Politics, Platitudes, and Teacher Pay

Over the weekend, my wife Sam gave me a heads up on a tweet from Democratic nominee Kamala Harris that had caught her attention. Ever since I’ve been thinking about her tweet, about what it means for education during this election cycle, and about what education means to the broader voting public (I see you, you non-voters; I see you). 

A brief caveat: I don't pay much attention to campaigning at this point. I think a long, drawn out primary and election cycle only lends more power to the influence of money. The results end up being more about who can outspend, rather than who can position themselves as the better candidate. However, I think it's important to talk about the difference between what are easy platitudes and what are the kinds of education reform discussions that really need to be happening.

Teachers and their plight have been getting more and more attention both from the media and from candidates. Part of this is due to the state and city wide strikes that have won concessions from their respective governing bodies. It has led to an increase in the visibility of the issues surrounding teacher pay, namely how little it is. We saw it grace the cover of TIME magazine. It was also a key campaign point of Florida's Democratic nominee for governor, Andrew Gillum. While teacher pay is rising in people's minds, it's definitely not the only issue that needs to be addressed in education.

It would be great to get a raise. As someone who is in exactly the situation Harris is talking about, her proposal really resonates with me. I’d love to be able to leave my third and possibly even my second job behind. That would give me more time to focus on my wife, my children, family and friends even. Also important, it allows me to focus more on my practice as a teacher, to be better prepared, and to do more learning in my field about how to best approach and connect with students.

The reality is stark, because even as Harris acknowledges in an earlier tweet from March, and something I've discussed with people at length, is that the teacher pay penalty is real. So even Harris's proposed $13,000 increase would only bring us back to where we should be based on our education, training, and responsibilities. Also yes, we need to increase access and funding for early-learning in PK through 2nd, as these are fundamental times for learning and most student learning gaps can be traced back to issues at that age. And no doubt, having a public school teacher at the head of the Dept of Ed, as Warren has proposed, would be fantastic and might help reorient their priorities to a certain degree. But even these relatively simple changes face a long road to approval and implementation.

One of the more significant talking points I've heard is Warrens commitment to supporting teachers unions and the right to join unions. In theory, this sounds great. Except this runs into a huge problem in the same place all other educational reform does: at the state level. Right now in Florida I'm more than welcome to join a "union" or an Association as they’re more likely to be. I'm currently a card carrying member of the Pinellas County Teachers Association, which also includes me in the National Education Association (described as a "terrorist organization" by Bush's Education Secretary Rod Paige). But that means very little in the bigger picture. They negotiate with the district on our behalf around salary and benefits, although that seems to be about the extent of it. And that's because Florida, like so many other currently or previously conservatively governed states, is a "Right To Work" state. This is just a clever way of saying anti-union. We have no right to collective organized action, which means we have no power. Which is why we keep seeing our legislators doing things like allocating money for charter schools, virtual schools, and guns in the classroom instead of things that can actually help. And also, remember those strikes that teachers "won" in West Virginia and Oklahoma? The conservatively controlled legislatures in both states have now passed bills barring and punishing teachers from going on strike again.

At the end of the day, most of what is being proposed by current candidates is a) pretty much the same and b) unlikely to have any type of real impact on education in America. Increasing teacher pay will help with teacher morale, retention, and preparedness. But it doesn’t do anything to offset the external burdens we bear. Our classrooms are overpopulated as class size laws are ignored by officials at all levels. We teach in old, deteriorating, and poorly designed schools that are so overly swollen with students that most have portables. We are hamstrung from innovating curriculum and cultivating culture in the classroom by the tyranny of mandated curriculums and teacher evaluations. And, we are painfully over-extended trying to meet a wide range of community, district, state, and federal initiatives. 

If politicians of any stripe want to show they’re serious about helping teachers and students, and that they’re serious about fixing public education in America then there are a few things that need to start coming up in their stump speeches, town halls, and televised debates. We need more teachers, not just to get us out of our current teacher deficit, but to help improve the teacher-to-student ratio. We need new schools and more schools. Schools with enough classrooms for every child, and enough teachers for every classroom. We need freedom, the freedom to do what is best for our students under our care in our classrooms. And finally, we need an understanding that the most powerful and most important part of learning is what happens in the classroom, and that all education policy and reform should be done in support of that.

But until that happens, education and the education reform movement won’t really change much in this country. And guess what, those changes are going to cost a lot more than the $315 billion that Harris’ pay raise proposal will.

Book Discussion: Why They Can't Write by John Warner (2018)

A brief note: This is not a book review. I’m not here to tell you if a book was good or not, or how many stars or points or Beards it got. Assume that any book that makes it to this website was good enough to hold my attention and make me want to talk about in depth. Hence, this is a book discussion. Now, discussions also require input, so feel free to add your thoughts in the comments or over on Instagram and Twitter. But as always, be nice and cite your sources.

