My junior high school Spanish teacher and I are friends on Facebook. I found her after a bit of internet searching and met her for coffee one day when I had flown home to visit my parents. Some decades have passed since I did dialogs in her class in Tacoma, Washington, but I still remember snippets of those exchanges.

“¿A dónde vas Tomás, a clase?”
“No, voy a la oficina del director.”

Those junior high Spanish classes led to high school Spanish (as well as French and Latin) and months of travel in Mexico. I went on to take Spanish in college, mostly to pick up an easy “A” or two along the way, accidentally accumulating a minor’s worth of credits. Years later, I found I had all the credits I needed for a Spanish teaching endorsement in Illinois. That endorsement got me my first job. I finished my student teaching in high school mathematics, but could not find a local mathematics position, so I accepted a high school Spanish position instead. My Spanish helped me segue into bilingual education a few years later.

Eduhonesty: Your mission, readers, should you decide to accept it, is to try to find that nurse, teacher, social worker, or other adult who made a difference when you were a kid. That quest may fail. I was too late to thank the marvelous Bolivian guy who taught me high school Spanish.

But you might get lucky. And on a gray, February day, or any other day, teachers, nurses, social workers, paraprofessionals, security guards, and all those many people who dedicate their lives to helping kids can use a boost — a reminder of how much their work matters.

P.S. The former elementary school teacher pictured above was also a Facebook friend. The picture was taken at her 95th birthday party.

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.

Poverty Rate of Children Ages 5 to 17 by County

This is a slightly updated replay of a post written shortly before my retirement. I don’t want these thoughts on unions to get lost in time. Unions create a power base for workers who lack power — which nowadays seems to be almost everyone putting on a work uniform.

The push to discredit unions has been underway for decades, fueled by powerful business interests, by men and women who would rather not pay any minimum wage at all. But at some point, a great many working Americans also bought into stories of laziness, ineptitude and unfairness that were used to depict unions as losers for education and other industries.

Speaking of fake news…

_____________________________________________________________________

I’d like share what may be my favorite professional development quote of all time: “Anyone who feels you’re overwhelmed, you are in the right spot. That’s the nature of teaching.” The presenter from the Danielson group had natural rhetorical flair. She had her audience at that point, all eyes glued up front.

There’s a lot of overwhelmed going around.

My students’ parents often feel overwhelmed. They share this when I call about classroom problems, explaining the difficulty of parenting while working two jobs. How do people live on minimum wage? They work two jobs and take as many hours as they can get, mostly as many as employers will allow without being required to provide benefits. Two jobs of less than thirty hours each can still equal nearly sixty hours of back-breaking labor — and I have talked to parents who worked three jobs to survive.

As I listen to these exhausted moms and dads, I think: We are not the better for the gutting of America’s unions. U.S. students knew more in the past, especially if breadth of knowledge is taken into account. Despite the dumbing down of state tests that has occurred over the last few decades — I’m sure a major contributor to the attempts to develop a national test like PARCC — the data demonstrates a decline in American academic strength. That academic strength occurred in a time of strong unions. The unions have not been the problem with American education, despite anecdotal stories about rare teachers who were protected from job loss unfairly.

Eduhonesty: I know that test-score mania and social science numbers have become tools to use to break unions, despite a total dearth of evidence that unions were the cause of America’s test-score problems. America has simply become labor unfriendly in general. But those lower scores are used to justify charters and school reorganizations, reorganizations that seldom produce desired results. The charter movement along with those fired administrations in reorganized schools have been a fact for more than ten years now. Yet test scores are stagnant and even falling in some places.

An international exam (PISA) shows that American 15-year-olds are stagnant in reading and math even though the country has spent billions to close gaps with the rest of the world. This has been true since the year 2000. The achievement gap in reading is even widening.

I refer readers to https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/us-students-international-test-scores.html for more details.

I didn’t used to believe in unions. I do now. If the nature of teaching is to be overwhelmed, perhaps teachers need some protection. When I started in this profession, I had reliable planning periods. I don’t now. There’s a planning period on my schedule, but I’ve never been able to depend on that period. After most of a year of stress and complaints by teachers, an email went out saying that Friday meetings were to be eliminated so teachers could have one guaranteed planning period. But I am teaching two subjects. If I don’t meet on Friday, when does that second, required lesson plan get done? I sometimes subbed during my planning period until we finally hired building substitute teachers (I loved that day when I was supposed to meet with the Assistant Superintendent for the District, but he had to cancel because he was supposed to sub in my school. That probably got us our building subs.)

No job should be overwhelming by its nature, not without some attempt to fix the working conditions creating that state of emotional turmoil. Overwhelmed teachers cannot be good for students. Overwhelmed teachers are defecting from the profession in big numbers, too. The estimate that half leave the profession within the first five years may be accurate. (Then again, that number may be more social science hooey. Who really knows? I know I started in my district with a group of more than 10 other, new teachers, all of whom are gone.) Why do we allow these toxic working conditions?

