I have just completed my fourth year of teaching. I have been at three different schools. If I want to move on to my fifth year of teaching I am looking at starting over at another school. I am dedicated, passionate about learning, hard-working, and willing to jump through all the educational hoops (latest education fads), most of which are only selectively successful. I'm not sure what it takes to survive in this crazy field. I have great relationships with parents, students test scores improve under me, and students tend to like my classes, albeit, boring reading classes. When I ask and do what is expected, that never seems to be good enough. I have a Master's Degree in Education, while very general, I have attended literally hundredss of seminars and trainings in literacy to advance this aspect of education. However, when you look at the national statistics on literacy advancement, even though schools have made this a huge priority, the scores overall have flatlined since this big push for literacy was started.
I would argue that Education is broken at two levels, the administrative level, because we have people running the local schools who don't understand students, motivation, or how to manage and empower teachers, and it is broken at the family level, an area that good teachers try and make an impact into, but most don't even come close to helping families make better educational choices. Since the latter one is much more complex and hard to address, I will focus my thoughts on administrators. Sadly, I have yet to meet one who seems to understand people and know how to manage them successfully. Moreover, I have yet to meet one who operates with much integrity or ethics. Most administrators seem scared, trying to desparately juggle meetings, staff and student issues, as if they would not hold on to their jobs, be respected by their collegues, or rise up in the ranks if they didn't committ to being the Superintendant's "yes" man, trying desparately to get their school to tow the latest educational fads successfully while increasing test scores. Seems most administrators have lost the human touch, following outdated corporate models of top-down managment that focus on deficits rather than strengths. If hiring decisions are based on one 30 minute interview, and evaluations are done by one or two pop-ins with write-ups and conferences being vague and not revealing administrators true intentions, then how does a person grow and improve and stay in this system. Seems, because of the drastic budget cuts that have been happening the last four years, administrators have gotten away with demanding only master teachers right out of the starting gate. The teacher who has some strengths, is humble and aknowledges they still need to grow and is willing to make changes and improvements, gets shoved out the door before given a chance. What kind of message does this send to students? If teachers taught the way educators manage, the dropout rate would be astronomical. So, a system has been established that demands perfection, but does not allow a person to grow and I believe this has long-term detrimental effects on everyone, clear down to the student/family level. It also creates a system that produces people that try something, if they aren't successful immediately, the system punishes them by shuffling them around until they drop out. I have seen this same pattern happen with students and teachers. This type of management system also creates workers who put in the bare minimum amount of time and rarely volunteer to take on any extra work. I have seen this phenomenon at the three schools where I have worked. The problem with schools is not that they lack good teachers or good curriculum (most veteran teachers have learned how to secretly continue to do what works best and ignore the educational fads) but they lack proper management and the system itself is becoming one that thwarts efforts to improve.