Let's start this discussion by getting one thing out of the way: if you come to this book expecting a myriad of ready-made solutions to slap into a curriculum or lesson plan, then you should seek that elsewhere. However, whether you're looking for these things or not you should still absolutely read this book. The real draw lies buried in the subtitle: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.

John Warner's book initially presents itself as the memoir of a grizzled and battered college writing teacher looking back on why his students are so disappointing when they arrive in his first year college writing class. But, it quickly turns away from that. Warner rapidly moves onto the very real concerns he has to present. He starts with the widely renowned and loathed five-paragraph essay, moving neatly and sharply through the concept and breaching into the realm of his "other necessities" when he declares:

"The standardization [of the the five paragraph essay] makes them easier to assign and grade for teachers who are burdened with too many students." (p.29)

From here forward, Warner launches a full assault on all of the underlying causes that are attacking and eroding our public education system. All of which in turn lead to students being poor writers. His text has a tendency to slide back and forth between tightly discussing specific issues and wandering in and out of the myriad social, economic, political, racial, and historical issues that have plagued and continue to plague students, teachers, and schools. But amongst these, there were three very specific ideas that stood out to me. These revolved around data, expectations for students, and treatment of teachers.

One of the first topics that Why They Can't Write gets into is data. Warner uses this excellent metaphor about how, in a hospital, data is constantly being gathered on a patient. However, the doctors and nurses aren't responding to every blip in that data as they know that small changes in either direction are natural and usually correct themselves (2018). This is contrasted with our schools, where we use data as a misnomer of measuring learning in every subject and every task in order to monitor both students and teachers. In many ways the collection of data in schools rivals that of the data collection being performed by big corporations like Amazon, Facebook, as well as your cell phone and internet providers. But in schools, the real-time application, manipulation, and often misuse of that data is far more apparent.

Students are constantly being earmarked for accommodations, different learning conditions, and additional testing every time there is even the slightest change (especially if it's downwards) in student “learning.” The danger here lies in what are the unexamined consequences when these data-initiated, external interventions "become an expectation [students] bring into the learning experience" (Warner, 2018, p. 44). The caveat being that while I completely understand that many students do need accommodations in certain topics and environments, we have also seen the rise in abuse of testing accommodations.

The collection of data and its uses and misuses is also leading us down a path where student control, especially control of student attention, is being valued above all. In a deviation into the ills of the educational technology market, Warner specifically comments on a number of products designed to garner, monitor, and manage student attention. This is of course all done under the errant belief that attention = learning. This dangerous belief has grown within the edtech market because it has grown among the educational reform movement as well, specifically at charter schools and so called No Excuses Schools. I won't get into the myriad of issues that center around schools like these and their zero-tolerance policies, but I will focus in on their role in creating what sociologist Joanne Golann calls the worker-learner. She describes them as students "who monitor themselves, hold back their opinions, and defer to authority" (Warner, 2018, p. 55). Some of you may be sitting there saying, that sounds like the ideal student! but research shows us that learning, real, true learning "requires time, space, and freedom" — all things that are stifled by zero-tolerance policies as well as "relentlessly tracking students in real time" (Warner, 2018, p. 56).

Warner goes on to extol on data and edtech pointing to the idea that the point of most of this is to drive an increase in "efficiency" in the class, but as he states it is "difficult to reconcile the value of efficiency with learning" (2018, p. 96). He goes on to question the value in efficiency, whether it is valuable "in our relationships" or "with our families" or even if our "most profound love [is] efficient" (p. 96). He pushes back on the idea of efficiency, as does with many others, by going to Dewey's belief that "education...is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." Unfortunately, Dewey's lament becomes more and more the reality with each passing day. We see education, both public, private, K12, and higher-ed being denigrated into a simplistic form of job training and career preparation. Education in this country is being transformed into a "vision of American values that substitutes gainful employment for freedom" (Warner, 2018, p. 137).

American educational values used to, at least in theory, be more about promoting learning. We wanted teachers to be instilling students with curiosity and critical thinking. These types of values and outcomes requires a specific type of of freedom and flexibility in the classroom. However, those making policy and in control of budgets have been adopting a more control-oriented approach to education. This approach is driven by increased means of collecting and monitoring data which exists in a feedback loop with educational technology. The more technology we use, the more data we collect. This allows us to create a more efficient and targeted technology, which allows us to collect more specific and tailored data. All of this is leveraged in an attempt to make schools and classrooms more efficient by “helping” teachers be more effective and efficient. The end result being that if a teacher is more efficient, they can have more students in the classroom. We already see this manifesting in the growth and expansion of online schools run by for profit companies financed by public funds. One of the leading states is Florida, which is no surprise since former governor Jeb Bush has been one of the strongest proponents of virtual schools since 2010, which was compounded by the state’s budget crisis in 2011 that led to a slashing of budgets for public education and a reallocation of the remaining funds to grow the sector (Rooks, 2017). These online schools and virtual classrooms can take on significantly more students per teacher and often escape the same levels of certification and oversight that public schools and public school teachers are subjected to.

