Quote:
Originally Posted by mja
I'm a teacher. I worked in one of the worst schools in the city and I'm now lucky enough to work in one of the very best schools in the city, one of those few select schools you mention.
There is certainly dead wood in the district, but no teacher who gives a damn (which is the overwhelming majority of them) aims for anything other than providing a quality education to their students.
I know it is popular to shit on teachers right now, but the outside perception of what teachers in those struggling schools do is completely off the mark. Some of the most dedicated and talented teachers I've worked with in the past decade plus were and still are at that "bad" school. Most of them stay there specifically for the kids.
It's funny, I got a job at a prestigious school and, according to the type of accountability systems that some advocate, I went from being one of the worst teachers in the system to one of the best practically overnight . . . But really it comes down to the fact that my current school handpicks who gets to be a student there, while my old school did not have that ability . . .
It isn't fair to expect the Comprehensive High Schools to compete with my school, we take their best and brightest and leave them with every challenging kid . . . . Penn Alexander, for example, draws from the same teacher talent pool as every other elementary school in the city and uses mostly the same curriculum, but people have this idea that it is this amazing place that is totally worth paying a premium for a house within its catchment . . . By the mere act of sending their relatively well off children to the school, these well-educated parents make Penn Alexander a "good" school. The district should copy this approach over & over again.
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I never said the teachers don't care - I was responding to the comment that the PSD (by which I inferred the administration) never really cared too much: like any bureaucracy of well-paid, not particularly challenged bureaucrats with job security and good benefits and little accountability. Ackerman is the poster child for this type of person, but the admin is and always has been filled with legions of lesser Ackermans. Ironically, some are now nostalgically reminiscing about the glorious tenure of Constance Clayton, who was the super when I was a student. My recollection is that she was unremarkable in every respect, but I suppose compared to overpaid celebrity carpetbaggers like Ackerman, Vallas, and the other guy, she wasn't so bad.
I know most teachers care. My father was a very committed PSD teacher for 30 years, and I went to Philadelphia public schools (some of the better ones) for a decade.
Even among the teachers though, there is alot of dead wood. I had as many "just OK" and as many terrible teachers as I had good ones even at the "very good" schools I attended. As you pointed out, the quality of the school depends much less on the individual teachers (who as I understand it get to choose their school based mainly on seniority, not performance) and more on the families that the kids come from. That's what makes a Central or a Masterman good: most (though by no means all) of the parents care about and understand the importance of their kids' educations and supporting their kids' education. What made my public school education decent was my peers primarily, teachers secondarily. In general the curricula to which we were subjected were boring and generally lacking in creativity, but I imagine that was more the fault of the "planners" downtown, in Harrisburg, and in DC.
I think the big problem in Philly and other big city districts is that for any school to be perceived to be good, or just to plain old be good, you need the critical mass (say over 75%) of the students' families to be the kind that value education, teachers and principals need the ability to get rid of the troublemakers
fast, and, ideally, you need some cultural/ethnic diversity where kids from different backgrounds can learn new perspectives and value systems.
Ultimately, I think the "troublemaker" kids will just have to be triaged along with the deadwood teachers, administrators, and rude-assed but entrenched janitorial, maintenance, lunchroom, and bus driver staff.
Too many kids who want to learn, and too many teachers who want to teach, just give up because their classes are taken over by seriously disruptive kids who essentially can't be removed from the environment unless they commit a felony in the school.
Maybe they should just set up a lower cost parallel disciplinary school system for troublemakers and deadwood teachers so they all can be cleaned out of the main system and everyone else can finally focus on learning and teaching.
My two cents.
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