Tag Archives: loss of talent

Informed, Nuanced, Experienced Veteran Teachers Are Rain Makers

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Accumulated knowledge, skill sets honed over time, and perceptions sharpened by experience lead to this observation: “At the point of retirement, most teachers know more, can do more, and have more value as teachers than any preceding year in their career”. A veteran teacher who persists through decades of teaching has high value to children, colleagues, and a school in her pre- and post-retirement years.

Take Away

How do schools make the most, in fact exploit, the valued commodity of a veteran educator? The answer is – we don’t. The teaching assignment and expectations for a veteran teacher mirror the expectations of a first-year teacher. We treat teachers with proven talents and teachers of unproven talents as similar “plug and play” personnel.

Teachers, of all ages, still operate in the block box of a classroom. A veteran teacher’s knowledge, skills and perceptions shine in their classroom, but are seldom known or discussed in whole school or faculty settings. The black box syndrome and mentality defeats the value of experience because of its isolationism. Whether the veteran is a Kindergarten teacher with decades of success in causing our youngest children to read or a high school AP teacher with years of causing our college-bound children to earn college credit while in high school, teachers work in isolation of each other and nominally alone within their school.

Informed experience is a value-added commodity that is achieved over time. A recent graduate knows the latest pedagogical theories and best practices and is ready to apply them. A veteran who is up-to-date on the latest theories and best practices adds the value of knowing which theory and practice works best with some student but not with others. The discernment of what, when and why children need specific teaching is an acquired judgment that is earned with experience, yet is undervalued in school.

It is essential to appreciate that all veteran teachers are not created equally. Some vets grow and ripen and enrich with time while some only repeat their first year of teaching over and over again every year.

A faculty group photo helps us observe many truths about our teacher corps. We see many contrasts. Faces and, to some degree, hair color portray two-thirds of the faculty as looking younger and less than one-third looking older. If we compare annual faculty group photos, we observe fewer and fewer of same veteran faces. There is a gradual yet steady decline in the number and in the continuity of older, veteran teachers. We believe that the work force in our nation is “graying” but, in public education, the work force is getting younger and younger. This means that we are losing the professionally-developed talent, knowledge, experiences, and perceptions faster than we are growing the talents of our young teachers.

What Do We Know?

In the 2015-16 school year, teachers in public schools averaged of 14 years of experience. If we interpret this in age as experience, the average teacher is in her mid 30s and has been working as a teacher for about one-third of her anticipated work life.

http://neatoday.org/2018/06/08/who-is-the-average-u-s-teacher/

In that year, the most common public school teacher is in her first three years of teaching. These data are supported by the fact that 44% of first year teachers leave the profession before their fifth year. That means that most schools have a continuous turn over of young and inexperienced teachers. We see this in the faculty group photo – so many look so young.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2018/10/today_teaching_force_richard_ingersoll.html

The average retirement age for teachers hovers around 59. Interestingly, many teachers retire before they are eligible for social security. Part of the reason is that salary tables tend to top out with little to no annual salary improvement after a set number of employment years. Some states and districts enact “rule of 30” incentives that encourage teachers to retire when they gain 30 years of experience or “rules of 55” that set the retirement incentive at a combination of age and years of teaching experience equaling 55. A teacher’s annual income of pensions and social security may be equal to or more than their annual working salary well before their anticipated retirement year. Why stay? Why not start a second career with earnings on top of teacher retirement benefits? We have created professional structures that purposefully diminish our teacher talent pool.

https://smartasset.com/retirement/why-your-retirement-age-matters

School leaders know the teachers in their faculty who perennially cause the greatest student learning. They know the “rain makers”. Principals know this through applying Effective Educator processes, comparing student assessment data, and sitting in classrooms observing teaching. They know it through their work with students and parents. And, they know the journeyman teachers who annually do a satisfactory job of teaching. However, this knowledge remains tight-lipped behind screens of confidentiality. If it were discussed, the parent demand for placement in “rain maker” classrooms would be impossible for satisfy.

Why Is This Thus?

In most school systems, a teacher with 40+ years of teaching is at the top of the district’s salary and benefits scale. The first consideration school boards make toward veteran teachers is financial. In many school districts, a veteran may cost twice that of a first-year teacher. If finances drive the decision making, “helping” expensive teachers to retire is a school board and administrative priority.

