Who is at the Center of the Education Policy Conversation?
“For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions. It is a lesson which governments still show no sign of learning.”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
For about five years now, I've been ringing the crier bell about the growing shortage of teachers, but with little traction.
My calls routinely go unheeded, and more so, dismissed.
"There is no shortage of teachers, just a shortage of teachers willing to do the job for what we are paying."
"The talk about shortages is overblown. It's just in certain subjects and certain districts."
"But of course, there aren't enough teachers, the bar to entry is too high. We have to make it easier to be a teacher."
The last one reminds me of when I managed a live music/disco downtown in the 90s. It was a 500-seat venue where we did bands during the week and had a DJ spin on the weekend.
At that time cover charges were virtually non-existent. We wanted a different kind of crowd, for lack of a better word, a we wanted to keep the riff-raff out. So we started a $5 cover.
It wasn't a terribly high cover, but one not everyone was willing to pay. It gave entry a perceived value and set a tone for expectations. If you were willing to pay an entry price, you were unlikely to treat that entry cavalierly.
We were immensely popular, with lines around the block every weekend. After being open for a couple years, we created laminates that got free entry for the possessor and a friend.. Those laminates were treated like gold.
Other places tried to undercut us with no cover charge or cheap drinks. Those places were treated as cheap places, and our lines never shrunk.
School districts are currently emulating my nightclub competitors, and it is turning out about as well for them.
Districts for the most part have raised pay, but have done little to increase support. as a result attrition number have only increased.
Look at any survey on teacher attrition and the same old suspects show up - discipline, workload, and stress. It is almost like teachers are trying to tell us something, but we ain't listening.
Earlier in the Fall, Governor Bill Lee, in an effort to sweeten the pot for his voucher bill, announced that as part of his proposed legislation, teachers would all receive a $2K one-time annual bonus. Talk about tone-deaf. Look up the word in the dictionary and you'll see a picture of Lee with arms extended and "what" painted on his face.
I think souls are going for a little more than 2k
Clearly, he hadn't read my piece from 2022 - how much is a punch in the face worth.
Let me quote from my own work:
Let me illustrate it this way, you’re fresh out of college, filled with optimism, and ready to change the world. I tell you I’ll pay you $1000 a month but it requires getting punched in the face once a day. You weigh your options, figure you are pretty tough, and what’s once a day? You take the gig.
Six months go by, and I double the number of times I punch you in the face and don’t change your pay. Two years later, I add another punch in the face per day.
After about 5 years, you’re pretty tired of getting punched in the face. After all, your friends only get punched about once every couple of weeks and make more money. But you do feel like you are making a difference, and other than getting punched in the face three times a day, you like everything about the job.
You also figure nobody else is going to want to get punched in the face, and if you leave, who’ll do the job. You convince yourself that you can take it for the greater good. The greater good, there’s a word rapidly falling out of favor in this me-first age. But I digress.
After a while, it starts to dawn on me that you are not liking this getting-punched thing too much, and are beginning to consider other options. So, I raise the pay to 3000K a week and increase the starting salary to lure others in. I add a PR campaign extolling your virtues, including your toughness and sense of commitment, and to what an exalted position I hold you. But I don’t reduce the number of punches to the face,
In fact, about 6 months later, while telling you how I increased your pay, I added two more punches to the daily routine. Why is that a problem? I just told you how much I valued you by increasing your pay, you’re not ungrateful, are you? And isn’t this supposed to be about kids?
Eventually, you are going to grow weary of getting punched in the face. You are going to realize that maybe you can live off of less, and only get punched in the arm. Or under certain circumstances, make more and not get punched at all. Those coming out of college may decide that getting punched isn’t attractive for any salary, and they’ll choose other professions. Leaving me with fewer options to receive my blows to the face.
What’ll happen then?
This has been our modus operandi for the past decade, yet we are shocked that it hasn't reduced attrition numbers.
The bottom line, whether you believe it or not is that too many teachers are leaving the profession too soon, leaving too many kids without quality teachers. If it wasn't the case, districts like Memphis wouldn't be trying harebrained schemes like the one they unleashed this past week.
On Tuesday, the Memphis-Shelby County School District approved a six-month contract for virtual instruction valued at $4.6 million. That contract allows for Texas-based Proximity Learning to obtain 100 teachers for live online teaching for middle and high school students.
Wait a minute, I thought COVID taught us that virtual instruction doesn't work. According to evidence cited in ChalkbeatTN, it doesn't:
The board’s 2022-23 evaluation showed more than 7,000 students in Proximity Learning classes. Those students performed significantly worse on end-of-course assessments in English I and II (combined), Algebra I, geometry, and biology than their peers in traditional courses.
However, Proximity Learning students had higher rates of A, B, and C grades than those in traditional classrooms in those subjects.
An evaluation of Proximity Learning for the fall 2023 semester found that students expressed “less positive attitudes” about their virtual instructors than those with a teacher physically in class, with students giving lower scores to classroom engagement, expectations, and student-teacher relationships.
Board Member Natalie McKinny told Chalkbeat that hiring Proximity Learning is beneficial because of their ability to supply certified teachers.
“I think we have to do it,” she said of the online teachers. “But I would like us to be innovative about how we look at this long-term, because as I’ve said before, we’re not going to magically come up with 300 teachers in six months.”.
“Until we do some innovative things to recruit folks in, we’re going to have to have alternatives,” McKinney said. “We need access to certified teachers.”
Am I the only one who sees it?
