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North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

367 points by bwsewell 14y ago

Nate75Sanders 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bur...
- Xcelerate 14y ago
  Whoops.. I think I accidentally downvoted you. Someone vote him back up, could you? That's an interesting trend. I think it could be resolved by instead having the ones doing the teaching decide on what sorts of standards and tests should be used to appraise performance. Some of my family members are teachers, and I hear more and more about how they are given less freedom to teach creatively and are instead forced to administer useless, rote-memorization tests that assess, well, nothing really. It's getting kind of ridiculous.
  - debacle 14y ago
    The problem right now is that the bureaucracy in place is a result of the CBAs of teachers unions preventing the firing of bad teachers or the introduction of regulations strictly for the sake of the student. In almost every instance of a public service, the right-but-left or left-but-right mentality of Americans creates a bureaucratic Mexican standoff: "We'll stop regulating you when you stop being shits." "We'll stop being shits when you stop regulating us." It's very easy to side with teachers as individuals, but teachers unions serve the good teachers and the bad teachers, and I would argue (without statistics, mind you) that teachers unions are just as much to blame for the current educational fiasco as incompetent bureaucracies, politics, ham-fisted regulations, and bad parenting.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - 001sky 14y ago
      without statistics, mind you -- You don't need statistics. There is no measurement. This is the problem: Seniority rules. skill, virtue, talent are uncorrelated variables. This is by design, au fait.
- vacri 14y ago
  Isn't this rather self-evident, that those who work to gain control of the structure gain control of the structure, and those who don't, don't? It seems to just be a wordier variant of 'use it or lose it'. Does such a self-evident law really require the appellation 'Iron'?
deleted 14y ago
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- deleted 14y ago
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hammock 14y ago
I... I... I... I... I... I... I... Is that how he teaches his students to write as well? edit: Hi downvoters, I understand parallelism. When it's used the way this teacher has used it, he risks coming across as whiny and juvenile. His point would come across more powerfully if he reframed his grievances in a way that shows their impact on the real victims, the children, as opposed to himself. "I have a dream" came from a place of hope and opportunity. King was laying out a roadmap for what progress would look like. Similarly, the Declaration of Independence was not a list of self-referential, logorrheic splatter. It contained specific, directed complaints combined with a plan of action. This man merely said I hate the world in a selfishly-worded cry for attention, threw up his hands and gave up. We do not say the same of King or the Founding Fathers.
- abduhl 14y ago
  It seemed to me that he was doing this on purpose as a stylistic choice to convey his frustrations with the system. Also, it sounds like he teaches math.
- zellyn 14y ago
  If you look at the "I have a dream speech" you'll see a similar form of repetition. Not that this letter is comparable. But it is a useful construct.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  Is that how he teaches his students to write as well? If those students can write something this straightforward, impassioned, and moving, they'll be better writers than most high school graduates.
- phil 14y ago
  You might find the parallel structure listing grievances familiar, since it was used in the Declaration of Independence (and many, many times since).
- w1nterl0ng 14y ago
  @Hammock, I would argue that the second half of that document was intended to be Parallelism as a Rhetorical Device. In terms of grammar, that may be how he teaches (at least for a class or two).
Osiris 14y ago
My mother is a school board member in a rural school district in Northern California. What I can from conversations with her is that it is often not the district's fault when there are issues, but the state's. The district is forced to come up with a budget months before the state approves their budget, so they don't even know if they are going to get the money they need. When money is low, they have gone to the community several times trying to pass a property tax to raise funds to keep teachers and maintain their facilities. The community has refused to fund the school each time. The district is constrained by their contract with the teachers which forces them to keep the most incompetent and highly paid teachers and get rid of the good but non-tenured new teachers (which are the ones that the students want to have). The way schools are funded are a major source of the problem. For example, they are funded per student with no regard for facilities, transportation, or other fixed costs. Lastly, there are too many crippling regulations that don't allow for flexibly to meet the various needs of students in varying districts. What works in the large LA County district is just not going to work in rural northern California. Throwing more regulations, tests, money, etc. at the system is not going to fix it. I really wish that a large group of educators (K-12, post-secondary), administrators, parents, etc. could get together and work out something different, perhaps even radically different.
- cheez 14y ago
  TL;DR send your kids to a private school.
  - factorizer 14y ago
    right. why fix the system, when you can be part of an elite?
    - imbriaco 14y ago
      Because your responsibility is to your kids and not to some idealistic vision of what you could be doing to improve the school system as a whole.
      - 14y ago
xaa 14y ago
TL;DR: The writer, a math teacher, is quitting (edit: his) job because of increased bureaucracy and standardized tests. Mostly, it seems, standardized tests. The problem is, math is the subject which is BEST served by standardized tests. There is really no fuzzy aspect to K-12 math: answers are right or wrong. And there are of course many benefits to standardized testing like teacher and school evaluation, providing structure to the curriculum, etc. His rant reminds me of another front-page HN article today (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712230 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712230), where the author claims that tough technical interview questions at Google bear no correlation with programming skill. Sure....
- Xcelerate 14y ago
  The author of the letter is male. I disagree that math is best served by these particular standardized tests. Testing can be useful (particularly something like the AMC or AIME), but when you're given meaningless problems like calculating how many watermelons Jack can carry to the store, there's better ways of assessing a deep understanding of mathematics. Also, tests are frequently too long. This forces a student into choosing an answer quickly instead of eventually arriving at the correct solution.
  - ditonal 14y ago
