I am taken aback by the hostility expressed toward public school teachers in two recent letters to the Herald (“Accountability must play part,” “Teachers have pay formula wrong”). The letters have in common an attempt to compare the process of education to jobs in the business world that tend to be more commodity based. It is easy to measure the number of burgers flipped per hour or airplanes delivered per year. It is not so easy to measure the effectiveness of a teacher in the classroom. If the metric for a teacher is to be the performance of students on tests, then perhaps a fairer comparison would be judging a manager’s performance by the production of the employees who report to him or her. That manager is responsible for training, motivating, disciplining and evaluating the employees, as is a teacher for his or her students. Still, there are significant differences between the two occupations. The manager likely is able to choose and hire the employees. If an employee cannot or will not meet standards, the manager ultimately has the ability to dismiss that employee.
The addition of employees to a manager’s workforce may help the team more easily meet production goals. It may at the same time reduce that manager’s effectiveness since he or she will be able to devote less time to each employee. Increasing the number of students in a classroom will never help a teacher meet a performance goal. It can only reduce the amount of individual attention that each student will receive. This is particularly detrimental to low performing and troubled students who often benefit most from one-on-one coaching. These are students that, were they employees, would likely be fired.
Let’s try to get over this notion that teachers don’t work enough hours. The amount of time spent preparing lessons, grading papers, posting grades, creating an inviting and stimulating classroom, attending meetings, and fulfilling continuing education requirements is enormous and often goes unseen, unrecognized and uncompensated.
The author of the second letter seems to have a beef with teachers thinking it might be fair if their salaries were occasionally adjusted to the cost of living. This is not an attempt to get richer but only to avoid getting poorer. Although I do not understand why he thinks a teacher’s COLA should be shared with the students, I can tell him that most teachers I know habitually reach into their own pocket to provide supplies and materials that the administration does not.
I do not have the answer to the question of how a teacher’s effectiveness may be most accurately evaluated. I do think, however, that the comparison of the teaching profession to commodity-based, profit-seeking endeavors is fallacious and that the demonization of a group of people most of whom are dedicated, passionate and conscientious in the fulfillment of a difficult and under-rewarded task is not productive.
Carl M. Milner Jr. is a resident of Edmonds.
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