Go ahead, admit it. At some point during the last school year, you wondered why you chose education. You could almost feel your blood pressure rising when you heard a perfect stranger--whether it was the governor of New Jersey or a bystander at a soccer game--rant about your career. Maybe you just tried to avoid that scenario by skipping family gatherings or backing out of block parties. You had one goal in mind: to steer clear of any situation that might require you to answer an acquaintance’s question with the phrase, “I am a teacher.”
Then it happened. You saw the look on a child’s face at the moment he mastered a new concept. A mother stopped you in the hallway to thank you for helping her daughter. You got your paycheck on the second Friday of the month. Suddenly, you remembered why you decided to become a teacher.
That’s right, educators do what we do because we want to make a difference. But we shouldn’t be embarrassed to also say that we do what we do because we need to make a living.
If you’re wishing for the good old days when teachers were revered or at least respected, you’ll have to go back awfully far. It was more than 60 years ago when French-born American historian Jacques Martin Barzun wrote “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”
Those of us who have been in the field a long time know that these bouts of teacher bashing come around as often as new theories on child brain development or strategies for classroom management. Still, it doesn’t matter if you are a grizzled veteran or at the start of your career—these attacks hurt. But we can’t continue to simply retreat into a corner and lick our wounds.
As a new school year begins, it’s time to challenge the false assumptions made and misinformation put forth by our critics. Like a football team that returns to the field after a losing season, we need to work hard and get the pride back.
The following essays were written with that goal in mind. The current New Jersey Teacher of the Year writes about the remarkable professionals she met as she toured the state during her sabbatical. A Hipp Grant winner reminds us that as teachers we are all innovators and that our creativity must not be taken for granted. A CEO-turned educator challenges the notion that schools should employ the cut-throat approach that is perceived to exist in the business world. A teacher who works in the same school he attended explains how he and his colleagues are determined to do right by the children of Camden. And a local president proclaims that we should not be ashamed of what we do or of what we make.
If our elected officials and the general public don’t recognize the tremendous importance and the inherent challenges in the work we do, then we must show them. We teach kids every day. Now it’s time to educate everyone else.
Oh, the amazing educators I met
Maryann Woods-Murphy
It was the end of March and I was in a taxi on my way to NBC studios in New York, about to speak live on “The Ed Show.” A Washington D.C.-based producer had called me that morning to ask me to talk about how the cuts to education funding will affect New Jersey teachers. Minutes before, I called my daughter Melynda, herself a teacher. I told her how scared I was to speak live, especially on a national television show. I wondered if I could do it.
Melynda quickly responded, “Mom, you can’t be nervous. That’s a luxury you cannot afford right now! Too many people are losing jobs. They’re depending on you. Just go do it!”
My daughter’s words of encouragement were just the shot in the arm I needed to stand up for public education. As I made my way to the studio, I felt proud to be a New Jersey teacher and even prouder to have the chance to represent us all.
This year, I’ve had the honor of being the New Jersey State Teacher of the Year. I’ve seen my colleagues from the north to the south of the state working magic with the children they teach. Despite this year’s many challenges to public education, my fellow teachers have remained undaunted, energized, and focused on why we are all here – the kids!
I’ve seen the joyful connections of student pen pals who collaborated online through social justice projects. I’ve watched teachers simplify math operations with colorful blocks. I’ve seen our students speaking Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, and French while they collect data for science experiments and create stories in the target language to share with others around the planet via Skype.
Every single day, in classrooms across our state, history comes alive, music and art are celebrated, and the habits of scientific and mathematical thinking are cultivated. I’ve even seen students growing their own vegetables to use in healthy meals they would cook and share!
And how does all of this happen? Story by story! The teachers I have met have told me why they feel passionate about what they do. Their eyes light up when they tell me about their students’ “a-ha” moments: those perfectly spontaneous instances that come as the result of their hard work and tireless efforts.
As I have traveled the state, it’s been gratifying to share with my fellow teachers the story of how my husband Joe and I learned Spanish 30 years ago by moving to Spain in 1978 and making a pact to speak no English. My story has opened the door for my colleagues to share their own path to teaching, their inspiration for igniting hope in their students, and the obstacles and barriers they have faced along the road.
I’ve listened to my colleagues mourn the loss of the jobs of admired colleagues because of budget cuts. They are concerned that some of the new educational reforms will actually widen the achievement gap rather than close it. I’ve learned that New Jersey teachers think, care, and work hard to make this state the fine example of best practices it has become.
Teachers have told me that they want more time to collaborate, to learn from each other’s experience and expertise. They want meaningful and appropriate professional development and professional learning communities. Teachers want to share what they do and see in their classrooms every day not only with school administrators, but with legislators and policy makers.