There is a large scale failure to understand the cost of less effective teachers. Successful initial learning is the most cost effective instruction. When a teacher must re-teach lessons to classes of children or extend the planned time for a unit of instruction, there will be instruction at the end of the year those children will not receive. That instruction must be taught the next year. The accumulated effect of ineffective teaching is graduates who did not learn all of their curricular objectives. Tier 2 interventions requiring “specialists” in addition to classroom teachers add significantly to the cost of a public education. Remedial summer school adds cost in large doses. The greatest cost is the sum of lost knowledge, skills and attitudes children suffer year after year that diminish their capacity for success in college and career. These are not costs in the hundreds of dollars, but in the millions nationwide. Getting teaching and learning right in initial instruction is the gold standard.

Most observers assume that veteran teachers with 30-40 years of teaching are slowing down. Their best years are behind them. They miss the point. Doing the same thing over and over diminishes energy, not the talent to work. Give a proven veteran a new assignment or change the challenges of the children the teacher instructs and the combination of informed experience and expertise takes over. Intellectual adrenalin makes vets act and look like younger teachers.

Too often principals respond to student and parental wants and demands and place veteran teachers in high popular demand or politically visible assignments. Parents want rainmakers teaching AP and college prep track courses. Rarely do parents of low achieving children stress principals to assign rainmakers to children performing below grade level. Some times teacher assignments are made for parents and not for children.

Lastly, phasing veteran teachers toward retirement is the way schools always have approached personnel. As institutions, schools are slow to change past practice, even poor past practice.

To Do

Use the informed experience and talent of veteran teachers for customized assignments, such as underachieving regular education children or children living in poverty who lack out of school resources. The vet’s understanding of chunked instruction, pacing, modeling, tutored guided practice, and interval reinforcement work well for children needing nuanced teaching.

Use the wisdom for instructional design. We engage large groups of teachers, most of whom are inexperienced or less experienced, to write curriculum and units of instruction. One of our misapplied thoughts is that every voice has equal value. Engage “rainmakers” in designing best strategies for making more rain for everyone.

Assure that talented veteran teachers work with small, discussion groups to refine student understanding. Too often, vets are assigned to large group information sessions because they are more entertaining. Knowing the right question to ask at the right point in a child’s learning is an acquired talent.

Weight employment using the value-added of informed experience and past records of causing significant student learning to create combinations of teaching and teacher coaching. First-year teachers graduate from mentored student teaching assignments straight into “you are on your own” classrooms. And, if they are assigned a mentor, mentoring seldom includes mentor observations because of their respective teaching classroom assignments. Give a proven and productive veteran released time to coach one or two inexperienced teachers.

Create emeritus teaching assignments for retired teachers. With closed-minded thinking, many states make it difficult for a retired teacher receiving a teacher’s pension to re-enter the classroom. An emeritus assignment need not be full-time or full-year. A highly trained veteran-in-retirement can work a very customized teaching assignment to cause children to learn. It may be an assignment that is “on demand” when children need talented and personalized instruction the most. Be creative.

The Big Duh

More than 40% of all teachers who start in the profession leave before their fifth year. The majority of teachers in any school are inexperienced due to this constant turn over. Among teachers who persist in the classroom are those who sadly repeat their first years of teaching over and over again. These often seek their first opportunity for an early retirement. And, there are talented rainmaking teachers whose experience, continuous professional development, and refinement of acquired art and science of teaching make them high valued veteran teachers. School leadership needs to optimize the use of their rainmakers and be creative in keeping rainmakers in the most productive of teaching assignments. A veteran teacher is a talent we cannot afford to waste.

The Public Gets What It Settles For – Stop Settling Low

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Louise Sawyer (Thelma and Louise, 1991) taught us “You get what you settle for.” Hearing Susan Sarandon voice these words many years ago, I found that they apply all too well to the many situations in public education today where we have settled for low and gotten even less. And, once settled low, it is harder than heck to get anything better.

My finger points at us, the public. In too many states and too many communities we have allowed public education to be so disparaged that the resulting lowly state of affairs has caused teachers to lose their passion and teaching to lose its appeal for talented teacher candidates. Disparaged by governors using education funding to balance state budgets. Disparaged by parents who have used arguments for school choice to demean public education. Disparaged by legislation that purposefully stunts educator salary and benefits to keep promises to taxpayers. Disparaged by community members who believe that public employees are a drain on their personal wealth. Disparaged by anyone with an axe to grind, we, the public, are settling for a public education that will not give us what we need to get from our public schools.

