I am growing tired of the call for the ouster of older teachers and the elevation of the younger. I am of the older generation (some might say very older) after a career in education spanning four decades. I was also a victim of budget cuts during that career losing my job at the end of every year for my first nine years in three school districts. After 34 years, I am no longer in Public education, but I am involved with Higher Education. My assignment is to train and observe Pre-service teachers, student teachers. In that role I get to travel from school to school and observe educators on all levels.
I teach and observe student teachers for a living. I know that my students have observed over 100 hours of lessons by teachers in the field prior to their becoming student teachers. Additionally, they must show mastery in a program of courses in both philosophy and methods in Education. This is all in addition to the courses required in their content area. By the time these students have an opportunity to stand as teachers in a classroom they will literally have hundreds of thousands of pieces of information floating through their heads, being arranged and rearranged depending on the situation in the classroom at any given point.
I remember reading an article in Time Magazine in the 60’s that rated the most stressful jobs in America based solely on the number of decisions that had to be made in the course of a day. I expected Air Traffic Controller, or Brain Surgeon to be at the top. I was pleasantly surprised to see my own occupation at the top of the list. It was very specific; an Eighth Grade English teacher was listed. That was me, and it was true.
Experience is the best teacher in life. When observing student teachers, I often note that the mistakes being made will be eliminated with teaching experience. So often these student teachers are pumping and processing so much information through their brains that it is amazing to me that they don’t crash at the end of every class. I guess that can be attributed to the energy of youth. As experience mounts up, the brain begins to file away and store those thousands of pieces of information which are repeated over and over each day, so that the teacher no longer needs to bounce that around in the brain. many things become an automatic response. This frees up the experienced teacher to focus more on more important decisions for motivating kids to learn. As a general rule, my personal measure is about ten years in teaching before I consider a teacher truly experienced. Of course any teacher with less than ten years experience will loudly disagree.
These experienced teachers are the foundation of each school’s culture. They become the mentors of the younger teachers. They are advisors to the administrators who often come and go in a never-ending cycle. They are connections to parents whose families have moved through the school over the years. They are the keepers of the keys. This is not how they are being portrayed by politicians and people with agendas for education. These experienced teachers are becoming targets. They are being demonized as the bad teachers, the burn-outs. The only hope, we are told, is the new youthful teachers entering the system. We are told that if cuts must be made, and they must, we need to base it on merit and cut the old, bad teachers, and keep the good, young teachers. We cannot consider any loyalty or obligation to any employee, even if they were loyal to the school district for years.
This has nothing to do with good or bad, young or old. It has everything to do with a political agenda. Older teachers are more experienced and better educated, making them more expensive. Younger teachers are eager to volunteer, less experienced, less credentialed and ultimately less expensive. You have to see where this is going. It is about the MONEY. Politicians want the ability to cut the least number of people with the most impact on the budget. There is little thought given to the educational impact. Having the ability to cut the older teachers is also the best way to push through other needed reforms like: Larger classes, elimination of collective bargaining, reduction of the arts, increasing the impact of high stakes testing, and fewer extracurricular activities. These may all be good for the budget, but not great for kids needing to be educated.
We should all be for maintaining good teachers and removing those who may not be making the mark. We have procedures in place to do this. (Please refer to an earlier post, Tenure’s Tenure ) What needs to be worked on is a program for Professional Development that enables every teacher the ability to stay relevant and knowledgeable about the tools and methods of their profession. It cannot be a voluntary or incentivized program, but an ongoing required program scheduled for all educators to participate. It must be a priority, if we are to improve the quality of education. This requires an investment in Education and not budget cuts and reductions in staff and services. We need an explanation as to why we give $40 billion in incentives to an Oil Industry that shows $100’s of Billions in profits every year while we are cutting back teachers and programs to educate the very people who we will need to call upon to lead us out of this mess.
My Island View 
Hi Tom.
I’m going to confuse a lot of people when I finish my student teaching, and start my career as a math teacher, because I will be an old, new teacher. Since I’m not teaching English, I beg forgiveness for any grammatical error I just made. However, I do expect to perplex a few folks when I do not fit neatly into their paradigm. And I look forward to it!
I enjoy reading your posts.
Dave
Great post, thank you!
Another overlooked factor about “Young vs. Old” is the 4 stages of competence that lead to teaching as “second nature”, even more obvious in technology education:
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Conscious+Competence+Model
1. Unconscious Incompetence:The individual neither understands nor knows how much he does not know.
2. Conscious Incompetence:Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.
3. Conscious Competence:The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.
4. Unconscious Competence: The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes “second nature” and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she may or may not be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.
Interesting post, Tom. While I do agree that money is one of the main factors in our current state of educational affairs I also think that calls for an end to the tenure-system and the start of value-added assessment are carrying momentum because of one additional fact: EVERYONE has encountered at least one bad teacher in their lives. Sometimes it IS about bad vs. good. They aren’t always older teachers, but ask around–most of the time they are. Ask kids today (especially at-risk kids) and they’ll have a slough of names for you–former teachers who gave up on them, couldn’t find an alternate way to explain how to complete math problems, didn’t help them. Ask people in their 40s and 50s and you’ll hear stories about an older teacher who made a remark that scarred them for life. Ask parents and you’ll hear stories about one teacher their child has now who is making their daughter feel like she no longer wants to attend school.