This month, I’ll be in the classroom once again as a Spanish teacher at Northern Highlands Regional High School in Allendale. Back at school, I will continue to stand alongside you to help our state flourish and grow. I know I’ll be in good company.
Thank you for letting me serve you this year. It’s been the journey of a lifetime!
The spirit of innovation lives in our classrooms
Rita Williams
They are here in New Jersey’s towns and cities, on the beaches, in the parks, in malls--they are everywhere! But one of the best places to catch glimpses of innovators is in our public schools. They come in all ages, shapes, and colors and are visible without special equipment (at least most of the time).
It feels amazing to have a close encounter with an innovator. You will feel no fear. You will be inspired to learn about everything. You will think great thoughts, do good deeds, and create!
Innovators are predisposed to come up with ideas that no one has even dared to dream. They are our “outside of the box” thinkers. When they brainstorm, they may think aloud. Innovators are visionaries. J.K. Rowling, Elvis Presley, Walt Disney, Claude Monet, Albert Einstein, Margaret Sanger, Steve Jobs, and Oprah Winfrey are some examples. In the end, all innovators have certain traits in common--the ability to generate lots of ideas, the inspiration to make some of those ideas reality, and the motivation (some might call it chutzpah) to never give up. They can’t help but make a difference. Jobs put it best: “I want to put a ding in the universe.”
I’m not famous, but I am an innovator. I’m also an art educator who works hard every day in our noble profession to make small dings in my tiny universe.
I recently created a new unit of lessons for my kindergarten and first-grade artists called “Young Leonardos.” We use Leonardo da Vinci as our role model for learning about everything. Not only was he an artist, but he was a scientist, a musician, an engineer, a writer, an inventor, and, of course, one of our most famous innovators. This curricular unit has art as its core and includes science, literacy, world languages, music, and engineering.
Thanks to two grant awards from the NJEA Frederick L. Hipp Foundation for Excellence in Education, we are able to enjoy an unusual and innovative program that encourages discovery for my youngest and most inquisitive students. Writing a grant proposal helped me stretch my abilities to think innovatively and create goals for rich learning experiences for my students. The funds are used to purchase materials for curricular enhancement such as books, CDs, art supplies, microscopes, scientific specimens, and materials for family learning events. It has been such an amazing experience, I encourage all New Jersey educators to apply for Hipp Foundation funding for their own innovative classroom projects.
The Hipp grant hasn’t just expanded my capabilities. I encourage “crazy” thinking among my students every day. When children are asked to solve problems in a safe and positive atmosphere, they show courage, take risks, and create new ideas. I am wide-eyed with amazement as my students learn the skills to create world-changing ideas. I am comforted to know that the possibilities are endless!
Think about that child in your class who sees things just a little bit differently. She’s the one who tells stories and asks a lot of questions. He’s the student who spends a lot of time looking outside. It’s the child who gets a faraway look in his eyes and wears a little smile when asked to imagine something. Sadly, that child’s inner light is often dimmed by the rigors of modern classroom life. That is why we must summon our creativity so we respond to each little crazy thought or odd behavior with patience and the realization that this child may grow to be the person whose ingenuity changes the world. And we must summon the courage to respond to those who would dim our inner light as educators.
I’d hate to see what’s happening to public education squelch our creativity and that of our students. We must demand the right to be innovative in the classroom, for the sake of our profession and for the sake of the children.
Public education and the so-called business approach
Bob Goodman
I entered the teaching profession after a 20-year career in the business world. I served as president and chief executive officer of several electronics companies; the largest of those companies employed more than 1,000 people, located in a half dozen countries, and generated about $500 million in annual sales. In each case, I was employed to repair a failing business; in each case the company was returned to a profitable state within a year or two.
After becoming a teacher, I often met people who shared with me that they were excited about the idea that I would bring a “business approach” to education. It would soon become clear, however, that they were picturing a methodology that has not been used in business for decades, at least not in the businesses with which I was familiar. They imagined a cut-throat environment where employees are summarily dismissed for their results; where employees are in constant competition for bonuses and higher positions; where short-term results are constantly measured and mechanically used to punish or reward.
I don’t know if those approaches were ever common in American business, but I can assure you that they were not used in my businesses, or those of my vendors, customers, or competitors. Modern business recognizes that people are a company’s most important asset and stronger companies act on that belief. They train, nurture, and support their employees who represent the lasting strength of a company.
You can only build a strong organization by creating trust and support among employees and between employees and management. In my organizations, I would work with management and employees to develop goals and incentives based on reasonable objectives for their division or company. That would be a time-consuming process; I perhaps spent more time on those discussions than any other. I did that because once there was a clear understanding of what needed to be accomplished, how that would be measured and what the rewards would be for accomplishing those goals, much of my work was done.
