Politicians talk about protecting America from lazy teachers. In my years in education, I have known almost no lazy teachers. For one thing, kids tend to push those teachers out. When a teacher does not care about students’ progress, students detect that lack of interest and start heaping on the abuse. They usually make those teachers completely miserable.
Lazy teachers form a miniscule percentage of the men and women who teach. In fact, the words “lazy teacher” are an oxymoron in my view, a perspective formed by many 70-plus hour weeks in education, by the week-ends I grade grade graded before preparing more lessons to grade later. Parent calls and emails take time. Administrative demands take time — general staff meetings, test and other data demands that often require whole spreadsheets or PowerPoints, peer collaboration meetings, and the many random requests for information that pop up in morning emails. And all of those demands supersede mandatory educational and professional development. How many Saturday and evening classes have I taken? I can’t remember. I loved my linguistics class at National Louis University, scheduled on Saturdays across from Chicago’s Art Institute. Bilingual teachers were expected to take linguistics or some forgotten alternative, and that class left me with an afternoon free to explore art. But many classes were evening exercises in missing dinner with my family. Tutoring students before and after school takes time, as does hammering out that common lesson plan that matches the district’s curricular requirements. Life’s a little easier for elementary teachers than secondary math teachers, I admit, but all those elephants and other critters don’t mysteriously appear out of nowhere, and they aren’t put on the walls of classrooms by friendly elves and fairies.
I bring up the issue of so-called lazy teachers because they are often presented as a rationale for trying to eliminate unions. In a broader sense, they have become whipping boys and girls for people who don’t want to acknowledge a truth: The differences that make up the achievement gap — better called the opportunity gap — cannot be fixed by better teaching, at least not better teaching by itself. For proof, we might look at No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and the Common Core. Nearly two decades after the implementation of these programs that punished schools and teachers for not delivering better test results, test results have hardly risen in many areas. Those results sometimes have even fallen despite frantic administrative efforts in lower-scoring districts. I attribute that lack of improvement to the fact that many, many people were already teaching as hard as they could.
The idea that our achievement gap results from differences in teacher quality is a misconception at best, and an outright lie at worst. I understand why this lie continues to be propagated. If teachers are the problem, then fixing teachers should fix the problem. Many stakeholders crave a simple, quick fix.
We will not find that simple fix.
From a 2012 article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/survey-teachers-work-53-hours-per-week-on-average/2012/03/16/gIQAqGxYGS_blog.html:
A new report from Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, called Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on the Teaching Profession, finally quantifies just how hard teachers work: 10 hours and 40 minutes a day on average. That’s a 53-hour work week!
Work hours have only been going up in my experience since that Post article. The article goes on to note that teachers who advise extracurricular clubs, such as the Spanish Club I once sponsored, or who coach sports put in 11 hours and 20 minutes in an average day. For that matter, I can’t count the minutes I spent watching soccer and basketball games I never coached, simply because good teachers often attend student sporting events. Nothing helps cement a student-teacher relationship more than being able to talk intelligently about yesterday’s winning basket or goal.
These are the teachers I know. More and more often, they are giving up summer hours for continuing education, summer school, and other professional development or committee work. Not long ago, I spent the evening with a charter school professional who sometimes spends 100 hours on her job in the course of a week. But I know public school teachers who are spending their evenings grading 130 math homework papers, and week-ends filling out multipage lesson plans as they chart the next week of 130 math homework papers per night.
Eduhonesty: We seem to have been looking for a quick fix for decades. That fix will not be new, different teachers, just as that fix has not been changed standards or punishments for poor test scores. That fix will not be the dismantling of unions. Unions have protected a small percentage of teachers who should have been replaced. I cannot disagree with that position. But mostly unions have supplied protection to teachers who are being held responsible for results that frequently have everything to do with homelessness, hunger, depression, anxiety, and gunfire in the night, rather than teaching techniques.
The only true fix I can see involves giving more educational time and resources to kids who have fallen behind. Rather than pointing fingers at teachers, we should be scrutinizing the 180-day school year. Some kids are doing great with that short year. Others have fallen behind. Those victims of the achievement gap should not be tossed out the door on May 31st if they have not mastered their year’s material. At the very least, our academically-struggling students should attend mandatory summer school until they have a chance to catch up to the students who have gone on ahead of them.
Blaming teachers takes our focus away from the real problem — the lack of resources available to help catch up those students who have fallen behind. I still remember one year of summer school with no busses.
“If parents want their children to get ahead, they will find a way to get them to school,” an administrator told me when I asked how this bus-less plan was supposed to work.
I can’t remember what I answered. I’m sure what I thought was a version of, “Damn, woman, those parents work, and most of their kids don’t want to go to summer school in the first place.”
Those missing busses were critical, but busses cost money no one could find in that district’s annual mostly-in-the-red budget. In the absence of air-conditioning in the same district, though, I did not intend to teach summer school that year anyway, I figured younger, healthier, stronger souls could take on those eighty to ninety degree small classes.
I took the summer “off” and took education classes in air-conditioned university classrooms instead.