I am not being purely hypothetical here: the reason I teach is because I had at least two older educators who scarred me and I was determined to teach better than they did. The students in my alternative program have horror stories, too, and they are all about veteran teachers. I spend weeks at the beginning of each semester trying to get new students to regain their faith in school, to trust me. And now as a parent, one of my own children currently has a teacher whose 25-year tried and true method seems to include public humiliation. At one point it was so bad that my 9 year-old ran away from school.
I don’t believe that all veteran teachers are terrible. There are some EXCELLENT teachers out there who deserve their tenure-track pay level AND a hefty bonus. I don’t think that a mandatory professional development schedule will fix all the problems with teachers like those I described above. Something has to change. There are bad teachers out there and it only takes one rotten apple to spoil it for the whole bunch. The push to end the tenure system may be largely based on politics and money, but it gains leverage from a hefty collection of memories of rotten apples. Those memories are not limited to any single political party or socioeconomic status–it really does come down to bad vs. good. People who don’t care about the money aspect are searching for a way to protect kids from being hurt, and that agenda coincides with the more nefarious political agenda…collectively they have great power.
As a 25 year senior teacher, I second that!
Thanks for your post!
Well said. Tom.
Great post Tom, you make some very excellent points and bring up many issues that need to be thought about and reflected upon. I am not a seasoned teacher, but I do suppose that I have just become a experienced teacher (12yrs)
I will agree that the problems in the United States are not only confined to that country, but are even of concern in other countries. We don’t have merit pay or bonuses, but we do have a grid that we climb until we max out and yes there are some issues with that, but there are some benefits and some draw backs. As you get more experienced you get expensive and therefore sometimes are not as appealing when attempting to move to other schools or divisions.
The one point that you made that bothers me the most is that if politicians do manage to get their way, then a experienced teacher in a school will have taught for 5 years, which to me is still a learning period for a teacher, especially in today’s teaching world where things are changing rapidly.
Overall, loved it.
Jen (@jenmardunc)
Although you bring up some interesting points, I would have to disagree with you. Although there may be many stories of teachers being ineffective, and they maybe perceived as veteran teachers I don’t think it has anything to do with how long the teacher had been teaching. It has a lot to do with training and PD. Many of the retired teachers that I know, tell the old stories of how University to become a teacher was 2 years at most, and no practicum. This does not compare to how prepared new teachers are to enter the work force. Traditional teaching, regretfully meant that you, as a teacher we on an island and learned and struggled on your own, which over the years can close a person to the outside world.
In my limited experience it is the younger teachers, that are sometimes the most ineffective. They are so worried about making everyone happy in relation to testing and the curriculum that they accidentally leave students behind. It is also these teachers that tend to sometimes think that because they are fresh and know everything that they over react to the smallest of incidents, who’s classrooms become escalated and out of control.
I often enjoy the conversations in the staff room, when the younger teachers complain or gripe about an incident in their classroom and that they cannot figure out how to motivate or engage a child. If your wondering why I enjoy these conversations, because they fail to do the one thing that would help them – ask for assistance. Also, before closing I will state that you only become a veteran teacher, by being committed to the profession and sticking through thick and thin.
Being effective has nothing to do with young or old and nor should it be measured by the score achieved on a standardized test. There are those that should be teaching and those that shouldn’t, but the measure for this should properly determined, but that is just my opinion.
Shawn
NYC has an equally confusing policy of last in, first out. I can’t believe anyone would want to work under that condition, in any field. That kind of counters the view that it is all about money. I’d like to see money examined more closely before considering cutting positions. If schools eliminated the mounds of paper based activities, work, assignments, flyers, reporting, etc. they could save. If they bought buses and hired bus drivers for sporting events, instead of renting and hiring on hourly rates, they could save. Cut back on some perks for the higher ups, have teachers pay more into their medical plans, look at 4 days weeks instead of 5, etc. Lots of ways to look at saving money before talking about eliminating positions. Getting rid of teachers strictly based on age, how much they make, and/or experience is not the way to go.
Many good points !
Where I saw the system fail, time and time again was in the principal’s office.
Failure to properly supervise staff, failure to properly evaluate staff, failure in leadership.
I had better administration in private schools that public. Jumped up teachers with Masters/PhD were made into principals.
Several I saw had been useless as teachers so they moved up and the school system failed to evaluate them as effective leaders when they were hired.
In one public school a state law mandated twice yearly visits to each teacher’s classroom. In 7 years I received 1 visit my first semester and none after that ever!
Poor teachers were not evaluated so there was no data to move to help or discharge.
I saw this same behavior in to different school systems in different states.
Leadership is in short supply.
I see reports of bullying that ends in violence because principals failed to address the issue at any level. There has been and will be more Columbine’s if principals like those allow bullying to occur unchecked. (I coached several sports and never allowed my athletes to act like they had any special position. Winning seasons every year!)
The thing that I don’t understand is why nobody within the American sphere is asking why the cuts are needed in the first place.
I agree with everything you have written about experience, old and new teachers are different and should be valued. There’s room for both.
One thing I think the new teacher need to remember is that one day, not long from now, those ‘bight young things’ will be the old teachers.