Depends on who you ask
Greg Abbott is not taking this teacher shortage business lying down. He’s a man of action. Like any other man of action, he is commissioning a committee to tell him why there is a teacher shortage. He recently changed the task force when it shockingly held only two teachers.
The 30 person panel included all kinds of central office administrators whose median salary was $170,000. In fact, it was rumored that one of the two teachers actually had their office in the central administration of their district. However, our crackpot team here could not confirm or deny those rumors. If they indeed add enough teachers to make it equal representation then that’s a good start, but it’s still much ado about nothing.
It is fairly easy for classroom teachers to simply say that they need to be paid more. That seems to be the standard response and without consulting teachers it is likely to be the only real answer you will get. That’s a good response. We could all use more money, but you need to be able to dig deeper.
I’ve seen any number of teachers that have left the profession and have come pretty close myself. I think I speak for many of them when I say money really wasn’t a factor in my decision. Teaching is a difficult job. You are more or less on an island and it took me a long time to find my niche. I’ve found it as a support facilitator. There were a lot of bumps and false starts along the way.
So, I would begin with how we train teachers and how we support them. Classroom management is always the most important thing and it is the one thing we are the worst at teaching new teachers. Schools reward experienced teachers with the more sought after assignments. They give younger teachers the more difficult ones. It’s pretty much sink or swim from there.
The job is just too difficult and it is getting much harder. We are adding paperwork demands and making teachers jump through more hoops. As soon as teachers feel like they have their sea legs under them, we change the landscape and force them to start from scratch. Teachers get less support from home and less support from their school’s administration and central office when dealing with difficult student populations.
Asking a central office administrator why teachers are leaving is somewhat comical. Those are people that escaped the classroom. I have no problem with most of them, but it is fairly straightforward. The further removed you are from the classroom the harder it is for them to remember what it was like.
Add to that the recent politicization of teachers and you get a perfect storm. We are expected to make white children feel better about being white. We are expected to avoid anything that might be controversial. We are expected to inform on students that might be transitioning. There are even whispers of doing all of this with cameras installed in our rooms so that administrators and parents can watch in real time.
Abbott doesn’t want to hear about any of this. So, what is he going to hear? He will hear that teachers want more money. He will be able to posture about how greedy we have become. I’ve seen too many teachers leave teaching and none of them left because of the money. They’ve left for all of those other reasons. Those are the reasons he isn’t likely to hear anything about.
You’re absolutely right — asking people who don’t do the job what is truly needed is totally the wrong thing to do. In fact, it reminds me of this story from an organization I used to belong to….
It was a major computer equipment leasing/purchasing finance company and we were looking to improve customer satisfaction and grow the business. Marketing/Sales was 100% double damn sure the issue was priced. Making everything cheaper would solve all our problems for double-damn sure!
But then we held some focus groups and started with small to medium businesses. Know what? Price didn’t even make the top five things they wanted! Instead they asked for things like this:
– Contracts which were short and easy to read so they didn’t have to spend so much money up front having an atty read and interpret everything for them.
– Contracts which made it easy to upgrade their equipment or add things to it.
Our CEO told the legal dept to shrink our contracts down to only a few pages. Legal went nuts and talked about how we’d have problems in lawsuits, spend time in court, etc. The CEO said admitted that yes that might be true but if we could really grow the business that was a risk he’d be willing to take. He also had them create a “master lease agreement” which made it easy to add/subtract/change equipment with addendums rather than having to write a whole new contract each time.
These are only two examples, but they illustrate just how far off people can be — even when they “know” what the answer is. Talk to teachers directly and find out from them.
As an aside, being good at a profession (be it teaching, engineering or whatever) doesn’t mean you’ll be good at **managing** in that profession. Now I can’t speak about teaching, but in engineering the joke was that we promoted into mgmt the folks who were most expendable — who created the least value. It’s also true in religion as the Catholic church used to have a policy for handling “troubled” priests. It had a fancy Latin name I can’t recall, but it translated as “promote to remove”.
1I guess it’s the same in most (all?) professions. I worked as a merchant mariner for twenty years, and every time a decision had to be made about repairs, a new vessel, etc. the clueless administrators in the office made the decisions and never came out to the ships or talk to a captain to find out what would work. They sold off the older reliable boats because “it would be too expensive to fix them” and cut corners to buy junk that didn’t work for the conditions, sat at the dock for months or years and then gotten rid of. The most reliable of the older ships has been tied up at a dock for nearly three years at a cost of $75,000 a month. They’ve been making this type of stupid moves for decades. They’ve also been fighting the union, lowering benefits, and have priced passage out of reach of most customers. (Don’t get me started…)
2I’ve always been impressed with Yellowstone Academy. It was started to serve the children of women in the Star of Hope shelters. They added a grade a year and now have college prep. They bought an old run down HISD school and added not only classes but also social services. A local restaurant owner donated their kitchen setup. The kids have small class sizes with a certified teacher and an aide. They wear donated uniforms. The kids are served breakfast, lunch and a hardy snack. The average family income is $9,600 per year. If donations can be used this effectively, why can’t our taxpayer dollars?
3I am glad the commission will have more teachers, but it seems to me that it would be good to find some former teachers who quit and have them on the commission to tell Abbott why they quit. I taught 4 years, decided there had to be an easier way to make a living, quit, and never looked back. No one ever asked me why I quit.
4Sandion, that’s a good idea. But let’s face it: no matter what composition the committee has, and no matter what it recommends, Abbott will claim it has backed up his “educational” goals, whatever those are. Beyond bullying LGBT kids, and changing “Civil War” to “War of Northern Aggression” in all the textbooks, that is. My guess is he’ll declare that defunding public schools and forking over all the money to charter schools is the conclusion he wants.
And you can bet that even if the committee ends up with mostly teachers, the report it produces will say what Abbott wants it to. The trick is to let everyone have their say and then assign the task of writing the report to a small group consisting of cronies and syncophants of the governor. Delay until the actual teachers are busy doing things (like teaching and working with students), leaving the administrators the job of “summarizing” and presenting the report.
When I finished my bachelor’s degree, I looked at teaching (in Texas) versus going back to running a locomotive crane in a steel mill (also in Texas). Being a crane operator won hands-down, and it was not the money. Already by then teachers were being tightly constrained by administrative garbage, and that was 20 years before Bush Junior asked “Is our children learning?”.
5Alan, sort of along the same lines, back in the early eighties I worked on drilling rigs. One guy had killed a couple guys previously as a driller with his maniacal obsession with speed. The joke was that management finally decided he was to dangerous to run the rig.
6So they promoted him to tool pusher, making the drillers answerable to him.
Greg only wants Re-Pubes to vote .
7AK Lynne @2, Been on the water since ~5y/o, seventy years [have two MMSIs assigned, one AIS].
You might like these links:
BoatNerd:
https://ais.boatnerd.com
https://boatnerd.com
Detroit River Live Cam from the Dossin Museum, Detroit, Michigan USA:
8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=994mtws8RNw