Dougco Ramble

I have been thinking about the recent uproar at the Douglas County School Board meeting a week ago. The only thing I know about Dougco going in is what I hear from Katherine.  I try to avoid reading too much about the state of the profession.

As I understand it the Dougco board is all about school reform on steroids.  They don't just have charter schools; they have CHARTER SCHOOLS.  They don't have merit pay; they have MERIT PAY.  They are all about applying market principles (make that MARKET PRINCIPLES) on an institution that by definition is anathema to market principles.  They want to let 15% of the teaching force get weeded out of the pool by quantifying that which cannot be quantified.  To be fair--since Merit Pay is based on test scores--shouldn't they let teachers select and cull  their own classes by using the same market principles?  Somehow, I don't think that would fly.

Dougco actually pays certain grade level teachers more than others  because those grades (6th and 1st maybe) are more critical and thus more difficult to teach than others.  No teacher, no teacher who had actually spent time in a classroom, would suggest that there are different levels of difficulty to effective teaching.  It is damn difficult no matter who you're teaching or where you are.  In addition to all of this, Dougco teachers tell Katherine, they are not being valued.  They are not getting enough input on the decision making of the powers that be.  They are being denigrated in the press; blamed for whichever societal ill is in fashion; resented for their retirement plan that is, along with the horrible prospect that everyone might have health care, bankrupting the country.  And not only that, but according to Mike Rosen and others of that ilk, their job is easy.  Anyone could do it.

All of those complaints, of course, have been voiced by teachers since the days when kids did their ABC's on stone tablets.  That doesn't make them any less legitimate, only more frustrating.  But the school board sat back and listened to all this carping with incredulity.  Test scores were soaring, they claimed.  Fully 80% of teachers in a recent survey said they were happy with Dougco.  The percentage of teachers leaving the district wasn't higher than anywhere else.  So where's the beef?

If you've taught long enough in a big district those survey results in the face of all the public discontent make perfect sense.  The disconnect between what teachers as a group really think and feel and what they are willing to say to the "boss" was and obviously continues to be one of the most infuriating things about the profession.

The majority of teachers are like the majority of college educated people everywhere.  They're average. And just like everywhere, there are a bunch of remarkably talented folks in that group and there are a bunch of remarkably untalented folks and there are some who have no business on the streets let alone a classroom.  I can make the same statement about doctors, lawyers, engineers, POLITICIANS, etc.  But the thing that distinguishes teachers, I think, is that they themselves were teacher pleasers growing up.  They knew how to play the game.  They felt comfortable within the rules.  Most of all, they wanted people, particularly their teachers, to like them.  I know everyone wants to be liked, but being in schools and all the baggage that comes with it intensifies that need.

In other words, we teachers have a hard time with authority.  We don't like to be called into the principal's office.  And we learned early on that principals as a rule don't like to be contradicted.  When they ask you to say what you really think, you know what you really have to do is tell them what they want to hear.  Therefore, those same people who bitch and moan over a beer at FAC (as long as the bar is out of the community) about the rotten state of morale in Dougco or Jeffco or Anyotherco, will happily bubble in mostly positive marks on a survey that might make it to the desk of someone with power.

According to the survey (one of the county expectations, by the way, is an acquiescence to county goals and standards) everything is just peachy in Dougco.  According to the disgruntled Dougco teachers working out at the Y in the morning, the place sucks.  Go figure.