Jay Mathews, the dean of education reporters, takes a strong stand on teacher retention, arguing that giving principals the unfettered power to hire and fire teachers is “crucial” to closing the achievement gap.
This is a difficult choice and a hard time for D.C. teachers. They are fine people who have chosen a tough profession and put their hearts into their work. Many fear being judged by principals who were not skillful teachers themselves and have little clue as to what helps kids learn and what doesn’t. But I don’t see any way the city’s children are going to get the instruction they deserve — the imaginative, fun-loving, firm teaching found at schools like KEY — unless principals are given the power to hire and fire teachers based on demonstrated skill and improved learning in class.
Mathews cites the example of the KIPP DC:KEY Academy, where principal Sarah Hayes dismissed two teachers who were not cutting it, despite efforts to improve. “If KEY were a traditional school, Hayes’s only reasonable option would have been to mentor the teachers, note her dissatisfaction on their evaluations and recommend that they not be kept after a two-year probation,” he writes. “That is the way it goes in most school systems. Staffing rules, tenure agreements and low expectations tend to favor weak teachers unless they do something awful.”
More than four out of ten teachers report sleeping six hours or less per night, according to researchers at Ball State University. Nearly half admit to missing work or making mistakes due to “serious lack of sleep,” according to the report in Teacher Magazine.
While the study doesn’t correlate teachers’ reported sleep problems with instructional quality or student performance, the researchers speculated that the potential effects on schools could be significant, based on what is known about job performance and lack of sleep. ‘Sleepy teachers are at higher risk of providing insufficient supervision and inferior classroom instruction,’ notes Denise Amschler, a professor of physiology and health sciences and co-author of the study.
It’s not discussed in the report, but I’ve often wondered if sleep deprivation is a factor in poor teacher retention rates, particularly in low-achieving schools. The relentless push for high achievement often feels physically unsustainable. It is very easy to find yourself going weeks on very few hours of sleep per night.
Jennifer Medina’s piece in this morning’s New York Times is a step up from the usual happy-talk cheerleading for small schools. Yes, small schools are better than faceless, anonymous megaschools, but Medina’s take on NYC’s Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Fort Greene, Brooklyn makes it clear that success, when it comes, is less a function of structure, but staff effort.
To hear the tales of the new graduates is to understand the enormous effort and amount of resources it takes to make a school succeed. Teachers and other staff members routinely work 60 hours a week. Millions of extra dollars have been collected in grants and private donations. Parents and students regularly attend workshops until 10 p.m.
Principal Elana Karopkin, 32, launched the school four years ago, and is leaving to work for Achievement First. She tells the Times she is nothing less than “exhausted,” both physically and emotionally.
“You are taking a bunch of hyper, type A perfectionist people and giving them a herculean task,” she said. “People have to work much too hard to do what we are doing. People cannot work at this level all their lives and nobody is prepared to do something at a level of mediocrity.”
Update: Over at Eduwonkette, Skoolboy weighs in smartly: “We need to disrupt this ridiculous myth that expects superhuman effort from educators in order to achieve success for kids….We don’t need cartoon-like superhero educators; we need a system that supports teachers to work hard and honestly at their craft, without the risk of burnout after a couple of years.”
Just so.
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