Prabhupada, July 4, 1975, Chicago, Conversation with Mayor of Evanston: […] And to serve under somebody, that is sudra. So at the present moment people are being educated to serve under somebody. Technology, one is very expert in some particular line of technology, say, computer machine… You know how to operate. It is a big qualification. But unless he gets a job under some big establishment, he is useless. He cannot live independently. The first-class man will live independently. The second-class man also will live independently. And the third-class men, they will also live independently. And those who cannot live independently, they are fourth-class men. So at the present moment we are simply creating fourth-class men. Full Conversation
Mary Gloster, left, evaluated Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher at a low-performing high school in Washington.
Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired | NYTimes
June 27, 2011 | WASHINGTON — Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city’s roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. “It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job,” Ms. Strzelecki said.
Her fears were not unfounded: 165 Washington teachers were fired last year based on a pioneering evaluation system that places significant emphasis on classroom observations; next month, 200 to 600 of the city’s 4,200 educators are expected to get similar bad news, in the nation’s highest rate of dismissal for poor performance.
The evaluation system, known as Impact, is disliked by many unionized teachers but has become a model for many educators. Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.
Its admirers say the system, a centerpiece of the tempestuous three-year tenure of Washington’s former schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, has brought clear teaching standards to a district that lacked them and is setting a new standard by establishing dismissal as a consequence of ineffective teaching.
But some educators say it is better at sorting and firing teachers than at helping struggling ones; they note that the system does not consider socioeconomic factors in most cases and that last year 35 percent of the teachers in the city’s wealthiest area, Ward 3, were rated highly effective, compared with 5 percent in Ward 8, the poorest.
“Teachers have to be parents, priests, lawyers, clothes washers, babysitters and a bunch of other things” if they work with low-income children, said Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union. “Impact takes none of those roles into account, so it can penalize you just for teaching in a high-needs school.”
Jason Kamras, the architect of the system, said “it’s too early to answer” whether Impact makes it easier for teachers in well-off neighborhoods to do well, but pointed out that Washington’s compensation system offers bigger bonuses ($25,000 versus $12,500) and salary enhancements in high-poverty schools.
“We take very seriously the distribution of high-quality teachers across the system,” he said.
The evaluation system leans heavily on student test scores to judge about 500 math and reading teachers in grades four to eight. Ratings for the rest of the city’s 3,600 teachers are determined mostly by five classroom observations annually, three by their principal and two by so-called master educators, most recruited from outside Washington.
For classroom observations, nine criteria — “explain content clearly,” “maximize instructional time” and “check for student understanding,” for example — are used to rate the lesson as highly effective, effective, minimally effective or ineffective.
These five observations combine to form 75 percent of these teachers’ overall ratings; the rest is based on achievement data and the teachers’ commitment to their school communities. Ineffective teachers face dismissal. Minimally effective ones get a year to improve.
Impact costs the city $7 million a year, including pay for 41 master educators, who earn about $90,000 a year and conduct about 170 observations each. The program also asks more of principals. Carolyne Albert-Garvey, the principal of Maury Elementary School on Capitol Hill, has 22 teachers — she must conduct 66 observations, about one every three school days.
“I’ve really gotten to know my staff, and I’m giving teachers more specific feedback,” Ms. Albert-Garvey said. “It’s empowered me to have the difficult conversations, and that gives everyone the opportunity to improve.”
Several teachers, however, said they considered their ratings unfair.
A veteran teacher who said he did not want to criticize the school system openly, said that a month after he inherited a chaotic world history class from a long-term substitute, the visiting evaluator cut him no slack for taking on the assignment and penalized him because a student was texting during the lesson.
Another teacher who expects to lose her job next month because of low ratings said at a public hearing that evaluators picked apart her seventh-grade geography lessons, making criticisms she considered trivial. During the most recent observation, her evaluator subtracted points because she had failed to notice a girl eating during class, the teacher said.
“I’m 25 years in the system, and before, I always got outstanding ratings,” she said. “How can you go overnight from outstanding to minimally effective?”
A report issued by the Aspen Institute in March said one of Impact’s accomplishments was to align teacher performance with student performance, noting that previously 95 percent of Washington’s teachers were highly rated but fewer than half of its students were demonstrating proficiency on tests. Still, the report quoted teachers who complained of cold-eyed evaluators more interested in identifying losers than in developing winners.
“After my first conversation with my master educator, I felt it was going to be worthwhile — she offered me some good resources,” the report quoted one teacher. “My second master educator was kind of a robot, not generous in offering assistance, a much tougher grader.”
This month, Mary Gloster, who taught science in three states before she was recruited to Impact in 2009, was at Ballou High, one of the city’s lowest-performing schools, to share the results of some classroom visits.
She met with Mahmood Dorosti, a physics teacher who won a $5,000 award this spring. “Don’t even think about it — you’re highly effective,” she told him.
Next was Ms. Strzelecki, 23, who came to Ballou through Teach for America. The two sat at adjoining desks, with Ms. Strzelecki looking a bit like a doe in the headlights.
But Ms. Gloster, who had watched her teach a ninth-grade biology lesson the week before, offered compliments, along with suggestions about how Ms. Strzelecki might provide differentiated teaching for advanced and struggling students.
“You did a really good job, kiddo,” the evaluator ruled, grading her as effective, the equivalent of a B (the same rating she got on previous observations).
