Taylor Mali answers back.
“I decide to bite my tongue instead of his…we’re eating, after all, and this is supposed to be polite conversation…’I mean you’re a teacher Taylor, c’mon. What do you make?’ And I wished he hadn’t done that. Asked me to be honest.”
Taylor Mali is a former teacher and now full-time globe-trotting poet / advocate and recruiter for the teaching profession. He’s written a book: What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World
In an era when education reform is sorely needed and when boys are looking for role models who will lead and inspire, it great to see a man like Mali be unapologetic in stating the importance of his profession.
Below is an early, solo, slam-poetry performance by Mali of the same material, raw and unpolished.
About the Editors
I love Mr. Mali’s work. Possibly my favorite, other than the above, is this one: http://taylormali.com/poems-online/like-lilly-like-wilson/
Teachers are great, the overwhelming majority of them. Having said that, if they’re bad and aren’t held accountable, they need to be fired ASAP.
In Atlanta last year more than 100 teachers were found guilty of changing grades. The students didn’t know, they thought they had all earned that higher grade. In reality it was an orchestrated move to keep a district’s test score above where it otherwise would’ve been.
That’s the frustrating thing about the Chicago strike. On average their pay is 70K +, far above average salary in Chicago. I’m all for people making money, but when only some 30 odd % of Chicago students go on to college, fewer if you’re a minority, then there’s a problem.
Trey- What you are saying is the core of the argument in Chicago and for what happened to students and teachers in Atlanta. Students performance, and teachers performance(and pay) and the amount of resources allocated to a particular school system are based on a standardized system that is not accurate and does not work well. While I don’t condone behavior like in Atlanta, I’m relatively certain that if the Atlanta School Board , the salaries, and the schools themselves had the resources they need instead of teachers buying school supplies out of their own pockets, and if they didn’t have to live in fear of losing their jobs based on an evaluation that is flawed, then that, combined with the freedom to tailor the education to the student, like situations may not happen. Let’s also not forget Atlanta was behavior that resulted as the result of unspoken mandates from an administration that was crooked to begin with.
The core of the Chicago issue is for that city to figure out. From what I’ve read Rahm and the Union chief got off to a bad start, he made some changes to their work day and they were PO’d from the get go. I read that they wanted a 36% increase over 4 years, but may ultimately settle on around 18% increase over the same time period. Again, I’m all for people making money, especially teachers, but supposedly the school system is losing money hand over fist.
I know there were some issues with the standard tests and I know that lots of countries do not use them at all. That’s cool, if the schools aren’t going to use them there must be some way to ensure that the teachers are teaching and that the kids are learning. I can’t think of any other industry that doesn’t monitor what their employees do and how well they do it.
A teacher losing their job is a rare thing. If said teacher fears for losing their job because of an evaluation then they deserve to find another job.
It’s not the fear of evaluation. It’s the type of evaluation. Standardized testing does not provide accurate data to evaluate a teacher. Students are not products, so you can not evaluate educators like you evaluate a person producing widgets. The factors that come in to play are so varied that it becomes necessary to evaluate teachers by many observable points of data. Student performance is one point of data, not the whole picture.
I’m from Chicago and have been through the public school system here. In fact, the last teachers’ strike was when I was in Kindergarten. I have these few things to say about the teachers’ strike..
1. The so-called teachers are turning out children who are barely literate. The teachers themselves can’t even write a proper sentence or use proper grammar.
2. The schools themselves need more money for books and supplies not the teachers.
3. The teachers claim to spend all summer long lesson planning and then also claim they spend hours before and after school lesson planning. Does it really take that long to tweak the lesson plan you used last year??
4. If teachers don’t use the time they have while students are in enrichment classes like phys ed, music, art, computer, study hall or on lunch to grade papers/tests they are incredibly inefficient.
5. Where do teachers get the nerve to think they are above being evaluated?
6. Where do teachers expect the city to get the money to pay them all 38% more? Chicago is broke, our property taxes are outrageous and our sales tax in nearly 11%!!
7. Unemployment is nearly 10% and teachers expect their jobs to be secure for shoddy work. NOBODY has job security in this market.
8. Karen Lewis and her thugs are an embarrassment to the teaching profession. What a joke!!
9. Get your entitled overpaid asses back in the classroom!!
Jennifer, I am not from Chicago, so some of your points I can not address. But as a teacher for 11 years, I can assure you of this: teachers do spend a lot of time planning and preparing lessons during the summer and after school (besides grading). In my years of teaching, I have never taught the same lesson the same way. Each class demands a different approach. Plus, good teachers are always looking for better ways to teach skills and reach new generations of students. Think of a professional fighter. The training for each bout may be similar, but planned specifically for each particular opponent. Even when they aren’t fighting, they are constantly training, eating right, and doing the kinds of things they need to do to say on top of their game. Teachers are on the front lines, they are fighters. They must be prepared to teach to the child who lives in a car, to the child who didn’t eat breakfast, to the child who’s strung out mother hasn’t been home in days, to the child who’s been abused, to the child who’s spoiled beyond belief, the the child who thought about suicide just before class, to the friends of these children who are concerned more about their friends than the French Revolution… I can go on. Teachers teach skills and are trying to positively affect the world around them; at the same time, the psychological and sociological ills of our society are confronting them and their classrooms on a daily basis.
I’m not addressing your other issues, I know. But the tone of your response is something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately: punish the teacher. A majority of teachers do not fit your description in my personal experiences.
As long as teachers have labor unions like service and manufacturing workers, they will be thought of in the the same way, NOT as professionals. The AFT and NEA remind me of the scene in “Animal House” when the Deltas are picking which students are going to be admitted to the fraternity. The decide to take all of them, derelicts and losers included, because “We need the dues.” Evaluating teachers based on standardized test scores is impossible, because every teacher works with different kinds of kids, whose ability to learn covers a wide spectrum. But there is a way to evaluate teachers. Let the other teachers do it, since they know who is pulling their weight, and who is not. Base it on random observations by colleagues, and use a graded checklist. Assume that teachers are actually professionals, and let them evaluate other teachers on a curve, instantly canning those that are in the bottom percentiles. But of course the unions would go crazy if anyone suggested such a thing, because they would lose a lot of control over the process, which now consists of never letting anyone go. And they need the dues.
In a six year period only 1 in 2500 Illinois teachers lost their jobs due to performance or misconduct, compared to 1 in 57 doctors and 1 in 97 lawyers. Looks like the union is more interested in protecting their union due base than anything remotely related to the children they are charged with educating. I hardly think fear of dismissal is a motivating factor here.
http://hiddenviolations.com/stories/?prcss=display&id=358596