Tonight’s writing is inspired by Ms. Frizzle’s post about KIPP. The post itself has a much broader scope that my entry does, and I think it’s a wonderful piece that you should go read. But as I think about what kind of faculty it’s going to take to get SLA going the way I hope it can, these two paragraphs are what got me to thinking:
My concerns are centered on the sustainability of the model. I get the sense (again, I can’t back this up) that KIPP burns through teachers, because they commit to insanely long hours (and still have work to take home at the end of the day). KIPP students also spend long hours at school. The take-away message for school reformers is that society is not doing enough for children and families. One solution is for schools to fill in the gaps, providing everything from extracurricular programming to meals to medical care. That’s a good model, and it seems to work, but I am worried about models where the teachers do most of this extra support. A more sustainable model would include a second (or third) shift of teachers, doctors, and support staff to meet the students’ extensive needs. Otherwise, you’re depending on the goodwill of extraordinarily-motivated teachers to provide what should, rightly, be provided by society, whatever the cost, and that is neither just nor scaleable.
(For similar reasons, I wish the press would stop writing so much about individual teachers who do absolutely everything for their kids, staying at school 18 hours a day, spending every Saturday at school, etc. I’m all for hard work and commitment, but that is no way to live and, more importantly, martyrdom is not a long-term solution to the problems in education today!).
I worry about this a lot these days. I worry that we’re asking teachers to do more and more without giving anything back. I worry that we, as a nation, respect our teachers less than we used to. I worry that applying the "corporate model" to education is having disasterous effects on our teachers’ moral. And I worry that there are education folks out there who believe that NCLB was right — that all we had to do was "hold teachers accountable" and they would somehow start teaching better.
Teaching is an incredibly difficult career — especially in our cities. We ask our teachers to be instructors, counselors, coaches, social workers and god-knows how many other things. High school teachers in urban public schools routinely have over 120 kids in their classes. And most of them go out of their way to know something real and important about each of those kids. It’s often a near-impossible task. Just learning how to survive the physical and emotional weight of the job takes several years. Ever see a teacher on a Friday afternoon who is taking home two class sets of notebooks? I remember a time when two of us were leaving school together, each carrying a crate full of notebooks home. We looked at each other and just started to laugh because we knew what our Sunday was going to be like.
I believe that teaching isn’t a 40-hour a week job. I really do. I believe that to do it right does require 50 to 60 hours a week. And I believe that to really do it right requires making teaching a part of who you are, part of your core identity. What we do isn’t a job, it’s a calling, and I’ll always believe that. But I also believe that we have to find ways to make it sustainable. I believe that Ms. Frizzle is right, the 15 hour day, six-day-a-week life isn’t sustainable. This is a job that can take a huge emotional and physical toll on a person. It is incumbent on administrators to find ways to nuture and support their teachers… and even to kick them out of the building from time to time to remind them that they have to take care of themselves too.
One of the things to remember is this… we are role models for our kids. And we want our kids to grow up to be dedicated and passionate and hard-working people after they leave our walls. But we also want them to be healthy and happy people too. And we have to model that for them as well.
This change can happen on a school-by-school basis and on a grander scale as well. Here’s the school basis that I hope to be able to put in place at SLA:
- Respect for teachers as people — Our shared humanity is important. If we don’t want to treat kids as widgets, we can’t treat our teachers that way either.
- Shared decision making — we have to build SLA as a collaborative school where teacher voices matter.
- Careful choices about expanding programs — there are many, many wonderful programs out there for schools to become a part of, but we can’t do them all. As a small school, we have to decide what we can do and do it as well as we can. Trying to be all things to all people leads to burn-out and often leads to doing very little well.
- Prioritizing spending on teachers and staff — the most important resource in education is the human resource. We have to make sure our budgetary priorities reflect that.
- Remembering the little things matter — a working coffee pot that is always filled in the main office makes life livable. Not having to fill out 20 forms to get your photocopies made makes life livable. Knowing that the inevitable district-level stress is filtered down to the teachers as little as humanly possible so that the teachers can worry about teaching their kids matters.
- Asking everyone to share the load — Knowing that the school doesn’t run because of the herculean efforts of the few, but rather because of the shared dedication of the many matters. If more teachers were willing to work 50 hours, fewer would have to work 80.
And that’s a start, anyway… every good teacher I know works incredibly hard. Every good teacher I’ve ever met has fought burnout. But this has to be a career that can span thirty years. We have to fight to make this sustainable. We need to be able to take the young teachers who have tons of energy and figure out how to make that energy last so that they can become master teachers who mentor the next generation — of teachers and students.