You have access to certified teachers, you just have to stop letting them walk out the door and go to work for Proximity Learning. You don't have to find 300 teachers if you manage to retain 150. Then you just have to find 150. It's simple math, but it seems to be beyond the grasp of district officials.
All we ever talk about is recruitment, we never discuss retention.
In my eyes, the single most important job of a superintendent and a school board is putting high-quality teachers in front of all students. It's literally the secret sauce.
If you have quality teachers you don't need scripted instruction, SEL, or any of the other stuff, because that's what good teachers do.
It's like this trend in sports that elevates coaches over players. It's horseshit.
I don't care how great your plans are, if you don't get the horses you can't competitively run the race. Great players can make a coach look like a genius, the same holds true in education.
Something else I want you to consider.
In about a month we'll be back engaged in voucher legislation debate, proponents will be arguing that public schools do a better job educating kids and that vouchers serve to rob students of opportunities.
Are you going to look at the parents of the over 7000 students served by virtual teachers and tell them that you are supplying the best opportunities for their child?
Are you going to tell them that taking a voucher to a private school where their child would be taught by a real-life honest-to-good certified teacher would be a disservice to the child?
Remind me again who is at the center of this conversation.
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A long time ago, someone told me that everything in education is guided by a pendulum. We over-focus on math instruction while scores increase, ELA scores fall. So, we rush over to ELA and raise scores while math scores fall. Rinse, wash, and repeat.
It has been like this forever and it's continuous.
If you acknowledge this, then it should come as no surprise that large school districts in Tennessee are underperforming in math. MSCS eighth-grade proficiency was reportedly 21% less than expected. Knox County was 20% less than expected. Davidson County came in at 15% less than expected.
According to research provided by The 74, Tennessee’s largest school districts are underperforming expectations. Of the state’s 12 largest school districts, only Williamson, Sumner, Wilson, and Sevier County School System had higher eighth-grade math proficiencies than expected based on poverty.
How much of this is related to poverty rates is debatable. Knoxville's poverty rate at 11% is only 8 percentage points higher than Williamson County yet their level of achievement was the exact opposite of WCS, whose math proficiency was 21% greater than expected.
You can expect legislation, similar to previous legislation on reading, to be introduced during this year's Tennessee General Assembly.
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Another thing to look for education-wise this coming session is a bill that mandates increased recess time for elementary school kids. I'm 100% behind this one, but would advocate for it to include middle school and perhaps high school.
I'm not sure superintendents will like this one. They are always arguing that there is already not enough time in the day and they can not afford to sacrifice time for frivolity. I'd argue that they can't afford not to.
You ever own a border collie? Or, know someone who does?
Great dogs. Some of the smartest and best animals out there. As long as you run them. They need exercise and if they don't get it they can be destructive. Kids are no different.
I've never understood how we continually fail to see the connection between discipline problems and a lack of recess. Kids are not designed to be on task for 8 hours. As a result they act up, and how do we respond?
By taking away recess, Then we are shocked when their behavior becomes even more disruptive.
Hopefully, this bill will address those issues.
Also hearing rumbles of a bill that would allow a high school student to transfer one time and not have to sit out. TSSAA is reportedly not raising any objections. I'm all for this one as well.
Too often gifted athletes are trapped in a school or not allowed to reach their full potential due to circumstances beyond their control.
Again, who's at the center of these conversations?
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Has anybody seen MNPS Superintendent Dr. Battle's Chief of Staff Hank Clay lately? Asking for a friend.
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Last week my friend Bill Freeman passed away. I wish I could summon the words to adequately describe what a great and generous man he was, but those words don't exist.
All I can say is that he was a kind, decent man, that always embraced people no matter what their status in life.
I can literally remember conversations in a public setting, where I walked away wondering why he'd engaged me as deeply in conversation as he did. There was certainly no benefit in it for him. Yet he did it time and time again.
You can look at his beloved children for evidence of who he was. His eldest son, Bob, currently serves in the Tennessee House of Representatives. He continually strives to be a voice of reason and modicum, even as others race to fill the void with noise. For that, he is chronically underappreciated, but Bob lie his father, is driven by something deeper than recognition and personal gains.
There are people who prove their greatness in private, and there are those who do it on the public stage. rarely do you find a person who is consistent in both personas? Bill Freeman was one of those men.
Over the last several years, as I've grown older, I've given a lot of thought to legacies and how much control we have over them. I tend to agree with Mike Tyson who was recently asked about whether fighting Jake Paul would harm his legacy.
"I don’t believe in the word ‘legacy.’ I just think that’s another word for ego. Legacy doesn’t mean nothing. That’s just some word everybody grabbed on to," Tyson says in a video Guerra posted Nov. 14.
“It means absolutely nothing to me. I’m just passing through. I’m gonna die and it’s gonna be over," continued Tyson, glancing at Guerrra. "Who cares about legacy after that?”
“It means absolutely nothing to me. I’m just passing through. I’m gonna die and it’s gonna be over," continued Tyson, glancing at Guerrra. "Who cares about legacy after that?”
I may be speaking out of turn, but I think Bill Freeman would understand that sentiment. In my experience, he never did the things he did to make you think he was a great guy, he did it because he thought it was the right thing.
He never looked to guard a legacy or protect a reputation, he always acted in a manner that would signal a belief that his actions were significant without any consideration. Just do the right thing, and he unflinchingly did.
In the end it's not a legacy that's left, but rather quality memories. Bill Freemena left behind a slew of those.
I always say a lot of men aspire to be "the guy", or "the man". Bill never had to aspire, he was the man.
Going to miss our random conversations and shared moments.
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