    Those meaningless low level problems are the basis for higher level skills. Studies have shown that students who are more capable of doing arithmetic without a calculator do better in college level math classes.* This is not the first time I've read complaints about standardized testing being unfair, nor people rolling their eyes at defenses of testing as people who just don't "get it". What I haven't seen much of is a thorough explanations of which tests are unfair and what specifically is bad about them. I just looked at the math section of the EXPLORE test. I would be very concerned if my child was unable to answer those questions and I would want my teacher to prioritize those basic skills before his so-called "deep-thinking" classes. Which tests are too long? It seems if tests are too long, we should shorten them. As an observer, it seems the standardized testing critics reach for any and all weaknesses of tests as a reason to shun them entirely, and it does raise suspicions they just hate the accountability. Standardized testing predicts college math performance. http://faculty.etsu.edu/stephen/diss-stephens.pdf http://faculty.etsu.edu/stephen/diss-stephens.pdf Less calculator usage in grade school correlates to better college math performance. http://www.math.jhu.edu/~wsw/ED/pubver.pdf http://www.math.jhu.edu/~wsw/ED/pubver.pdf
zupreme 14y ago
I found the following paragraph to be very poignant. "I’m tired of watching my students produce amazing things, which show their true understanding of 21st century skills, only to see their looks of disappointment when they don’t meet the arbitrary expectations of low-level state and district tests that do not assess their skills." I hope that this teacher finds happiness teaching in a more productive environment. Charter schools and some universities come to mind.
ryanwaggoner 14y ago
There's a huge conversation to be had about the quality of public K-12 education in this country, but I'm not sure this letter contributes much of anything to that conversation. The whole thing is so personal and subjective that it could have come from any school district in the country. Maybe the author is just a really bad teacher, and we're better off if he quits. Maybe this rant actually represents a data point about how NC squeezes out bad teachers. There's no way to know from what is written.
swordswinger12 14y ago
The author of the blog itself, Diane Ravitch, wrote a very interesting book called "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" on the topic of education reform. I'd encourage HNers to pick it up if this piqued their curiosity.
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
There is a defence. An engaged, informed, active, body of parents who will take action to ensure their children receive best schooling and care available. Take 100 irate parents to the next North Carolina State Board meeting and have them raise individually one after the other motions of no-confidence in each member. Then try to elect this woman to the Board. Will that help. Yes if you keep up the pressure for the 14 - 18 years it takes your child to go through the system. There is a website / startup in there...
- chii 14y ago
  Perhaps part of the problem is that a lot of parents wash their hands free of the process, but complain when their kids don't get the high marks they think they ought to. And looking for someone to blame, instead of looking at making it work.
justin_vanw 14y ago
It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it keeps teachers honest. Without testing, how do you measure teacher performance at all? How can you tell if someone who is capable of teaching well isn't just being lazy or getting distracted? So, if you aren't a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better. Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have. It's easy to point out problems. It's useful and important that people find flaws and fault. In this case, however, just pointing out the deficiencies in standardized testing doesn't help anyone unless it either leads to a more effective alternative, or improvements in standardized testing. Standardized tests might be very imperfect at measuring teacher performance, but it's far better to use the tool we have than to just throw up our arms and assume that all teachers are equally competent.
- kstenerud 14y ago
  "Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have." Are you sure about that? How do you know that a bad metric is better than no metric? It sounds a lot more like "We should be doing something. This is something. Therefore we should do it."
  - justin_vanw 14y ago
    Sure, I agree that in a general sense just pulling a number out of the air is crap. Testing isn't wrong, it's just not as correlated to the things we would actually like to measure as we would like it to be. This is an open problem in the world, and solving it (besides potentially making the inventor fabulously wealthy) would dramatically change the world. How do you decide if someone is qualified for a job, or will be successful at a university? In reality we don't have a very solid way to figure that out, so lots of people that would have done well are passed over and lots of people get into universities and hired for jobs and end up failing. Testing is correlated to lots of things, and is quite nicely correlated to the quality of the training a student was given. I'm sure there is a better solution out there in the aether, but mankind hasn't discovered it yet.
tokenadult 14y ago
"I lost my job only due to my lack of seniority. I was devastated." He ("he" is correct; I was confused by the given name at first until looking the person up with a Google search) should blame the typical master contract with the teachers in the school district for that. That is a standard contract provision recommended by schoolteacher unions whether a state has a "union shop" or "right-to-work" rules. Usually, school districts cave in and adopt contract provisions like that, because in states where a union shop is not mandatory, and collective bargaining for public employees is not mandatory either, schoolteacher unions are still very influential political interest groups that can swing voter turnout in the typical low-turnout school board election. School boards have a lot more electoral incentive to align with the interests of schoolteacher unions than with the interests of learners. (The interests of learners align with favoring better teachers over worse teachers, rather than with favoring senior teachers over newly hired teachers.) The crucial voter action influencing the daily lives of teachers at work happens not at the federal level http://educationnext.org/the-election-contests-that-really-matter/ http://educationnext.org/the-election-contests-that-really-m... but at the state level and local level, where most of the funding for schooling is set (and what proportion of funding goes to anything other than staff compensation, by far the largest line item in any school budget, is set) and where work rules, especially priority for promotions or layoffs, are set. There is considerable evidence that seniority rules lead to higher numbers of teacher layoffs than would be necessary if administrators were allowed to make effectiveness the determining factor in issuing layoff notices, rather than length of service. http://educationnext.org/seniority-rules-lead-districts-to-increase-teacher-layoffs-and-undermine-teaching-quality/ http://educationnext.org/seniority-rules-lead-districts-to-i... A teacher who is doing a good job helping students learn is worth his or her weight in gold, but