Hell, NYC and bad examples

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If you are like me, I pity you. Aside from that if you are like me, you look back on your days in High School differently than you did when in high school.

I could have given him lessons.

My first book is dedicated to three teachers, two from college and one from high school. The high school teacher is Margaret Traylor, an English instructor. The battle of wills and minds was epic. She is now retired, but in the years after I graduated, she told her classes there was pretty much nothing they could do which she'd not already seen. I covered that ground.

A favorite example of hers was my use of Playboy magazine as a source for some class assignment.

Margaret left the private high school where I was educated to go to work in the public school system.

"I am tired of defending my methods," she said as we talked in her classroom while she packed her personal belongings those years ago.

Cash = Influence. Every time.

The problem was at the private school, a few influential parents could determine how teachers would be able to work in their classrooms. PHS finally closed its doors, owing far more to the arrogant attitude of a select few students than parents, but that's another story.

Margaret's problem (at least when I was in high school) was she expected to teach, expected the students to learn and brooked little interference from any direction.

Such teachers are pretty much a thing of the past now. Teachers these days are cowed into meeting impossible performance standards.

Means what it says. Lower the standard for all.

Rather than let a student's grade stand as it is earned, teachers round up the grade to a D or D-. A failing grade, at least for the subject, is the same as my steaks - extremely rare. I have personally talked to school administrators who have told me school policy is no one fails a subject.

Literally.

A student can not turn in any assignments, score a zero on all tests and yet still pass the course.

I am not kidding.

This person never failed a HS class, according to the grade book.

In the case of students who are from "important" families, the child is pushed through public school. Come time for college, when Momma and Daddy can no longer wield an ICBM of influence, Junior or Juniorina promptly flunk right out. Momma and Daddy then are aghast, stunned and so forth and then sometimes explode into irrighteous anger when their "influence" is told to get the hell off the college campus and take their idiot child with them.

Enter New York City, a place Bocephus compared to Hell.

NYC is planning to test teachers. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/what-are-your-thoughts-on-tests-to-grade-teachers/

Unions are good for protecting the bad teachers. That's it.

I am all in favor of this and performance based standards for teachers. I believe in holding teachers accountable for their classroom performance. Fire the bad teachers. Immediately. As a newspaper a editor I see firsthand incompetent and functionally illiterate teachers in the classroom. They need to be fired.

But they can't be fired.

The good teachers are instead pushed down to the level of the incompetent teachers by school administrators more interested in passing rates than student achievement.

If you'll allow me an aside, in the Deep South where I work it is next to impossible to fire a teacher of a certain ethnicity unless criminal offenses are involved.

At the same time, I strenuously object to performance-based anything where teachers are concerned.

There is no contradiction.

Quit blaming other people for your failures.

Until teachers are allowed to teach again, as they were when I was in school, then performance-based standards are hollow, empty and devoid of meaning. Not useless. They can always serve as a bad example.

Let teachers run their classrooms, let them teach and let students earn the grade they get. Then performance-based tests will mean something and can be used to sort the good from the bad.