The “this is what you get for settling low” is the exodus of educator talent from public schools. Many of our best and brightest teachers also will be best and brightest in other endeavors. By the thousands, talented educators annually choose to leave their schools for careers that will appreciate their talent and passion. The loss of this talent has become irreplaceable. Doubling down on the problem is the reality that the next generation of best and brightest career-seekers do not give the merest of consideration to education as their career of choice. Why should they volunteer to be disparaged? Why should they volunteer to be under appreciated? The best and brightest of the current and most recent generations do not become educators. As a result, every state struggles for find the talented teachers that children deserve. Richly trained teacher candidates are a rarity today. In fact, teacher candidates of any quality are rare in most states. The result of career disparagement is a growing number of schools beginning and finishing the school year with unqualified substitutes as permanent teachers. State government deepens the “low” settlement by endorsing local school boards to hire non-teachers to teach. The depth of our current low now allows high school graduates with “qualified work experience” to be employed as teachers. In our current state of low settling, almost any body will suffice as a classroom supervisor – not a teacher.

If I overuse the term “disparage”, it is with purpose. Synonyms for this word are: belittle, denigrate, depreciate, trivialize, undervalue, underrate, and play down. Read any contemporary educational journal and count the number of articles with one of these words as its theme. Listen to radio broadcasts of state legislators talking “live from the statehouse” and the positions they take on public education. Examine the names of the funding groups of TV broadsides proposing educational reform; the names that are in the small print, to understand the forces that disparage public schools. Read the “teacher wanted” job postings that are a fixture in local newspapers. Read any of the literature of the PAC-based education foundations, like EdChoice.com, to understand their argument for school choice at the disparagement of public school. The term is used because it is the right word for this argument.

My argument is not a “poor teacher” rant. Within every high quality teacher is the passion to cause children to learn. This passion is in their bones and greater than monetary compensation. However, all passion is vulnerable to continual denigration. The argument is based on the overwhelming social, cultural, economic, political and educational value that public school has brought to our nation. The American Dream and public school are entwined. Settling low for what we want to get from public education today will have consequences for the nation we get in our future. I loved the Thunderbird that Thelma and Louise drove, but to avoid their inevitable fatality, let us not allow public school be driven over the cliff.

My argument cannot close on such a low and dismal note. Whereas, it is unwise to think that the strong community support of local schools in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s will return, it is wise to describe a new kind of support that will raise the community value of public schools. We will not and cannot see PTA groups of stay-at-home mothers rallying to every school initiative as they did decades ago. In our new age of virtual and seemingly offhand commitments, we, you and me and our fellow citizens, can assist a revitalization of community support for public schools. My finger points at –

• our demanding highly qualified teachers in every classroom and a refusal to settle for “any body.” Insist that School Boards do not settle low in their employment practices.

• our recognition that high quality teachers are more than content and skill instructors. For many children, the teacher in the classroom is a mentor, a role model, a guide and many become a life-long friend. These quality relationships are difficult to quantify as a monetary value; they are priceless.

• our understanding that many parents choose public schools as their school of “choice. Parents choose their family residence based upon school districts. Moms and Dads choose public schools that resemble their positive experiences in the public schools they attended. Parents often identify a particular strength in a local school’s academic, arts, activities and athletic programs that they want for their children. Public school is a wonderful choice.

• our being informed that choices are good things. School choice is a good thing. But, all schools need to be available for the choosing. We need to respect all choices and the schools that are chosen.

• our appreciation that many parents cannot afford financially or in their family commitments the needs of a charter or voucher program. For families just starting economically or who have become economically disadvantaged, public school is their only school.

• our knowledge that strong schools are essential for a strong community. Schools may be the community recreation and entertainment center. School teams and activity groups create essential community identity and pride. Schools also are essential responders to community tragedies and critical events. These schools may be public, private, or parochial. Strong communities need them all.

These will not happen by accident. They will happen because we, the public, refuse to settle low regarding our schools and our teachers. And, by raising the bar for what we settle for, we will get even more.