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Editor's Notes

• #3: No positional authority for teachers Data points of frustration – time wasted, polling numbers 71 % say they have very little control of what happens in school, and half feel that their unions ignore their views. 80 % feel that they are rarely consulted about what happens in their schools 70 % believe district leaders only talk to them to win their support. UPenn’s Richard Ingersoll: “Teachers in schools do not call the shots. They have very little say. They’re told what to do; it’s a very disempowered line of work.” On the other hand, teachers also contradict themselves, you see the problem 85% of teachers report that their principal is doing an excellent or a pretty good job 51% of teachers say they already have a “great deal” or “some” authority in schools The cage is so familiar that it can be hard to see. While teachers may shrug off these polling results as unsurprising, they shouldn’t. These results aren’t normal – they reflect a disheartening dysfunction that has somehow come to seem normal.
• #4: Isolating culture - ����NEA president Lily Eskelsen says, "Once you leave the confines of your border and go out into your hallways, you become undocumented and the border patrol is looking for you." That’s the cage, a feel of abject isolation. Being told, “Stay in your lane” – even great teachers working at charter schools can fall into this trap. Madaline Edison, who went on to found E4E in Minnesota told us when she first started teaching she asked her peers how they could get better professional development and better data systems and they told her “‘Get used to it, kid.�� That's not within our purview.�� Stay in your lane.�� It’s going to drive you crazy if you try to work on all of these things that are outside your classroom.’ Churning leadership – Peggy Stewart build a great model UN program, took her kids all over the world, they even had a graduation ceremony on the great wall of China! Peggy mentored new teachers, but the new supe said he didn’t like the power she had so he banned teachers from meeting after school. Peggy left… of course the supe left the next year as well. Policy that doesn’t make sense – Alex ��Lopes was FL STOY in 2013.�� He taught preschool autistic kids, and as you can imagine they didn’t have great value-added growth. So he was canned.
• #5: Casie Jones, elementary teacher at Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Transition Academy in Memphis, TN, Teach Plus District piloted Gates’ Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project which included student feedback as part of teacher evaluation system Students required to take 75 question long “Tripod survey” Difficult for Jones’ students who were alternative classroom 4th graders
• #6: Teachers have 2 sources of authority – do not have positional authority, but do have moral and expertise (Hammer and crowbar) Can’t order people to do things, have to persuade peers and administrators Requires different skill set that teachers don’t often realize they need Policing the profession Policing the profession and holding people accountable most school systems consistently rate 99 percent of their teachers as effective one out of six teachers were absent at least 18 days a year (even after excluding teachers who had long-term absences of 11 days or more, since there were probably extraordinary circumstances) massively inflated grades of education majors, with 4.0s a commonplace only one of every 930 teacher evaluations resulted in an “unsatisfactory” rating for a tenured teacher
• #9: Can choose to be cage dweller or cage buster Playing field more open than you might think Casie Jones – brought teachers in to talk about problem, started negative, she geared them to solutions, produced signed memo to give to district, district decided to cut the survey to 40 questions Jones had credibility, identified problem, offered solutions, and engaged respectfully. Chris Ruszkowski, Chief Officer of DE’s Teacher Leader Effectiveness Unit, revealed to teachers that they could actually evaluate one another through a simple credential process ( six modules, an hour each, and 2 day training) But still no teachers have participated! This shows that policymakers can be more open-minded than you might think. Ruszkowski says blame goes to districts for telling teachers that the state was the enemy.