This approach allowed all of us to have constant, ongoing discussions about how we could perform better as a company. Since everyone shared evenly in the results, we all had the same stake in the game. Continuous improvement was driven by creating a community of employees with a common interest.
It was sometimes the case that an employee in a company was viewed as not doing his or her share. Most often that was a concern of an employee’s peers, even more than by his or her manager. That’s reasonable since the people most affected by someone not doing their share of work are the people who have to pick up that extra work. We would then meet with that person and first try to determine if the concerns of his or her manager and/or peers were valid. If the complaints were not valid, we’d make sure that everyone understood why that was the case, so those who identified the problem would be satisfied. If the concerns were valid, we’d work out a plan to help the employee improve his or her work, and monitor progress toward that goal.
As for new employees, I always felt that during their first six months, their net contribution was about zero. The effort we all had to put in to bringing them up to speed canceled out much of the benefit of having hired them. As a result, we viewed replacing a current employee with someone new as an expensive last step, to be taken after all else had failed. If an employee who was not performing well had a sincere interest in improving, we would work with him for months to try to realize that improvement. Only then would he or she be asked to leave. That was a rare case in my companies and considered a defeat for everyone involved.
If this is the sort of “business approach” that people are looking for in education, I think it would be a very positive step forward. Teachers should be very involved in setting up any metrics by which their work would be measured. The current high-stakes tests are, in most cases, inadequate to the task of measuring student achievement; improving those assessments would have to be the first step in any data-based system of measuring teaching and learning. Teachers need to be in agreement that assessments are valid and accurately measure student learning of important material as a first step.
Once valid assessments are established, data from those assessments can’t be just blindly used to measure performance; they must be used as the basis for genuine discussion about what the data means. The reason behind the results must be probed to determine if it was related to teacher effectiveness or the luck of the draw in terms of the students in that class. Variance in results is as likely to result from the composition of a class as the teacher of the class.
If all discussions lead to the conclusion that a teacher is not performing well, a process of working with that teacher should be set in motion. As long as teachers are interested in improving, the effort should be made to improve their work. The last resort, a very expensive choice, should be to have the teacher leave the school.
In my businesses, I always gave equal bonus shares to all because I wanted each employee’s efforts to be directed to reaching the goals of the company, not on getting a bigger share than a colleague. It did not serve my interests to have salespeople competing for accounts, or to have the accounting department not shipping orders to improve their Accounts Receivable, or to have salespeople writing business with accounts with poor credit just to hit their sales figures. Giving everyone a share of the company bonus based on how we all did as a company put everyone on the same page. The same should apply to schools. We should all be working together to help our students realize their human potential, not competing to get the “best” kids into our classes to improve our numbers.
It is possible to imagine an approach where everyone in a school (students, teachers, administrators, support professionals, etc.) works together to create a place where everyone can reach their potential. That’s a business approach to education that I strongly endorse.
A view from Camden’s public schools
Jamal Dickerson
Fifteen years ago, I graduated from Camden’s public schools; today I’m teaching music at Camden’s Creative Arts High School and my wife and I are raising our six children here.
After high school, I left the state to attend college at Morgan State University in Maryland. When I graduated, my college mentors encouraged me to stay and teach in Maryland. But I was really set on coming back to Camden and being a positive role model for the students of Camden City Schools. They have so many negative role models and I wanted to help combat that.
Even though Maryland offered me financial incentives to stay and teach in the state, including money towards a down payment on a house, I felt obligated to be part of the solution for Camden. I always knew I would come home to this city.
In the same dangerous neighborhoods where my students live, my wife and I are raising our six children. With so few examples of a strong, whole family, I want to be a picture of success for my students. Academically and personally, I want them to see what’s possible. I want them to build on the life I’m making here so they can go even farther and eventually have healthy relationships of their own.
Recently we started looking for a larger home. We could have gotten something in the suburbs with a pool or a lot more property, but we still want to be in Camden. So we are refurbishing a home. Like the city in which we live, this house needs a lot of care and skill to bring it back to what it once was. Since I’m financing our home improvements on a teacher’s salary, a lot of people are pitching in to help me. They see the value in improving this house and in having a family there. One of our new neighbors has even offered to purchase all the drywall I’ll need for one room. In addition, I have friends, family members, neighbors, and even students helping with the house.
A lot of people think they know how to “fix” Camden, but no one is really asking us – the people who work here, live here, and are raising our families here – what we think this city needs.
Like my house, Camden needs people willing to stick around for the long haul. You can’t rebuild our city or our schools with temporary employees who aren’t invested in our students and our community. And when people focus on teachers as the problem, they’re missing the infrastructure issues that have plagued our schools for decades. Everyone who works in Camden knows about the shortcomings of some of the teachers. But no matter where you work, you’re going to find that dynamic. So many of our teachers have made Camden’s schools their life. They think about their students before school, after school, and over the summer. They’re trying to puzzle out their students’ needs and how to deliver the right tools to help them learn.
