Putting Children First

Obviously, when it comes to education policy, we need to put children first. That is why when we are faced with the potential of teacher layoffs, we need to make sure that we abolish seniority as a criterion. Because we value children and education so much, we must make sure that the least “effective” teachers are laid off first, not the least senior. After all, children first.

Or so say an enormous number of people, relatively few of whom actually work in classrooms every day.

Most of the arguments against this line of argument address the question of teacher effectiveness and how we might recognize it. And there are a lot of good objections there. But I want to address the ridiculous idea of putting the needs of students ahead of the needs of adults. I want to question this idea of children first.

Over at Gotham Schools, I challenged commenters to come up with a workable alternative to seniority for layoff decision-making. That meant an alternative that would cover all teachers, would not be subject to easy manipulation (e.g. from favoritism or backlash), and would produce to unambiguous priorities in layoffs. The only response was a Bad Attendance First Out (BAFO) plan.

As I wrote over there, BAFO is legally unworkable. It could run afoul of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act Family and Medical Leave Act, the federal Uniformed Servicemembers Employment and Re-Employment Rights Act and the New York Human Rights Law. That's a problem. But in my view, that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the children first thinking behind this proposal.

Should teachers be allowed to take sick days? Should they be allowed to take their own children to doctor's appointments? Should they be allowed take a day off to attend a funeral? What about their parent's funeral? What about -- god forbid -- their own child's funeral? Or, should they suffer the punishment of being higher on the layoff list if they do any of these things?

What about being stuck on a train that has had mechanical problems? What about their car being broadsided by a car that ran a red light? What about having a heart attack and therefore being hospitalized? Should these teachers  be held responsible for the time they miss and be put higher on the layoff list?

If you want to suggest that teachers get too many vacation days in addition to the scheduled school vacations, I might agree with you. But sometimes, teachers need personal days. Sometimes they really need sick days.

The children first thinking of so many non-teachers is premised on the idea that teachers should have less rights than any other workers in this country, because -- after all -- children first. Unlike other workers, they should not be able to take vacation. Unlike others, they should not be allowed to get sick. Unlike others, they should not be allowed to go to funerals. Unlike others, nothing in their own personal lives should ever be more important than their jobs. They should take pay cuts, give up the pensions they were promised, suffer arbitrary (and often capricious) judgments at the hands of their undertrained and undersupported supervisors. Unlike others, they should give up their lunch hours and work beyond any reasonable number of “work hours.”

According to non-teachers, the laws that protect all other workers and the rights of all other workers should not apply to teachers. The contracts that schools and districts sign with teachers should not be binding on the schools and districts. The standards for workplaces and treatment of employees that matter in other contexts should not apply to schools and teachers. After all, children first.

I'm sorry, but we cannot always put children first.

Oh, wait......I'm not sorry.

What is Tenure?

In this country, most of us can be fired from our jobs for virtually any reason – however dumb, inane or counterproductive. We can be fired because of our taste in music, because we made a bad joke, because we are too good at our jobs, or because someone just doesn’t like us. If you do not have a contract, you can even be fired for no reason at all. You boss can fire you simply because s/he feels like it.

If you do not have a contract, there is a short list of reasons why you cannot be fired (e.g., gender, race, age, disability and in some places sexual orientation) but an infinitely long list of reasons why you can be fired.

It makes some sense that private employers should be able to set their own standards for employment, and that such organization’s supervisors be empowered to make all kind of decisions. That is kind of what it means to be a private business.

However, public organizations have a different moral calculus. They operate for the public good and serve as a sort of trust on behalf of the public. We empower their management to make decisions in the furtherance of those public goals, but those managers do not own the organizations, divisions, departments or work groups. There are any number of reasons that might be acceptable for a private organization to fire someone that are inappropriate for a public organization.

The only acceptable reason for a public organization to fire someone is that they are unable in some way to serve the public goals of the organization. Obviously, such inability could take many forms, but fundamentally that’s it. (A chairman of the EEOC in Washington DC who does not believe that that law should be used to combat discrimination against minorities is one such (purely) hypothetical example. A meat inspector for the USDA who is both color blind and has a poor sense of small probably could not support the USDA’s mission. And school workers who cannot handle children or fulfill their roles in supporting the educational process also should be removed.)

Tenure for K-12 public school teachers is not a guarantee of lifetime employment, despite what many would have you believe. Rather, it is a right to contest termination in some kind of formal and binding way (i.e. due process). It is certainly not as complicated as a death penalty trial, but it is more detailed than merely begging your boss to reconsider his/her decision.

Tenure means that if a principal or a district wants to terminate a teacher, the teacher gets to challenge them on the reasons. It forces the district to make the case – to present evidence and make the argument – that this teacher cannot do the job. Because tenure is only granted after multiple years of positive job reviews, there is a certain level of presumption in favor of the teacher. After all, the district is claiming that something has changed, something that their own managers and records said was fine in the past.

That is all tenure is. It is an earned right for experienced teachers to say, “If I have years of good evaluations, why are they firing me now?” and to have an impartial judge (i.e. a mutually agreed upon arbiter) weigh the evidence.

Does that seem unfair to you? Or does it seem like something that every worker should be able to earn?

What do I mean by "More Thoughtful"?

Is this more thoughtful? I hope so. I hope that this blog is more thoughtful that most of what you read about education or education policy. But that is not really what the title of my new blog refers to.

Title refers to the need generally for society to be more thoughtful, and particularly the need for more thoughtfulness in education.

Our schools need to prepare students to be more thoughtful, and to do this we need more thoughtful teachers. Teachers need to think more about what they are doing in the short term, especially how it fits into their longer term goals for their student. Teachers should think more, individually and as a group, about how their long term goals fit together and how those longer term goals taken together comprise a meaningful education.

Of course, shifting our teacher corps to a more thoughtful stance requires more thoughtful school leadership. I do not mean to imply that such a thing is easy. School leaders have inundated with responsibilities and cries for attention from all areas and every imaginable constituency. So much falls to school leaders that it is hard for them to have time to think, let alone to be thoughtful. But we need our leaders to lead, not just run things and respond to crises. If we are going to have more thoughtful teachers, their leaders need to model this behavior, encourage it and reward it. We need more thoughtful school leaders.

The chain goes on. How do we get more thoughtful school leaders? Well, their supervisors must also be more thoughtful. They must model, encourage and reward thoughtfulness. And so on, and so on.....

Obviously, high quality schools are not simply a product of thoughtfulness. There are a lot of technical issue, concrete know how, experience, habits and other factors that contribute, as well. I will address many of those things in this blog, too. In fact, most of what I address will be fairly concrete, and might appear to be removed from this idea of thoughtfulness. However, it will always be motivated by my ultimate concern for thoughtfulness both as a goal and a means in education.