seniority doesn't match teacher quality sufficiently well to be the sole basis for determining promotions or layoffs in a particular school district. Actively identifying the most able teachers and encouraging the least effective teachers to find other employment, regardless of seniority, could do much to improve the efficiency of the public school system and free up resources to reward the best teachers better than they are rewarded now. http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-how-much-good-teacher-worth http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-h... My Google search to verify the teacher's background turned up this post from the teacher's blog http://mgmfocus.com/2012/10/21/i-used-to-love-teaching/ http://mgmfocus.com/2012/10/21/i-used-to-love-teaching/ covering some of the same issues, with a different slant for the blog's different audience. "I give up. They win. I have joined the ranks of parents who have come to realize that we are only empowered to do one thing: take care of our own. I hope that things change, but I don’t have the energy, the money, or the time to continue beating my head into a wall. And if the choices have run out for my toddler when he’s ready for school, I will do it myself. Maybe I’ll do it for others, as well. Who knows." AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the several interesting comments. Wisty asks how teachers might be identified as effective teachers in the interest of making more effective teachers available to students. The same scholar of education policy I linked to for the general point that effective teachers make a difference has written extensively about identifying those teachers. These links http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/effective-teacher-every-classroom-lofty-goal-how-do-it http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/effective-teacher-... http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-deselection http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-deselectio... from his website (which link in turn to longer-form formal articles on the issues) are a sample of the research on the subject. Identifying teachers with good "value-added" is not at all easy, and there are immense incentives to cheat while attempting to identify such teachers, but there is also an enormous payoff from doing better than is done now in identifying effective teachers.
R_Edward 14y ago
Great letter exposing the toxic level of administratium in the air in NC public schools, but I think it would have been better to have left out the financial paragraph. The author presumably knew what the pay scale was before he accepted the opportunity and moved his family across the country to live there. Complaining about it afterward makes him look foolish, and this teacher is clearly no fool.
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
We have a brilliant system for determining the quality of teachers - and it is one used throughout the private sector with considerable effect. Its called a competent boss Every Head knows which ones to get rid of and which ones to keep. Every Head also knows if they get rid of the bad ones, they will need double the budget to hire in new, also good teachers. Especially if every other Head does this at the same time.
sodomizer 14y ago
The school bureaucracy is a symptom of something else, as is the monotonous testing and the union power. The American educational system changed its premise back in the 1960s. Since that time, we have become addicted to assembly line, one-size-fits-all, bulk format education in which we put kids through a ton of information and measure them by how much they retain. Not the quality of what they retain, and not their actual skills, but what they've memorized. By prioritizing memorized facts over learned application, we are losing a lot of our most talented kids. To compound the problem further, this one-size-fits-all approach isn't calibrated to the smart kids, but to the average. In public schools, it's also impossible to send home the disruptive kids. The result is a system that is so hobbled by contradictions that it is dysfunctional. Dysfunction attracts lazy administrators who like to use test metrics to force teachers to teach to the test, thus making everyone look like a success, even when the graduates aren't good at doing anything. The recent spate of test-cheating scandals should show us exactly why these tests are in favor among administrators. Instead of a broad open-ended task like "teach these kids to reason," all you have to do is make sure they make a pretty bell curve on the standardized test.
yequalsx 14y ago
There seem to be quite a few people who want to do away with tenure and seniority rules as a means of fixing a broken system. Is there any evidence that doing this would fix the system or make it better? Academic freedom, tenure, and seniority (to a lesser extent) have a lot of positives. Getting rid of these should only be done if the reasons are compelling and valid. What is required is not a collection of anecdotes of how tenure protects bad teachers - there are equally many anecdotes showing that tenure protects students and educational integrity - but rather statistics, facts, and well reasoned arguments. There are large portions of the United States where parents without any training or knowledge on teaching have very strong opinions on what should or should not be said in the classroom. Getting rid of tenure and academic freedom will, in some areas, lead to ignorant people making important educational decisions. Will the physics department stop talking about the Big Bang? Does the geology department stop talking about processes taking millions of years to work? Does the history department only talk about the good parts of Manifest Destiny? Instead of tenure maybe 5 year, renewable contracts would work. I don't know. I do think it is in society's best interest if teachers treat society as the client and not the students as the client. Doing the latter leads to dilution of standards. Doing the former without fear of being fired, at least in me, leads to grading on knowledge and not fluff.
- aroberge 14y ago
  Tenure and Academic freedom are applicable to University professors, not to teachers.
  - drharris 14y ago
    Why? Source, or are you just making stuff up?
  - johnrgrace 14y ago
    In the United States, public school teachers do get tenure in most locations which protects them for being fired except for a limited set of reasons or teacher supply being greater than demand.
  - saraid216 14y ago
zem 14y ago
> I refuse to watch my students being treated like prisoners. There are other ways. It’s a shame that we don’t have the vision to seek out those alternatives. if i could fix just one thing about the educational system, this would be it. it's the laziest option, so it ends up being implemented pretty much everywhere (this is not a us-specific problem; i grew up in dubai, and every time i visit my old school the place looks more like a prison), and all it does is alienate and disinvest students at precisely the time they need to be engaged and nurtured.
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imroot 14y ago
