their judgment flawed. For a
teacher who's spent 20 years in Detroit, bringing in used clothing and peanut
butter sandwiches for neglected students, blaming teachers for the system's
failures now is callous.

Some
of those favorite lessons and teaching methods are useless junk. But--a significant group of teachers who retain
the potential to be very effective in the classroom have found the only
"leadership" role open to them is fighting back against systemic
change through their unions. They need to have their professional experience
validated and acknowledged; they're not going accept either praise or criticism
from someone they don't respect, but they have not stopped caring about their
students' learning.

So there
is an opportunity to salvage good teaching--and valuable contextual
experience-- by acknowledging that veteran teachers have something to
contribute: been there, tried that, learned from it.  We might start by asking dried-up veteran
teachers "Why did you choose to be a teacher?" The ones who say
"June, July and August" can be dismissed. But the ones who say
"I wanted to make a difference in kids' lives" deserve to have their
ideas heard, at least.

An
old friend inadvertently gave me the title for this blog when he let me know
that a true Michigan conservationist and sportsman-Rusty Gates--passed over to
the great fly fishing stream in the sky last week.  Rusty Gates understood that in order to learn
to fish, you had to stand in the river for a time. And so it is with teaching.

Image: Neil Whiteside@Flickr Creative Commons

It's
time for the annual round of teachers-in-summer blogs. These come in several
flavors: Ambitious (with a side helping of enrichment). Justification (a.k.a. "I
work harder than you know"). The traditional, obligatory Reading List for
Teachers. (This one blew me away--three books involving Nazis, Charles Murray
of Bell Curve fame, and...Daniel Pink?
) A Snarky Saga of the Last Days of '08-'09 (where someone almost gets punched
out, speaking of tense and irritable...). Plus two new cable TV shows for your
summer viewing pleasure, featuring garden-variety, nice-guy teachers. One manufactures
and sells high-test meth to build a nest egg for his family (since he's dying
of cancer), and the other sells his own substantially endowed body since he
doesn't make enough money teaching to keep his children happy and a roof over
his head.

Moral
of all the stories: Teaching is an undesirable low-prestige, low-salary,
high-stress job--and teachers can no longer publicly say the three best things
about teaching are June, July and August.

The
answer to all these trials seems clear to me. The traditional school calendar
is way past its expiration date, and should be abandoned. Its flaws are
well-known:  too much time off in the
summer, too much review needed in the fall--not enough well-used time, crammed
into too few days. The agrarian calendar represents a wildly inefficient use of
resources, and the folks who support it do so for reasons that have nothing to
do with education. All of the barriers to changing the calendar--busing,
sports, vacations, staffing, summer camps, cheap labor for summer businesses--
can be effectively addressed. 

My
personal preference would be a modular calendar, with four- to six-week
curricular units, offered flexibly, year-round--through both in-building residencies
and on-line. Students would be required to be "in school" a minimal
number of days (say, 180) but could select additional modules to attend school
200 or 220 days a year. Short vacations would be scheduled between modules. Students
could enter the system at multiple points in the year (September, January,
June) and finish when all the modules were successfully completed. Nobody would
"fail a grade," because a module could be re-taken if material wasn't
mastered. There are dozens of ways to improve the school calendar.

I
find it amazing--and get huffy and defensive--when I am reminded that a
significant chunk of the general public still thinks that teachers are working only
when there are students in front of them. The first step in changing that
perception is not going to be strongly worded blogs, however. It will be
banishing the lazy, crazy 10-week summer vacation.

A
few years ago, a local reporter interviewed me for a story on what teachers do
in summer. I ran through the usual agenda: planning, reading, looking at new
music, cleaning the percussion cabinet, taking a class, directing the community
band. They sent out a photographer for a photo. We had coffee on my deck--and
he persuaded me to stretch out in our backyard hammock with my own summer professional
reading. The photo (below) made the front page of the paper. 

And---I
got a call from a School Board member, that evening. He was dismayed that I
would agree to a photo suggesting that I was "laying around" all
summer, doing nothing. The Board wished another shot had been chosen. Perhaps a
glamorous pose of me cleaning out the spit-valves on the school-owned euphoniums?
 I declined to give him the brief lecture
on Urgent vs. Important that came to mind. But we have a long way to go before teaching
is a real profession in the public's mind.

Images: Livingston County Press-Argus; k.l.macke

It's
natural for me to think of my dad on Memorial Day. He was a proud veteran of World
War II, a tail gunner in the Army Air Corps, serving in the Pacific theatre for
the duration of the war.  He enlisted
early in 1942, at age 20, inspiring his younger brother, my Uncle Don, to lie
about his age so he could get into combat, too. My dad made it home but Don did
not--he was killed in action, in the first Marine landing on Iwo Jima, February
1945. He was nineteen years old.

I
don't think my dad ever got over the terrible loss of his brother; the war was
a powerful influence on his character and thinking. Most of the life lessons I
learned from my dad sprang from perceptions born of his wartime experience:
Have confidence--you're as good as anyone else. We live in the best country in
the world. Tattoos are OK only if they're memorial crosses. Freedom is worth
any cost. Buy American. And--the Palmer House (where he and his unit did their
radio training) is the best hotel in Chicago.