Speaking of teachers, Warner spends a lot of time on them in Why They Can't Write. Early on, he appears to be laying the blame on them for why students in high school are so woefully unprepared for writing at the college level. Then he shifts that blame by acknowledging that while public school teachers may not be getting the job done, it's because of the incredibly long list of reasons that are interfering with and or outright preventing them from being effective and "efficient" in the classroom.

Many will acknowledge or at least pay lip service to the idea that teachers are overwhelmed and overburdened. But, it's my belief that many think well hey, I’m busy too, I have a lot going too, I'm stressed too and then discount it and move on. Warner actively goes into the hurdles faced by teachers today. He points out that research shows that U.S. teachers "spend 38% more time in the classroom" (2018, p. 121) compared with those in other developed nations and that educators are "least likely to report feeling their opinions seem to count" (p. 121). He sums it up by pointing out that while teaching is "honorable work" it is being performed at a "pace that is unsustainable and not conducive to effective teaching" (p. 120). This unsustainable pace means that teachers have "no time for professional development" or even "enough time for adequate rest" (p. 120). When you roll this in with the well documented teacher pay penalty , hopefully it beings to become a little clearer as to why there is a looming (just kidding it's already here) crisis in the hiring and retention of quality teachers.

This all has to be compounded with the fact that teachers are constantly juggling new initiatives. Warner has a whole section on fads in education, essentially how in the constant quest to “fix” education we are constantly seeking some now quick, singular solution. In his writing, he distills each of these into a "hype cycle" and how it plays out over 9 stages. Stage 6 really stood out to me:

"The burden of implementing this new curriculum falls entirely on teachers via administrative diktat. Nothing is removed from teacher’s responsibilities to make way for this additional requirement, although many things naturally fall by the wayside. Teachers are to be held accountable for how their students perform on these new metrics while being given very little, if any assistance in implementing these new programs." (p. 75)

At the end of the list of stages, it highlights how the failure of each successive initiative is always chalked up to "poor implementation" which I read simply as code for “'the teachers fault.”

Why They Can't Write isn't all about problems with no solutions. In fact, it actually offers up a number of answers to these issues. Unfortunately, they're the unpopular ones that require spending money directly on schools and teachers. The one that stood out to me the most, as it's a problem and solution near and dear to my heart, is class size. I'll expound more on this in later posts, but in the book, Warner cites specifically a list from the Conference of College Composition and Communication on optimal conditions for college writing classes. The list contains 12 principles, that while specifically written for post-secondary writing, could easily be adopted for all classrooms. Principle 11 stated that "instructors [should have] reasonable and equitable working conditions" which they went on to add, also includes that "teaching loads should be no more than 20 students per class" and that no teacher should have "more than 60...students a term." (2018, p. 114).

I want you to pause here and imagine that. Imagine what your school experience would have been like if all of your classes had fewer than twenty students, and if your teachers had been freed up to enable your learning by not being encumbered under 150 other students to teach. Imagine what school would be like for your children if they could receive that kind of clear eyed, focused attention and feedback.

But this would also require acknowledging that teaching and learning are not things that can be rushed or forced. It would also require acknowledging that if we really want to help teachers we "should first recognize that teaching is a profession with its own practice," and that that practice, like any other, law, medicine, etc., "requires what any professional needs: time, resources, and motivation." (p. 229). This acts as the heart of Warner’s argument: that teachers can't effectively serve students because they're not allowed to serve themselves. But he also connects it back to students, noting that this failure to support teachers "trickles down to students" (p. 122).

If we want students to be better, and to do better, we have to give teachers the means to be better, and to do better.

Algretto, S.& Mishel, L. (2018) The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high. Economic policy Institute.

Retrieved July 3, 2019, from https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-gap-2018/

Florida department of education. (2019). Identification of critical teacher shortage areas. Retrieved July 3,

2019, from http://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/7584/urlt/CTSA1920.pdf

Lombardo, C. (2019) Why the college admissions scandal hurts students with disabilities. National Public

Radio. Retrieved July 3, 2019, from https://www.npr.org/2019/03/14/703006521/why-the-college-admissions-scandal-hurts-students-with-disabilities

Rooks, N. (2017). Cutting school: Privatization, segregation, and the end of public education. New York, NY: The New Press.

Warner, J. (2018). Why the can’t write: Killing the five-paragraph essay and other neccessities. Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University Press.