My wife was a full time teacher (she's now working on her Ph.D in educational technologies), and she's said the same thing over, over, and over again. Her first year out of her probationary year was a Kindergarden teacher. She had a girl in her class who had telltale signs of EBD (Emotional/Behavioral Disorders), and spent the year trying to convince the girl's mother to seek the appropriate (free) care from the educational system. The mother refused to attend any meeting; my wife eventually drove to her house to find the girl living in a "crack den" (her words). The girl's mother refused to allow her to be tested for EBD, and the girl barely finished the year with passing marks. Over the summer, the district noticed that my wife wanted to help kids...so, instead of putting her back in Kindergarden the next year, she was reassigned to a juvenile detention center/lockdown facility, where the kids didn't want to be helped. There were instances where they'd pull the kids out of her class, one by one, until it was just her and another student, before they come in to arrest the student for a crime, or, have a disgruntled student show up on my doorstep at midnight with a handgun in his waistband. Teachers get shit on by society, coworkers, and parents. The good ones are worth their weight in gold. The poor ones need to be replaced with better ones -- the problem is that there's no true way to rank teachers and how they teach that isn't subject to tampering or isn't completely subjective based on inter-school politics. There's not a good solution to the teaching problem...which is why I'm excited to look at what the technology/startup community comes out with over the next few years. Open Source SIS'es/Course Management/Educational Networking is something that can make the teacher's life easier, and provide pointes and guidance for parents who want to learn more, or students who want to self-learn/pace themselves faster or slower.
- chii 14y ago
  I m sorry to hear about the experiences of your wife - i feel that whoever reassigned her to juvie might've even done it with the best of intentions, but is incompetent and made the worst possible decision. The open courses may lead to a more distributed education paradigm, and i think that ways lies the future. However, the process of ranking is such a subjective method, that i don't believe there will ever be a way to do so and not have it tampered with either via politics or personal gain.
scott_meade 14y ago
Good for Dr. Atkinson! Anyone who doesn't think teachers work hard enough, care enough, or are skilled enough is full of it. When I go to my kids' after school activities and see teachers there night after night, on their own time and dime. When I see teachers buying supplies out of their own pockets. When I see teachers in school weeks before start to ready their classrooms. When I see these things I have little tolerance for the sentiment that teachers just slack off. All that happens with this approach is that the best teachers say, "I don't need this crap" and leave.
sapien 14y ago
One of the big tragedies here is the seniority based tenure system that caused a beloved energetic teacher such as this to have to leave the west coast. There was an interesting discussion about this in an interview on reddit with a teachers union president: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/124dur/i_am_the_president_of_the_american_federation_of/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/124dur/i_am_the_presid...
samspot 14y ago
I was in public school in the Greenville, NC area from 1985-1998, and I felt I had mostly good teachers and was adequately prepared for college. I happen to be a good test taker, and so my experience is likely different from others with different skills. At the time we only had end-of-grade tests, and not for every subject. My impression is that things have gotten a lot worse/more political since I went to school. I wonder if any long-time teachers care to comment on the changes over the last 30 years?
joncalhoun 14y ago
Does anyone have any demographics for the HN community's age? I am curious how many people here have attended schools with standardized tests. If you did attend a high school with standardized tests - do you feel it negatively affected your education? How? Do you have specific examples or courses? For clarity - I am not claiming that standardized tests do/don't help. I just want to hear form recent HS grads.
- icelancer 14y ago
  I took standardized tests in high school to pass 11th and 12th grade. At best it was an annoyance. I overslept one of them (we took them all in one week, one day for each subject) and was kicked out of my home by my mother. I simply took both tests (Reading, Math) in the same day and finished with honors in both. It taught me nothing. It was a waste of time. Why test the kids who are naturally good test-takers or who had parents who intellectually stimulated them (me, fortunately) - it strikes me as an exercise in mental masturbation.
danielweber 14y ago
I will not spend another day wondering how I can have classes that are full inclusion, and where 50% of my students have IEPs, yet I’m given no support. I had to fire our public school (in North Carolina; this was in the first district he moved to in the state) because it took them 3 years to do an IEP. In another example, a family member moved out of state, and it took the school two years to call up and ask if she would still be attending. I'm know in some places the teachers are the problem, but the teachers we met were working their hardest. The administration just didn't seem to give a shit. Teacher responsibility is a great thing, but we also need administrator responsibility.
- acdha 14y ago
  > Teacher responsibility is a great thing, but we also need administrator responsibility. I cannot upvote this enough. All too often, the administrators get a free pass for blaming everything on the teachers and/or insufficient funding. If you have 30% annual turnover, at some point you have to ask who was the constant in the system.
rocky1138 14y ago
I hate to be "that guy" but what does this have to do with hacking? Maybe someone can explain it to me, I am asking legitimately.
swaits 14y ago
Waiting for Superman. Watch it.
crazy1van 14y ago
Finally a teacher with the guts to put their money where their mouth is. I'm not sure I agree with the ins and outs of all the teacher's reasons, but I applaud him for quitting instead of just complaining. This is what people who have enough faith in themselves to find another job do when they are in a terrible situation. I'm tired of hearing teachers complain about life as a teacher, but never quit. That tells me that they don't have faith in the marketability of their skills to take the plunge and get a different job.
brownbat 14y ago
I wish I understood the arguments against testing more clearly. It seems as if the claim is that testing doesn't correlate with knowledge, since some kids "test well," or "test poorly," so it's a waste of time. I've known lots of folks who claim to know a subject well, but test poorly in it. I've never been able to verify it though, because the followup discussions about the concepts involved left me... uncertain at best. I'm not sure undemonstrable knowledge is really any kind of knowledge at all. But say we granted that an individual student's tests have a wide margin of error. Wouldn't the aggregate of tests for a given classroom or school still provide some information on whether or not a school was well or poorly run? (Assuming you use moving averages or something to soften noise.) Do standardized tests really have no value, no redeeming benefits?
phusuke 14y ago
Peggy hill is angry!

