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It's boardrooms vs. classrooms
(by Dave Lange - March 31, 2011)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
It's boardrooms vs. classrooms
Schoolteachers have had a profound influence on my life. During my school days, I had some excellent teachers, some average ones and a few others. I learned from all of them.
I also learned from my mom, who had a master's degree in education and taught at a parochial high school for 20 years. And I've been influenced by my wife, Linda Lange, a special-education teacher, who retired in 2009 after 35 years in one of Cleveland's inner-ring suburban public school districts.
Having received quite an education on the education profession during that time, I find some of the criticisms of teachers by people who apparently consider themselves experts to be somewhat curious.
My wife graduated near the top of her high school class and earned her bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, with dual majors in special and elementary education. She could have excelled in any profession she chose. But she wanted to teach special children. She went on to earn a master's degree in educational supervision and continued her studies to earn certification for administration. She could have been a principal or other supervisor. But she wanted to teach special children. Every year, she attended seminars and took more college classes to gain more knowledge and expertise in her chosen field. She wanted to be the best teacher she could be.
It would be my opinion that my wife, Linda Lange, was the best special-education teacher her school district ever had. It would be a fact that, in the later years of her career, she was the most experienced special-education teacher in the district and, based on her advanced and continuing education, probably the most qualified one as well.
Some of today's critics claim that greater experience and knowledge do not make better teachers. They do not apply that upside-down rationale to lawyers, engineers or other professionals, none of whom begin their careers at the top of the pay scale. The critics really are not concerned about the quality of education. They want more teachers at the low end of the pay scale.
After 20 years of teaching, my wife was earning a decent salary. But there are plumbers, carpenters, policemen, accountants and insurance salesmen who make more. And now the pension fund to which she invested a substantial portion of her earnings over the years is being assailed by some of the same obscenely compensated Wall Street crooks whose reckless practices drove public retirement systems to the brink of bankruptcy.
My wife is fortunate that most, but not all, of the supervisors she had during her time in public education knew the difference between good educators and those who should be doing something else with their lives.
But she is all too familiar with such human propensities as assigning the best teachers to the most difficult students, who do not score well on standardized tests. She knows about administrators who confuse geniality with competence and value diffidence over professionalism.
Politicians, corporatists and their followers would place the future of educators and education in such hands. They have simplistic answers to complex problems with education today -- from "merit" pay based on fanciful merits to legislating age discrimination through the abolishment of collective bargaining and seniority. They are too busy kissing up to their millionaire friends with unlimited resources in the boardrooms to really care what teachers with real experience and real knowledge are accomplishing with limited resources in the classrooms.
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