All these proposals are in the name of eliminating the red tape that prevents superintendents and boards of education from hiring the best, most talented people out there. Now I’m sure most of us can think of a situation or two when someone talented was entangled in some certification red tape. My wife had a teacher a few years ago who just couldn’t pass the math portion of the Praxis I, who actually got such test anxiety that she once vomited on the keyboard at the test site, and this prevented her from getting certified. The super at the time supported her and did everything he could to emergency certify her and retain her as long as possible, but ultimately the state called his hand and she had to be let go. She landed on her feet in a community college, but the district lost a talented teacher over a test that was irrelevant to her subject area. But let’s face it, this is not what Malloy is really opening the doors to. He wants districts to be able to hire people who aren’t certified, just as the elimination of tenure isn’t really about empowering superintendents to fire poor performing teachers. It’s about empowering boards of finance to eliminate the highest paid teachers. And if they successfully tie job performance to student performance on standardized tests, then the only thing one has to do to get rid of veteran teachers is assign them the lowest performing kids, set them up for failure by giving them kids with a history of failure. It’s that easy, isn’t it?
Sorry for my cynicism, but honestly, even if Malloy and Pryor aren’t thinking these things, we all know there are administrators and board members and local politicians who are, who are just drooling at the prospect of replacing the teachers at the top of the pay scale with a bunch of new, young, uncertified teachers who don’t have to be paid peanuts.
The only thing I liked in Malloy’s latest iteration of his plan to save education by scapegoating the teachers is his tawaran to improve continuing education programs by replacing “generic continuing education programs presented in large auditoriums†with “high-quality programs … tailored to a teacher's particular needs.†Now that would be wonderful—if he can manage it. I remember when I got my first job, and my mother, a veteran elementary school teacher, sent me a sign that read, “When I die, I hope I die during an in-service aktivitas so that the transition from life to death will be seamless.†I put that up in the faculty room at my new school. Everyone laughed, but most had seen it before.
Professional development was never meant to be this way. When the educational enhancement acts were passed almost thirty years ago now, no one intended for us all to be packed into the auditorium for some generic, canned program, or for the offerings to change with every shift of the educational wind, or to be held captive to another lecture on blood-born pathogens, or to have our principals tell us to meet as a department or team and ‘come up with something.’ Me, I get calls all the time to provide PD, but ninety percent ask me to help them raise their CMT or CAPT scores. That’s not really PD. Typically, I ask to talk to the teachers, use the discussion as a sort of diagnostic, and then I propose something I think will be useful. And I assure the direktur that it WILL help scores, however indirectly. Which isn’t a lie, really, but it takes some persuasion. Often the direktur seems overwhelmed, underfunded, and at a loss. They, too, are under such pressure to raise scores. They’re just desperate.
Can Malloy and Pryor eliminate this mess? I’ll tell you one thing, it will cost more to provide “high quality programs tailored to a teacher’s particular needs†than it does to provide something canned and generic. Somehow I see this cost getting passed onto us. We’ll be required to get this new Master Educator Certificate to stay employed and at the top of our district’s pay scale, but we’ll have to pay for the coursework ourselves. Just watch.
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