367 points by bwsewell 14y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bur...

Xcelerate 14y ago
Whoops.. I think I accidentally downvoted you. Someone vote him back up, could you? That's an interesting trend. I think it could be resolved by instead having the ones doing the teaching decide on what sorts of standards and tests should be used to appraise performance. Some of my family members are teachers, and I hear more and more about how they are given less freedom to teach creatively and are instead forced to administer useless, rote-memorization tests that assess, well, nothing really. It's getting kind of ridiculous.
- debacle 14y ago
  The problem right now is that the bureaucracy in place is a result of the CBAs of teachers unions preventing the firing of bad teachers or the introduction of regulations strictly for the sake of the student. In almost every instance of a public service, the right-but-left or left-but-right mentality of Americans creates a bureaucratic Mexican standoff: "We'll stop regulating you when you stop being shits." "We'll stop being shits when you stop regulating us." It's very easy to side with teachers as individuals, but teachers unions serve the good teachers and the bad teachers, and I would argue (without statistics, mind you) that teachers unions are just as much to blame for the current educational fiasco as incompetent bureaucracies, politics, ham-fisted regulations, and bad parenting.
  - deleted 14y ago
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  - 001sky 14y ago
    without statistics, mind you -- You don't need statistics. There is no measurement. This is the problem: Seniority rules. skill, virtue, talent are uncorrelated variables. This is by design, au fait.
vacri 14y ago
Isn't this rather self-evident, that those who work to gain control of the structure gain control of the structure, and those who don't, don't? It seems to just be a wordier variant of 'use it or lose it'. Does such a self-evident law really require the appellation 'Iron'?

deleted 14y ago

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hammock 14y ago

I... I... I... I... I... I... I... Is that how he teaches his students to write as well? edit: Hi downvoters, I understand parallelism. When it's used the way this teacher has used it, he risks coming across as whiny and juvenile. His point would come across more powerfully if he reframed his grievances in a way that shows their impact on the real victims, the children, as opposed to himself. "I have a dream" came from a place of hope and opportunity. King was laying out a roadmap for what progress would look like. Similarly, the Declaration of Independence was not a list of self-referential, logorrheic splatter. It contained specific, directed complaints combined with a plan of action. This man merely said I hate the world in a selfishly-worded cry for attention, threw up his hands and gave up. We do not say the same of King or the Founding Fathers.

abduhl 14y ago
It seemed to me that he was doing this on purpose as a stylistic choice to convey his frustrations with the system. Also, it sounds like he teaches math.
zellyn 14y ago
If you look at the "I have a dream speech" you'll see a similar form of repetition. Not that this letter is comparable. But it is a useful construct.
MartinCron 14y ago
Is that how he teaches his students to write as well? If those students can write something this straightforward, impassioned, and moving, they'll be better writers than most high school graduates.
phil 14y ago
You might find the parallel structure listing grievances familiar, since it was used in the Declaration of Independence (and many, many times since).
w1nterl0ng 14y ago
@Hammock, I would argue that the second half of that document was intended to be Parallelism as a Rhetorical Device. In terms of grammar, that may be how he teaches (at least for a class or two).

Osiris 14y ago

My mother is a school board member in a rural school district in Northern California. What I can from conversations with her is that it is often not the district's fault when there are issues, but the state's. The district is forced to come up with a budget months before the state approves their budget, so they don't even know if they are going to get the money they need. When money is low, they have gone to the community several times trying to pass a property tax to raise funds to keep teachers and maintain their facilities. The community has refused to fund the school each time. The district is constrained by their contract with the teachers which forces them to keep the most incompetent and highly paid teachers and get rid of the good but non-tenured new teachers (which are the ones that the students want to have). The way schools are funded are a major source of the problem. For example, they are funded per student with no regard for facilities, transportation, or other fixed costs. Lastly, there are too many crippling regulations that don't allow for flexibly to meet the various needs of students in varying districts. What works in the large LA County district is just not going to work in rural northern California. Throwing more regulations, tests, money, etc. at the system is not going to fix it. I really wish that a large group of educators (K-12, post-secondary), administrators, parents, etc. could get together and work out something different, perhaps even radically different.

cheez 14y ago
TL;DR send your kids to a private school.
- factorizer 14y ago
  right. why fix the system, when you can be part of an elite?
  - imbriaco 14y ago
    Because your responsibility is to your kids and not to some idealistic vision of what you could be doing to improve the school system as a whole.
    - 14y ago

xaa 14y ago

TL;DR: The writer, a math teacher, is quitting (edit: his) job because of increased bureaucracy and standardized tests. Mostly, it seems, standardized tests. The problem is, math is the subject which is BEST served by standardized tests. There is really no fuzzy aspect to K-12 math: answers are right or wrong. And there are of course many benefits to standardized testing like teacher and school evaluation, providing structure to the curriculum, etc. His rant reminds me of another front-page HN article today (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712230 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712230), where the author claims that tough technical interview questions at Google bear no correlation with programming skill. Sure....