“What I liked about Mary was that I felt she was on my side,” Ms. Strzelecki said later. “Some teachers feel the master educators are out to get them.”
That is a common perception, said Mark Simon, an education analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, which receives teachers’ union financing. Ms. Rhee developed the system, he noted, during tough contract negotiations and did not consult with the teachers’ union in its design.
“That was a missed opportunity,” Mr. Simon said, “and it’s created a lot of resentment.”
source: NYTimes
Interesting article. After I blooped from FISKCON in 1981, I struggled to make ends meet. Making a long story short, because I have a fair hand at mathematics, I was able to get a couple of jobs teaching over the years at both junior high and senior high school levels. My most recent job was at a senior high in 2004.
My observations are as follows. Teachers, nearly to the man, work their tails off. Not only is teaching a demanding job, with endless paperwork to go through, meetings, lesson plans, grading, parent conferences, etc., but also it is a job with little reward and little peer association. Superficially it seems like an easy job as you get the summers off, but all the teachers I know put in 60-80 hours a week just to keep the classroom afloat. So it is intensively laborious.
But the big thing I noticed is that the teachers, in spite of their dedication and hard work, get blamed for anything and everything that goes wrong with the student. If the student misbehaves, the teacher is to blame. If the student doesn’t work or gets poor grades, the teacher is to blame. It is NEVER the student’s fault.
So, in short, teaching can be a hellish-and-a-half environment for the teacher.
My last job placed me in a room of 25+ students per period for 6 full periods (50 minutes). All of my classes were with the lowest level (Algebra 1b) sophomore High School students. The ethnicity was skewed, but that is neither here nor there for the purpose of this comment. The problem was, that the behavior of the students was outrageous, and unless one teaches in an IB (advanced, college bound) classroom, discipline is the PRIMARY concern.
If you send a kid to the principal, you are looked upon as not being able to handle the kids, and that gets noted in your evaluation. In short, you are expected to keep a rein on these kids, many of which are bigger than you, without any support. If you call home, the parents 95% of the time blame you for the child’s failings. If you catch a child cheating and take the paper away, the parent is outraged and claims that their child DOES NOT CHEAT. It is discouraging, to say the least.
In 1980-1981 I was an asrama teacher for L.A. gurukula. My kids were great. Well behaved and a lot of fun. When I was in high school as a student, we all wore suit jackets and ties, and there was little behavior issues (though I went to a college bound high school). However, stepping into the modern, karmi world from FISKCON was really a shock for me.
All teachers seem to agree that behavior is the prime issue and there is little to no support from parents and administrators for teachers “in the trenches.” Unless you are a performer or an “Apples” teacher (type A personality… high voltage, fast talker, everywhere at every second type of personality), you cannot keep on top of the environment. So, in the schools, they try to get everyone to have that “Apples” mentality. Former teachers will know exactly what I am talking about. However, even these “Apples” teachers have problems because, after all, no matter how skilled you are at juggling, it is hard to keep 7 balls in the air for long, and that is what I was seeing. As for me, I am metaphorically a good 3 ball juggler, so I could sort of keep my job and the kids in line, sort of, but never had it smooth, especially with the kids that are not succeeding and trying to prove themselves in other ways, like being rowdy, tough, showing off, etc. This is what you have to deal with in the lower levels, like Algebra 1b.
In our culture, from G. W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” concoction right through what we are reading in this article, the blame for child failure is placed squarely on the shoulders of the teacher. Not on the parents, not on the school structure, and, most of all, not on the student. The teacher is the scapegoat and his (or her) job is held over his head as a threat.
And one last word about the school structure. Now, everybody is expected to go to college. There is no division among learners unless you are special ed. However, as we have learned about varnasrama, some people are more intelligent than others. However, this is overlooked in the schools, as if distinctions do not exist. And teachers are expected to raise everybody “up” to the college level, and this means, of necessity, dumbing down the curriculum so everyone succeeds. Again, failures are the teacher’s fault, so this is the natural solution.
Presently, I work in a university, and what we are finding is that the students coming from the high schools are not prepared for the rigors of the classroom. They misbehave and have no study skills. Again, at this level, professors are at the mercy of the evaluations that students fill out about them at the end of the semester. Professors are expected to pass everybody, so, when dealing with a weak body of learners, the obvious tactic is either dumbing down the curriculum or giving away C’s to those that deserve to fail. After all, failure is negative and we are in a culture that celebrates the positive…
In summary, teachers are getting a bad rap. They are some of the hardest workers on the planet and those that criticize them from afar need to spend one (1) day in front of the classroom. Then opinion will change.
Of course, Srila Prabhupada said that karmi, material education is the “slaughterhouse of the mind”, and within this slaughterhouse, not only are hard working, idealistic teachers being slaughtered, but also good students are being slaughtered, not only by curriculum and viewpoints, but by the poor fabric of students that are forced into classes they are not suited for, ruining the environment much further for everyone. Some classes are not as much of a slaughterhouse as other classes, of course (like French or mathematics does not push sinful atheistic ideas into people heads, like social studies, literature, philosophy, and some of the sciences); but in every case, the aspect of victimizing the teacher when there is a problem is universal.
Obama needs to recognize this, but what chance is there as the voters, parents, will never take the blame for the poor school environment.