When
my dad came home, in 1945, he was diagnosed with "battle fatigue."  The discharging physician recommended a job
that involved physical labor, independent work without constant supervision,
and friendly colleagues. My dad got a job delivering bread. He became a Teamster,
and was a loyal union member until he died, in 1980, of brain cancer. Another
lesson from my father:  The union keeps
us strong, and watches out for the little guy. When I joined the teachers'
union, in 1975, nobody was more pleased than my dad.

According
to my father, there are people with money and control, and there are people
whose assets are loyalty and community. He did not go into battle, or survive
having his plane shot down, for the benefit of the rich and powerful. He fought
for the rights of ordinary Joes to make a good living for their families, to
live in a country where their contributions were honored. The union was there
to protect justice for the working man.

I
thought about my dad when I read "Is Seniority Best Practice?" in the
Stories from School blog. The
blogger, Kim, shares her dismay over losing so many fine new teachers with
budget cuts in WA, and asks "...with all of the pressure being put on
teachers to meet professional standards through reflection and best practices,
shouldn’t the teachers who are doing that have some advantage?"

I know
what my dad would have said:  Seniority
protects loyal workers, when their bosses can replace them with someone
cheaper. And in a brutal economy, it's often difficult to determine whether
employers are valuing quality practice or merely seeking the lowest price.

Still--in
a profession critical to building human capacity, shouldn't exemplary practice
be rewarded above all else? In teaching, there must be a balance between
excellence and mere longevity. We owe that to our children, as much as we owe
fair employment practices to workers.

John Adams  said: I
was a warrior so my son could be a farmer--so his son could be a poet.  I would hate to think that my dad got up
every morning at 4:00 a.m., lugging heavy bread racks when he was 58 years old,
so that I could turn my back on fairness. But don't the blessings of liberty
include the right to an affordable, high-quality education for everyone--the
21st century ticket to opportunity? Isn't that also a right worthy of
sacrifice?

My father was also right
about the Palmer House: it's magnificent.

Times
are tough. Schools are slashing budgets. But are they collecting advice and
suggestions from their teachers and other staff, or just handing out the pink
slips? The twelve suggestions below are not wholly original, but they honor the
concept that loyal and committed employees would rather contribute 
more--and
more effectively--than go down with the financial tsunami, clinging to outmoded
habits or contract language. Here's what I'd try, if I were in charge, ideas
both simple and complex:

#1) Plant an idea box in every school office to collect suggestions for small-scale
scrimps--from students, parents, teachers and especially custodians who are by
far the best source of information on waste in school buildings.  New habits, like recycling paper printed on
one side only, or collecting half-used spiral notebooks from the trash on
locker cleanout day, can save modest amounts. They also serve as a constant
reminder to conserve and recycle. Ideas should be shared school-wide.

#2)
Use donations and volunteers more effectively. Instead of recruiting volunteer
classroom "helpers" (then boring them to distraction at the Xerox machine), or
preparing a "wish list" of things the PTO should raise money to purchase,
why not ask parents, local businesses and community members what services,
skills or goods they'd be interested in sharing, to enrich kids' learning?  I once had a retired piano teacher, newly
moved into town to be near her grandchildren, call and ask if she could donate
her piano-playing. She accompanied my students at solo and ensemble contest for
years, gratis.

#3)
Start buying supplies and teaching materials from discount commercial outlets. School
supply companies add huge markups for materials, especially pre-packaged (and often
junky) instructional "kits." Schools pay for the convenience of
working with a catalog dealer willing to take school purchase orders, and
accept payment in 90 days. Someone might have to actually go shopping, of
course--but virtually everything is cheaper if you're canny and look for sales.

#4)
Let experienced, capable teachers accept larger class loads for additional pay.
When contract language on class size specifies no class larger than 28, and there
are 90 kids enrolled in the 4th grade, with three teachers, you have two
choices. You can either hire a new 4th grade teacher, and put 22 or 23 kids in
a class, or you can put 28 kids in two classes and pay the third teacher more
to deal with 34 kids. Something like this actually happens, fairly often, on a
secondary schedule, when a teacher takes an extra section, forgoing
their prep period, for an extra 15% or 20% of their salary. In fact, the
opportunity to teach an overload is often offered as a perk for teachers with
seniority (weakening the student load/class size impact-on-teaching argument). Why not offer overloads based
on perceived excellence instead--giving exemplary teachers the chance to work
with more students? Remember: every additional teacher also needs a space to
teach. Much cheaper to provide extra desks and materials than a new classroom.

#5)
Stop buying textbooks on a schedule. In fact, stop buying textbooks, period--or
purchase limited classroom sets for selected materials teachers think they
can't live without. Start by cutting the district's annual textbook budget in
half, then challenging expert teachers to create syllabi full of free-access or
low-cost/consumable materials and digital tools, to meet curricular benchmarks--and
offer bonuses for teachers who share self-created materials that all teachers
in the grade/department agree to use. Begin building resource libraries
of common on-line content links, assessments, classroom sets of trade books,
video clips and licensed web resources. And never buy another media security
system, spending tens of thousands of dollars to "catch" someone
stealing a $5 magazine.