Xcelerate 14y ago
The author of the letter is male. I disagree that math is best served by these particular standardized tests. Testing can be useful (particularly something like the AMC or AIME), but when you're given meaningless problems like calculating how many watermelons Jack can carry to the store, there's better ways of assessing a deep understanding of mathematics. Also, tests are frequently too long. This forces a student into choosing an answer quickly instead of eventually arriving at the correct solution.
- ditonal 14y ago
  Those meaningless low level problems are the basis for higher level skills. Studies have shown that students who are more capable of doing arithmetic without a calculator do better in college level math classes.* This is not the first time I've read complaints about standardized testing being unfair, nor people rolling their eyes at defenses of testing as people who just don't "get it". What I haven't seen much of is a thorough explanations of which tests are unfair and what specifically is bad about them. I just looked at the math section of the EXPLORE test. I would be very concerned if my child was unable to answer those questions and I would want my teacher to prioritize those basic skills before his so-called "deep-thinking" classes. Which tests are too long? It seems if tests are too long, we should shorten them. As an observer, it seems the standardized testing critics reach for any and all weaknesses of tests as a reason to shun them entirely, and it does raise suspicions they just hate the accountability. Standardized testing predicts college math performance. http://faculty.etsu.edu/stephen/diss-stephens.pdf http://faculty.etsu.edu/stephen/diss-stephens.pdf Less calculator usage in grade school correlates to better college math performance. http://www.math.jhu.edu/~wsw/ED/pubver.pdf http://www.math.jhu.edu/~wsw/ED/pubver.pdf

zupreme 14y ago

I found the following paragraph to be very poignant. "I’m tired of watching my students produce amazing things, which show their true understanding of 21st century skills, only to see their looks of disappointment when they don’t meet the arbitrary expectations of low-level state and district tests that do not assess their skills." I hope that this teacher finds happiness teaching in a more productive environment. Charter schools and some universities come to mind.

ryanwaggoner 14y ago

There's a huge conversation to be had about the quality of public K-12 education in this country, but I'm not sure this letter contributes much of anything to that conversation. The whole thing is so personal and subjective that it could have come from any school district in the country. Maybe the author is just a really bad teacher, and we're better off if he quits. Maybe this rant actually represents a data point about how NC squeezes out bad teachers. There's no way to know from what is written.

swordswinger12 14y ago

The author of the blog itself, Diane Ravitch, wrote a very interesting book called "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" on the topic of education reform. I'd encourage HNers to pick it up if this piqued their curiosity.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

There is a defence. An engaged, informed, active, body of parents who will take action to ensure their children receive best schooling and care available. Take 100 irate parents to the next North Carolina State Board meeting and have them raise individually one after the other motions of no-confidence in each member. Then try to elect this woman to the Board. Will that help. Yes if you keep up the pressure for the 14 - 18 years it takes your child to go through the system. There is a website / startup in there...

chii 14y ago
Perhaps part of the problem is that a lot of parents wash their hands free of the process, but complain when their kids don't get the high marks they think they ought to. And looking for someone to blame, instead of looking at making it work.

justin_vanw 14y ago

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it keeps teachers honest. Without testing, how do you measure teacher performance at all? How can you tell if someone who is capable of teaching well isn't just being lazy or getting distracted? So, if you aren't a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better. Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have. It's easy to point out problems. It's useful and important that people find flaws and fault. In this case, however, just pointing out the deficiencies in standardized testing doesn't help anyone unless it either leads to a more effective alternative, or improvements in standardized testing. Standardized tests might be very imperfect at measuring teacher performance, but it's far better to use the tool we have than to just throw up our arms and assume that all teachers are equally competent.

kstenerud 14y ago
"Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have." Are you sure about that? How do you know that a bad metric is better than no metric? It sounds a lot more like "We should be doing something. This is something. Therefore we should do it."
- justin_vanw 14y ago
  Sure, I agree that in a general sense just pulling a number out of the air is crap. Testing isn't wrong, it's just not as correlated to the things we would actually like to measure as we would like it to be. This is an open problem in the world, and solving it (besides potentially making the inventor fabulously wealthy) would dramatically change the world. How do you decide if someone is qualified for a job, or will be successful at a university? In reality we don't have a very solid way to figure that out, so lots of people that would have done well are passed over and lots of people get into universities and hired for jobs and end up failing. Testing is correlated to lots of things, and is quite nicely correlated to the quality of the training a student was given. I'm sure there is a better solution out there in the aether, but mankind hasn't discovered it yet.

tokenadult 14y ago

"I lost my job only due to my lack of seniority. I was devastated." He ("he" is correct; I was confused by the given name at first until looking the person up with a Google search) should blame the typical master contract with the teachers in the school district for that. That is a standard contract provision recommended by schoolteacher unions whether a state has a "union shop" or "right-to-work" rules. Usually, school districts cave in and adopt contract provisions like that, because in states where a union shop is not mandatory, and collective bargaining for public employees is not mandatory either, schoolteacher unions are still very influential political interest groups that can swing voter turnout in the typical low-turnout school board election. School boards have a lot more electoral incentive to align with the interests of schoolteacher unions than with the interests of learners. (The interests of learners align with favoring better teachers over worse teachers, rather than with favoring senior teachers over newly hired teachers.) The crucial voter action influencing the daily lives of teachers at work happens not at the federal level http://educationnext.org/the-election-contests-that-really-matter/ http://educationnext.org/the-election-contests-that-really-m... but at the state level and local level, where most of the funding for schooling is set (and what proportion of funding goes to anything other than staff compensation, by far the largest line item in any school budget, is set) and where work rules, especially priority for promotions or layoffs, are set. There is considerable evidence that seniority rules lead to higher numbers of teacher layoffs than would be necessary if administrators were allowed to make effectiveness the determining factor in issuing layoff notices, rather than length of service. http://educationnext.org/seniority-rules-lead-districts-to-increase-teacher-layoffs-and-undermine-teaching-quality/ http://educationnext.org/seniority-rules-lead-districts-to-i... A teacher who is doing a good job helping students learn is worth his or her weight in gold, but seniority doesn't match teacher quality sufficiently well to be the sole basis for determining promotions or layoffs in a particular school district. Actively identifying the most able teachers and encouraging the least effective teachers to find other employment, regardless of seniority, could do much to improve the efficiency of the public school system and free up resources to reward the best teachers better than they are rewarded now. http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-how-much-good-teacher-worth http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-h... My Google search to verify the teacher's background turned up this post from the teacher's blog http://mgmfocus.com/2012/10/21/i-used-to-love-teaching/ http://mgmfocus.com/2012/10/21/i-used-to-love-teaching/ covering some of the same issues, with a different slant for the blog's different audience. "I give up. They win. I have joined the ranks of parents who have come to realize that we are only empowered to do one thing: take care of our own. I hope that things change, but I don’t have the energy, the money, or the time to continue beating my head into a wall. And if the choices have run out for my toddler when he’s ready for school, I will do it myself. Maybe I’ll do it for others, as well. Who knows." AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the several interesting comments. Wisty asks how teachers might be identified as effective teachers in the interest of making more effective teachers available to students. The same scholar of education policy I linked to for the general point that effective teachers make a difference has written extensively about identifying those teachers. These links http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/effective-teacher-every-classroom-lofty-goal-how-do-it http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/effective-teacher-... http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-deselection http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-deselectio... from his website (which link in turn to longer-form formal articles on the issues) are a sample of the research on the subject. Identifying teachers with good "value-added" is not at all easy, and there are immense incentives to cheat while attempting to identify such teachers, but there is also an enormous payoff from doing better than is done now in identifying effective teachers.