I try to take a special interest in each child and connect with the student’s life. What does that child need and how do I get it for them? I take time to work with individual students and their families, and in the evenings, I work at the Unity Community Center. I truly believe that our families and our neighborhoods have to be an integral part of the learning process for our students – and that’s true no matter where you live.
You need administrative support in order to teach in this way. You can’t be hampered by a rigid curriculum where you have to be on the same page on the same day as every other teacher in the district. State-level support is just as important. As teachers, we cannot be slaves to mandates and still be effective. Those mandates trickle down to administrators to teachers and then on to students. They have a chilling effect on real learning and developing a passion for a subject – any subject. As a music teacher, I’m fortunate not to have the emphasis on testing that math, science, and English teachers have to face.
As for the emphasis on standardized testing, I haven’t been convinced of its true purpose or real value in education. I’m not convinced that it can truly measure what a child can learn or what a child knows.
My own story is proof of that. My SAT scores were not high enough to get into college but my college took me on probation because my grades were good. In my first semester, I had a 3.8 GPA and just this May I completed a master’s degree. If I had been judged solely on standardized tests such as the SAT, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
As someone who grew up in Camden, I’m conscious of the impact that appearances can have on my students. In this community, it looks like the people getting rewarded are the ones chasing the negative things in life. My students look at their teachers driving broken-down cars to work and wearing unstylish clothes. Then they look at the drug dealers who have nice cars and nice clothes and those students draw conclusions from that.
It’s not enough to tell students not to value those things because those are the things people value in most communities. So I try to dress nicely and drive a nicer car – not because those things are necessarily important to me, but because I’m trying to be a viable alternative for my students. I want them to know that you can choose education and still be successful in the ways that matter to them.
I don’t recommend living in the community for every teacher. Even teachers who don’t live in our community can have – and do have – a powerful impact on their students. It works for me – it’s where I think I can be most effective.
There’s beauty in this city, and I want to illuminate that. By teaching here and living here, I’m fighting to preserve that beauty.
Don’t apologize for the work you do or the salary you earn
Kathy Bowers
As the saying goes, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Of course, that really depends on which side of the fence you are standing.
In 1996 the starting salary in my district, an affluent Bergen County town, was $28,000. Our 3.18 percent increase was inclusive of rising health benefit costs. No one in the community seemed to care that we actually made less from one year to the next because of the dramatic rise in health care costs.
At this point I need to interject that this was during the economic boom of the late 1990s. Many private citizens in my district were making triple-digit salaries, receiving large bonuses and paid health benefits, and were happily turning their pensions into 401Ks. The private sector and boards of education were doing very well, while teachers were struggling to make ends meet. There was never a suggestion to give the school staff a bonus to make up for the deficit in our paychecks, nor did we ask for it. We had a signed three-year contract and for better or worse that was what was negotiated on our behalf.
Salaries were low. The new staff could no longer afford to live in town. In fact, they could not even afford to live in the neighboring towns. Many staff members were traveling (and still do) between 30 and 60 minutes to get to work. The private sector was flourishing, the prices of houses were skyrocketing, and yet the starting salary for teachers had barely reached $40,000 by the fall of 2005.
We all know that you don’t go into teaching to get rich, but you don’t expect to qualify for low-income housing either. I can’t help but wonder why no one mentioned the concept of “shared sacrifice” back then.
Meanwhile, teachers dutifully paid toward our pensions each and every paycheck. We took comfort in knowing that even though our salaries were not great, we had pensions that would help carry us through our “golden years.” It’s devastating to think that along with our health benefits, those pensions are in jeopardy. It’s even harder to swallow given the fact that the negligence and incompetence of elected officials has put us in this bind.
Today it seems the public doesn’t like their side of the fence, and they believe our side is greener. Complaints of no jobs, no health benefits, and no pensions are frequently heard at board of education meetings. Now it’s time to ask them who is standing on either side of them on the unemployment line. Thanks to Governor Chris Christie, it is probably a teacher. Still, they seem to think that we are to blame, as if we planted the weeds on their side of the fence.
It is mismanagement, greed, and corruption that have brought New Jersey’s economy to its knees. NJEA and our local associations are not to blame. We have worked and always will work hard for every penny we make. And now that the governor and the legislature have placed caps on revenue and are about to put caps on spending, school districts have nowhere to turn except to the precious student programs and invaluable staff to make up these deficits.
Don’t ever apologize for what you make or feel you need to give it back. Have you ever heard a sports figure, movie star, or the governor’s social networking officer apologize for what they make? Are you any less important than they are?
The state of New Jersey needs to get its priorities in order. As an educator you make a difference in a child’s life every single day. You are molding the future of our country. Don’t ever let anyone diminish your importance.