At some point, we’ve probably all had at least one
slacker teacher that has basically been useless throughout our years of
schooling. However, I’d be willing to bet, what with us all being Academy kids,
that the occurrences of these sorts of teachers have been minimal. We’ve been
fortunate enough to have high-achieving teachers all the way from Kindergarten
to the present. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t be where we are today, chasing academic
success and exceptional college admittance. For me, personally, I’m proud to
say that almost every single one of my teachers has been passionate about his
or her job and I have gained an abundance of knowledge from their remarkable teaching
skills. However, the majority of the rest of the country is not as fortunate as
the top tier of the academically succeeding students. Students may start off in
elementary school being fairly successful, but as they progress through the
years, they tend to stop progressing academically. They will inevitably end up
in high schools known as “dropout factories” if these kids live in districts
with academic sinkholes, otherwise known as high school. Now we all know that
there will always be the kids that have no motivation to succeed in school or
in life in general, but the blame of failing students shouldn’t always be
tossed on the students. In many cases across the nation, the blame falls on the
teachers that are too incompetent to teach. The lack of passion in these
teachers creates a horrendous learning environment for the students, further
perpetuating the dearth of actual educating happening in these schools.
Tenure
is the main issue. It was something that was created for professors at
universities to ensure that they wouldn’t be fired for political reasons, not
public school teachers. That was something brought in by the national teachers
unions, like the National Educators Association, which are considered to be
menaces and impediments for those trying to reform the system. The theory of
tenure in context of a university makes sense, not in grade schools. For
professors, to gain tenure means long years of hard work and dedication. It is
something that most don’t even achieve. In contrast, tenure for grade school teachers
is child’s play. “If you continue to breathe for two years, you get it,” says
Geoffrey Canada, a prominent educator in New York. Tenure is a roadblock on the
highway of firing incompetent teachers to so many school districts. It’s a long,
costly, and mostly ineffective process to try and get rid of any teacher that
has tenure. In comparison, 1 in every 57 doctors loses their medical license. 1
in 97 attorneys lose their law license. But only one teacher in every 2500
loses their teaching credentials. This is a percentage that needs to rise by leaps
and bounds. Teaching is a profession that is arguably just as important as the aforementioned
careers. Without it, nobody would even be competent enough to write their own
name, much less perform open heart surgery.
In
an attempt to go around the infuriating t-word (that is to say “tenure”), some school
districts have found more “creative” ways to deal with these teachers. Dubbed “the
dance of the lemons” by some, the practice of exchanging lemons, otherwise
known as chronically bad teachers, amongst schools every few years is a common method
of trying to resolve the issue of slacking teachers. It involves the principals
of schools passing on the bottom tier of teachers to another school, in exchange
for another school’s lemons. It’s hardly a solution, but it just goes to show
how desperate these schools are for better teachers, taking the risk of
throwing out their rotten lemons, and hoping that their new batch will be even
a little bit better. New York has a different system, though. When teachers are
found to be incompetent, with faults that range from lateness to sexual abuse,
they are sent to the reassignment center while they wait for their disciplinary
hearings. They get paid their full salaries and accumulate benefits for sitting
in a room for seven hours a day doing nothing. This, to me, is the pinnacle of
problems with tenure, the rock bottom of the abyss of incompetence. Teachers
that have been proven to be sexual abusers can’t even be fired because of some
lousy tenure that they didn’t even have to earn, except for being alive for two
years. It can’t get much worse than this.
This
is where Michelle Rhee finally steps in--the Superman that everyone had been
waiting for to rescue the failing schools in Washington DC,--that would, in turn,
set an example for the rest of the nation. She took the reigns as the new
Superintendent of the Washington DC public schools in 2007, planning radical
reform. She was young, and had never been a principal or a superintendent
before. She faced strong opposition to her radical ideas of reform, mostly from
teachers’ unions. She immediately took action, with mass firings of principals
and teachers that were found to be incompetent, as well as the shutting down of
a number of failing schools. This was not welcomed warmly amongst the teachers
and faculty of the DC schools. There were “union sponsored demonstrations
taking over city streets” and disgruntled parents always complaining at Rhee’s
place of work, Central Office. Her plans were rash and radical, but they were
the push that DC needed to get them out of the bottom ranked school districts
in America.
Rhee’s
plan was one to which I believe we should adhere, despite that fact that it was
never adopted. Her idea was to give teachers an option: they can either cling
to their precious tenure, but will not receive any kind of pay raise, or, they
can choose to give up tenure for a handsome boost in their salaries. It’s a
great compromise, one that I’m sure our own Henry Clay would be proud of. In
this way, the teachers that are confident in their abilities to retain their
jobs without tenure would be rewarded for their teaching abilities. Something
that couldn’t have happened before, due to the fact that teachers could not be
paid more based on performance.
The
education problem in America is one that can be salvaged. We didn’t used to be
like this. America has not been perpetually abysmal in the education arena
compared to other countries that we could easily compete with. It wouldn’t take
much. All we would need to do is get rid of the teachers that are worthless and
taking up jobs that could be filled with people that actually have a passion
for teaching and connecting with their students. Students that actually want to learn. People shouldn’t need
tenure as a crutch to rely on to keep their jobs. Everyone else in the work
force has to undergo performance evaluations to maintain their jobs, so why shouldn’t
teachers? They are, after all, fulfilling one of the most important professions
there are: teaching each new generation to be successful and carry on our
country’s success. We are, so I’ve been told, the future.
To
close my argument, I’d like to quote one of my favorite authors, John Green, on
the topic of education. “I think that teenagers are infinitely intellectually
capable. As long as we grant them intelligence they will show us that
intelligence.”
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