R_Edward 14y ago

Great letter exposing the toxic level of administratium in the air in NC public schools, but I think it would have been better to have left out the financial paragraph. The author presumably knew what the pay scale was before he accepted the opportunity and moved his family across the country to live there. Complaining about it afterward makes him look foolish, and this teacher is clearly no fool.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

We have a brilliant system for determining the quality of teachers - and it is one used throughout the private sector with considerable effect. Its called a competent boss Every Head knows which ones to get rid of and which ones to keep. Every Head also knows if they get rid of the bad ones, they will need double the budget to hire in new, also good teachers. Especially if every other Head does this at the same time.

sodomizer 14y ago

The school bureaucracy is a symptom of something else, as is the monotonous testing and the union power. The American educational system changed its premise back in the 1960s. Since that time, we have become addicted to assembly line, one-size-fits-all, bulk format education in which we put kids through a ton of information and measure them by how much they retain. Not the quality of what they retain, and not their actual skills, but what they've memorized. By prioritizing memorized facts over learned application, we are losing a lot of our most talented kids. To compound the problem further, this one-size-fits-all approach isn't calibrated to the smart kids, but to the average. In public schools, it's also impossible to send home the disruptive kids. The result is a system that is so hobbled by contradictions that it is dysfunctional. Dysfunction attracts lazy administrators who like to use test metrics to force teachers to teach to the test, thus making everyone look like a success, even when the graduates aren't good at doing anything. The recent spate of test-cheating scandals should show us exactly why these tests are in favor among administrators. Instead of a broad open-ended task like "teach these kids to reason," all you have to do is make sure they make a pretty bell curve on the standardized test.

yequalsx 14y ago

There seem to be quite a few people who want to do away with tenure and seniority rules as a means of fixing a broken system. Is there any evidence that doing this would fix the system or make it better? Academic freedom, tenure, and seniority (to a lesser extent) have a lot of positives. Getting rid of these should only be done if the reasons are compelling and valid. What is required is not a collection of anecdotes of how tenure protects bad teachers - there are equally many anecdotes showing that tenure protects students and educational integrity - but rather statistics, facts, and well reasoned arguments. There are large portions of the United States where parents without any training or knowledge on teaching have very strong opinions on what should or should not be said in the classroom. Getting rid of tenure and academic freedom will, in some areas, lead to ignorant people making important educational decisions. Will the physics department stop talking about the Big Bang? Does the geology department stop talking about processes taking millions of years to work? Does the history department only talk about the good parts of Manifest Destiny? Instead of tenure maybe 5 year, renewable contracts would work. I don't know. I do think it is in society's best interest if teachers treat society as the client and not the students as the client. Doing the latter leads to dilution of standards. Doing the former without fear of being fired, at least in me, leads to grading on knowledge and not fluff.

aroberge 14y ago
Tenure and Academic freedom are applicable to University professors, not to teachers.
- drharris 14y ago
  Why? Source, or are you just making stuff up?
- johnrgrace 14y ago
  In the United States, public school teachers do get tenure in most locations which protects them for being fired except for a limited set of reasons or teacher supply being greater than demand.
- saraid216 14y ago

zem 14y ago

> I refuse to watch my students being treated like prisoners. There are other ways. It’s a shame that we don’t have the vision to seek out those alternatives. if i could fix just one thing about the educational system, this would be it. it's the laziest option, so it ends up being implemented pretty much everywhere (this is not a us-specific problem; i grew up in dubai, and every time i visit my old school the place looks more like a prison), and all it does is alienate and disinvest students at precisely the time they need to be engaged and nurtured.