Many Americans need to reconsider the idea of unions in my opinion. United, American workers once created a middle class. United, we created schools that the world envied. That middle class appears to be slipping away for many hard workers. Those schools have become objects of pity and even scorn by other countries. If we don’t stand together, what will happen to the workers and teachers in this country? Who will take care of us? Not those many employers who are calculatingly keeping millions of Americans below the threshold hours for benefits. Not those school districts who are broke and can save $30,000 by replacing experienced Maria with newly-graduated Juan. Throw in required governmental purges of educational staff, and the landscape’s looking increasingly bleak out in pockets of America.

It’s time to support our unions again. It’s past time to help those workers who are working two jobs just to make the rent and buy enough food for the family. In the past, one argument against unions consisted of the idea that corporations and school districts would take care of their employees, paternally looking out for members of their organizational family. Surely no one trusts in that idea today. Where are the benefits of yesteryear? If a single one of my students’ parents is receiving those benefits, I’ve never heard about it. I’ve heard my share of sad stories, though, like the story from one mom working in the “backroom” for two years, trying her hardest to get a job “on the floor.” On the floor, they get benefits, but for many workers, that floor might as well be the moon.

I’ve got two separate posts melded into one here. Teachers are not factory workers or burger servers. The problems of teachers may overlap with those of unskilled workers, though, even if that overlap diverges at points. Still, I plan to keep this post as it is, since I think my general point applies cleanly to both groups: We need to organize. We need not to be ashamed or intimidated by the thought of organizing.

To quote one of my favorite historical figures, Benjamin Franklin: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

P.S. If Costco can pay its employees a living wage, I’ll submit that Walmart probably can too. Paying that wage would increase Walmart’s prices, but Walmart workers could then funnel more money into the economy generally. The demand for decent working conditions with an eventual retirement plan should not be regarded as some form of gouging.

Click on the pics to appreciate the full ugliness.

The problem with evidence as defined by test scores is that data can always be manipulated. In honest hands, this manipulation does not usually produce misleading results — although not all data handlers know the meaning of the numbers they crunch and some may boldly assert “facts” unsupported by their numbers — but many stakeholders in education are under pressure to produce results. It’s a short step from optimistic interpretation to deceit. When the results show annual growth of 1.05 years from a benchmark test, that may be presented as “has shown dramatic improvement until our 2nd grade is exceeding expectations and producing over a year’s academic improvement now!” Ummm… That 0.05 growth above the 1.0? That 0.05 may not be statistically meaningful. There may be no growth or slightly less than one year’s growth.

Other problems with data:

Many teachers are forced to compile, record and keep data that is never ever used. Somebody’s great idea creates days of extra work throughout a school, but then no administrator ever finds time to sit down with the resulting forms and spreadsheets to figure out what the numbers reveal.

None of the spreadsheets from my last year before retirement affected instruction. We were kept on the common lesson plan whether our students could read and understand the questions or not. I proved and proved that my students could not read the Common Core tests I was obliged to give, explained the problem with giving 7th grade tests in English to bilingual students who were reading English at a third grade level and sometimes Spanish at an even lower level. But nothing changed and the tests kept being handed to me along with threats if I resisted those useless tests and quizzes.

I have shown a few of these tests. I’ll insert one more.

The cost of data gathering goes unremarked too often, especially now that most data lives out its life electronically. Those old-fashioned dollar losses from stacks of paper and ink at least highlighted wastage sometimes, as recycling bins and waste paper baskets filled up. The paper was visible. The hours spent at computers and in subsequent meetings and trainings are harder to track. The opportunity costs are impossible to track. For example, essay tests have mostly become a thing of the past. After complying with data requirements, many teachers don’t have time to grade such tests. The shift toward multiple choice has come about in part because those tests are good standardized test practice, but also because data requirements frequently don’t leave a whole evening or day to grade students’ essays properly — or even to grade piles of essays at all.

Eduhonesty: The opportunity costs from gathering data are kneecapping education. Time is stolen from lesson preparation all up and down the line, until buying lessons from Teachers Pay Teachers becomes some teachers’ only hope, while others use required lesson plans that they know are not as good as what they might be able to prepare themselves — if given back the time stolen by Spreadsheet #42.

I am by no means against gathering and analyzing educational data. Data is required so educators can determine how well instruction is working. But data demands have been exploding in the recent past, and I wrote this post to highlight one point: Data demands have opportunity costs. The time to prepare data is taken out of lesson preparation, grading, tutoring, materials preparation, and other student-centered activities.

And to what end? Our international test scores remain fairly stagnant. In some locations, scores have been declining over time despite this full court data press. I strongly suspect that excessive demands for data not only reflect this lack of progress — THEY CREATE A PORTION OF THE LOST LEARNING WE ARE BUSY DOCUMENTING.