The Teaching Profession
New York Times: A Teacher Grows Disillusioned After a ‘Fail’ Becomes a ‘Pass’
I’m sure this is covered ad nauseam, in fact just a brief search on Technorati for the title of the peice yields a hundred and forty posts about the article. Anyway, I’ll toss my hat into the ring and weigh in because this is very much an issue that will directly affect me if I continue to be a secondary education major. Though, stories like these certainly make one take a long hard look at the future and consider other options.
Thomas Hochmann gives a great analysis of the situation, which I think anyone would agree with. You can read it here if you want to know the dirty details. I’d highly recommend reading the New York Times article, because it’s essential to our nation that people realize the challenges that educators face today.
We cannot have a strong democracy without strong citizens and strong citizens require an excellent education. There’s no two ways about it. Are we getting that kind of excellent education? Teachers like Mr. Lampros clearly show passion for their line of work, just look at his credentials and you’ll find a stellar teacher.
According to the New York Times:
He has master’s degrees in both statistics and math education and has won awards for his teaching at the college level.
So it’s definitely not a question of ability. Mr. Lampros was not a teacher that just scraped by in college, got his certifications and went into the teaching system. This isn’t a story about a teacher that was “adequate” for the job, this is the story about a professional that seems to have honestly, packed it in and has gone home. The school that he left behind surely has lost an excellent math teacher, which is a fiasco in of itself because our nation already lacks good math and science teachers.
Mr. Lampros has resigned and returned to his home state, Michigan. The principal and officials in the Department of Education say that he missed 24 school days during the last year for illness and personal reasons. He missed two of the three sets of parent-teacher conferences. He also had conflicts with an assistant principal, Antonio Arocho, over teaching styles. Mr. Lampros said all of this was true
As I stated before, he’s totally given up and gone home. You don’t miss that many schools for illness and personal reasons. He probably had difficulty with the cognitive dissonance and probably didn’t want to be part of that fiasco any longer. ‘Teaching styles’ I suppose is just a way of putting it lightly. He probably had a good argument, and the principal came down hard, which is why he had ‘personal reasons’ for not showing up to work.
The real meat of the issue is the raw numbers. How many bodies go into the school, how many make it out. That’s all Arocho probably cared about.
The written record, in the form of the minutely detailed charts Mr. Lampros maintained to determine student grades, supports his account. Colleagues of his from the school — a counselor, a programmer, several fellow teachers — corroborated key elements of his version of events. They also describe a principal worried that the 2006 graduation rate of 72.5 percent would fall closer to 50 or 60 percent unless teachers came up with ways to pass more students.
As an education major, this already has me raising my eyebrows. There’s so much talk of “excellence” in the education field. Teachers have to pass tests and display “excellence” in their content area after attending schools that boast of “excellence” in training teachers. We spend four to five years studying hard and working hard to make sure that we make the grades, so that we can go into the classroom and do our part to strengthen the education system in America.
Last time I checked, the word “strengthen” does not mean “lower the grading standards so that we can pass more people and avoid any punitive action under the No Child Left Behind Act”
“It’s almost as if you stick to your morals and your ethics, you’ll end up without a job,” Mr. Lampros said in an interview. “I don’t think every school is like that. But in my case, it was.”
This is the quote that made me worry the most. I have very strong opinions as well as a strong sense of morality and ethics. I would rather quit a job than compromise them. Is this the decision that I’ll be forced to make? Will I have to resign, pack up all my stuff and leave a school because I encounter the same administrative practices that Mr. Lampros encountered? I know for a fact that I would have done the same thing that Mr. Lampros did in that situation, but it still does not sit well with me to imagine that such a thing is possible.