deleted 14y ago

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imroot 14y ago

My wife was a full time teacher (she's now working on her Ph.D in educational technologies), and she's said the same thing over, over, and over again. Her first year out of her probationary year was a Kindergarden teacher. She had a girl in her class who had telltale signs of EBD (Emotional/Behavioral Disorders), and spent the year trying to convince the girl's mother to seek the appropriate (free) care from the educational system. The mother refused to attend any meeting; my wife eventually drove to her house to find the girl living in a "crack den" (her words). The girl's mother refused to allow her to be tested for EBD, and the girl barely finished the year with passing marks. Over the summer, the district noticed that my wife wanted to help kids...so, instead of putting her back in Kindergarden the next year, she was reassigned to a juvenile detention center/lockdown facility, where the kids didn't want to be helped. There were instances where they'd pull the kids out of her class, one by one, until it was just her and another student, before they come in to arrest the student for a crime, or, have a disgruntled student show up on my doorstep at midnight with a handgun in his waistband. Teachers get shit on by society, coworkers, and parents. The good ones are worth their weight in gold. The poor ones need to be replaced with better ones -- the problem is that there's no true way to rank teachers and how they teach that isn't subject to tampering or isn't completely subjective based on inter-school politics. There's not a good solution to the teaching problem...which is why I'm excited to look at what the technology/startup community comes out with over the next few years. Open Source SIS'es/Course Management/Educational Networking is something that can make the teacher's life easier, and provide pointes and guidance for parents who want to learn more, or students who want to self-learn/pace themselves faster or slower.

chii 14y ago
I m sorry to hear about the experiences of your wife - i feel that whoever reassigned her to juvie might've even done it with the best of intentions, but is incompetent and made the worst possible decision. The open courses may lead to a more distributed education paradigm, and i think that ways lies the future. However, the process of ranking is such a subjective method, that i don't believe there will ever be a way to do so and not have it tampered with either via politics or personal gain.

scott_meade 14y ago

Good for Dr. Atkinson! Anyone who doesn't think teachers work hard enough, care enough, or are skilled enough is full of it. When I go to my kids' after school activities and see teachers there night after night, on their own time and dime. When I see teachers buying supplies out of their own pockets. When I see teachers in school weeks before start to ready their classrooms. When I see these things I have little tolerance for the sentiment that teachers just slack off. All that happens with this approach is that the best teachers say, "I don't need this crap" and leave.

sapien 14y ago

One of the big tragedies here is the seniority based tenure system that caused a beloved energetic teacher such as this to have to leave the west coast. There was an interesting discussion about this in an interview on reddit with a teachers union president: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/124dur/i_am_the_president_of_the_american_federation_of/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/124dur/i_am_the_presid...

samspot 14y ago

I was in public school in the Greenville, NC area from 1985-1998, and I felt I had mostly good teachers and was adequately prepared for college. I happen to be a good test taker, and so my experience is likely different from others with different skills. At the time we only had end-of-grade tests, and not for every subject. My impression is that things have gotten a lot worse/more political since I went to school. I wonder if any long-time teachers care to comment on the changes over the last 30 years?

joncalhoun 14y ago

Does anyone have any demographics for the HN community's age? I am curious how many people here have attended schools with standardized tests. If you did attend a high school with standardized tests - do you feel it negatively affected your education? How? Do you have specific examples or courses? For clarity - I am not claiming that standardized tests do/don't help. I just want to hear form recent HS grads.

icelancer 14y ago
I took standardized tests in high school to pass 11th and 12th grade. At best it was an annoyance. I overslept one of them (we took them all in one week, one day for each subject) and was kicked out of my home by my mother. I simply took both tests (Reading, Math) in the same day and finished with honors in both. It taught me nothing. It was a waste of time. Why test the kids who are naturally good test-takers or who had parents who intellectually stimulated them (me, fortunately) - it strikes me as an exercise in mental masturbation.

danielweber 14y ago

I will not spend another day wondering how I can have classes that are full inclusion, and where 50% of my students have IEPs, yet I’m given no support. I had to fire our public school (in North Carolina; this was in the first district he moved to in the state) because it took them 3 years to do an IEP. In another example, a family member moved out of state, and it took the school two years to call up and ask if she would still be attending. I'm know in some places the teachers are the problem, but the teachers we met were working their hardest. The administration just didn't seem to give a shit. Teacher responsibility is a great thing, but we also need administrator responsibility.

acdha 14y ago
> Teacher responsibility is a great thing, but we also need administrator responsibility. I cannot upvote this enough. All too often, the administrators get a free pass for blaming everything on the teachers and/or insufficient funding. If you have 30% annual turnover, at some point you have to ask who was the constant in the system.

rocky1138 14y ago

I hate to be "that guy" but what does this have to do with hacking? Maybe someone can explain it to me, I am asking legitimately.

swaits 14y ago

Waiting for Superman. Watch it.

crazy1van 14y ago

Finally a teacher with the guts to put their money where their mouth is. I'm not sure I agree with the ins and outs of all the teacher's reasons, but I applaud him for quitting instead of just complaining. This is what people who have enough faith in themselves to find another job do when they are in a terrible situation. I'm tired of hearing teachers complain about life as a teacher, but never quit. That tells me that they don't have faith in the marketability of their skills to take the plunge and get a different job.

brownbat 14y ago

I wish I understood the arguments against testing more clearly. It seems as if the claim is that testing doesn't correlate with knowledge, since some kids "test well," or "test poorly," so it's a waste of time. I've known lots of folks who claim to know a subject well, but test poorly in it. I've never been able to verify it though, because the followup discussions about the concepts involved left me... uncertain at best. I'm not sure undemonstrable knowledge is really any kind of knowledge at all. But say we granted that an individual student's tests have a wide margin of error. Wouldn't the aggregate of tests for a given classroom or school still provide some information on whether or not a school was well or poorly run? (Assuming you use moving averages or something to soften noise.) Do standardized tests really have no value, no redeeming benefits?

phusuke 14y ago

Peggy hill is angry!