#6)
Stop centralized ordering in large districts. 
Once, while doing a presentation at a school in a nearby urban district,
I needed an LCD projector. When the custodian opened the equipment storage
room, there were unopened boxes stacked against all four walls--laser disc
players, turntables and cassette players, slide projectors, VCRs,  giant video cameras and tripods, 16-mm film
projectors, and DuKane machines (filmstrip projectors with sound, highly
desirable, c. 1978). Plus unopened boxes of computer monitors and CPUs. The
custodian shrugged when I glanced around the room. Each building gets the same
stuff, each year, whether they want it or not, he said--keeps them all equal,
you know. 

While
we're at it, let's stop allowing districts so large that they have to have a
warehouse for toilet paper, a centralized sub-hiring system (rather than
calling someone who's a known quantity in a building), or more than a single
layer between superintendent and teachers. Note to would-be consolidators: Big
is nearly always less efficient.

#7)
Immediately offer job sharing and flex hours to both elementary and secondary
teachers.  Give every teacher who'd be
willing to work part-time a shot at proposing a position that fits district
needs, goals and budget. Don't put too many pre-conditions on the arrangements--someone
might like to teach M/T, sharing with a W/TH/F partner. Someone might like to
stay home in the mornings with their toddler, or take a semester-long unpaid
sabbatical. One-year agreements only. Sweeten the deal by offering them a full
year of seniority for half-time work, or (even better) permission to skip staff
meetings.  If a small percentage of a
staff was willing to work half-time, it would free up slots for new personnel
and save small programs during cutbacks.

#8)
Open up school building budgets to the teachers and other building staff. Instead
of dividing available monies between grade levels or departments based on "equality"
or some archaic needs formula (read: the principal was once fond of this program), then
urging complete disposal of the allotted amount, as "proof" that all
the money was essential, adopt full transparency. Provide every teacher with
on-line access to the building's materials budget, and dispersal patterns over
previous years. Every teacher who wants to make a purchase over a certain modest
amount would have to defend the expenditure to a committee, and every person in
the building would have access to the records. Might foment lots of arguing
about what's worthwhile--but those arguments could lead to some productive
program weeding  or even consensus about
priorities in student learning, rather than protecting legacy budgets or programs.

#9)
Hire new staff year-round, including promising interns and subs. Give them a
month-to-month subbing contract with an option offer of the first available
position, then watch them work, up close, with students and staff. Renegotiate
contracts to push hiring windows into the school year, so prospective
candidates' interviews can include actual teaching. How does this save money?
Turnover in school personnel is enormously costly--hiring procedures, records and
reference checks, induction, benefits startups and mentoring costs, plus loss
of investment in professional development and training when teachers leave.  Hiring the right teachers to begin with saves
money--and it boosts achievement and collegiality.

#10)
Think about investing in programs that save money over the long run, like high-quality
early-intervention support for individual students (rather than an untrained
aide to help with management), site-based family assistance, dropout prevention
models or intensive literacy programs. Every child who remains in school,
healthy and out of a special education placement represents recaptured funding.
This is not a knock on special education programs--there are kids who truly need
the services of educators specially trained to deal with specific learning
disabilities. But there are also special education referrals related to
dysfunctional family structures or inability to read--and students who drop out
for the same reasons. It costs two to three times as much to provide special
education, and dropouts are expensive not only for schools but also communities.

#11)
Pay teachers to do needs assessments with colleagues, look at research and
develop their own professional learning experiences, where appropriate, instead
of assuming that expensive curriculum experts or inspirational speakers change
practice.  Put in-house teachers in charge
of interpreting test data, or conducting lesson studies. Build structures into
school schedules (rotating lunch discussion groups? early morning coffees? data
retreats? intensive summer workshops?) where genuine learning communities can
form around emerging issues and interests, rather than mandating PLC formation
and membership. Putting teachers in charge of their own learning will also lead
to some consistency over time. In professional development, you don't always
get what you pay for, or what is promised.  So grow your own.

#12)
Re-conceptualize the idea of "full-time teacher." Break role-based
work (instructional coaching, student programs and events, discipline, building
maintenance, personnel issues, curriculum development, guidance) into chunks
and create hybrid leadership roles for professional staff, which include a mix
of job responsibilities, always including a connection to the classroom. Stop
paying people for collecting graduate credits and remaining in the same
job--and start looking for new ways to use the diverse skills and talents of
teachers, reducing all-supervisory job classifications and plugging those
functions into mixed-role positions, based on aptitude and skills. It's a
business model--flattening the hierarchy. But it also provides a progression of
work responsibilities and challenges for the world's flattest career: teaching.

I am still wiping my eyes after the Inaugural speech, and really need to get my act together for the Virtual Inaugural Ball edition of the Carnival of Education which will be held here, in a Strange Land--tomorrow! I should...