We Gotta Lotta Pink Elephants (Part V)

Okay, I had to take Halloween weened off to digest everything. (Plus, a pumpkin's worth of candy. And my daughter thought I was making her look all cutesy for her sake. HA! It was a ruse to dupe my unsuspecting neighbors out of their chocolate! Worked like a charm, too.)

Anyway, so what have I learned?

Well, we gotta lotta pink elephants.

Pink Elephant example: When an admin makes the master schedule it seems they pretty much go along with the following playbook. They...
1) identify the best teachers and cherry pick the classroom placement of these folks.
2) Identify the Lemons and try to put them in a location where they'll cause the least amount of damage. (OWCH!)
3) Slot in all the other teachers primarily basing this placement on what that person taught the prior year.
4) Fill in all additional holes. (This is where the newbies come in… new hires usually get the “leftover classes” in case anyone is wondering why the first year teachers often get 4 different preps at 3 different grade levels with kids who often are the most academically and behaviorally challenged.)

I think point number 2 about how admins often identify the Lemons and then try to put them in a location where they'll cause the least amount of damage (to test scores, that is -- it's not even kids they fret so much about... it's their own butts!) is the most damning of all the "placement of teacher" practices. And it's why teacher tenure is under such fire. The Lemons are being protected in ways that seem unnatural. The common sense argument goes, "Why can't we seem to get these people out of the classroom?"

It's a question all the solid educators I know would love answered as well. We truly wish the Lemons would move on more than even the regular public wishes this because these Lemons are tarnishing the entire profession in a way that sidetracks us all from our much more important and much more lofty goals.

However, the way the newbies get tossed into their assignments also is cause for alarm. Like maybe it's an alarm that should have been pulled 25 years ago because it seems like this practice of embedding the rookies into (for the most part) the least desirable classes, most unwanted/ highest turnover of teacher classes began long before I was at the front of my own classroom. But I still see it going on around the country all the time and though lip service is paid by all the right people about how this practice is silly and needs to stop, nothing much seems to be changing on this front.

All of this makes me thing that it's too bad the teacher education programs can't stand up for their own students more, huh? Or the veteran teachers who know what awaits these newbies? Or the admins who make these schedules in the first place? Or the districts that do the hiring? Of the folks at the State Dept of Ed.

Look, we are all complicit when lambs are tossed into the lion's den... for am I not my teacher's keeper?

Not in most American public schools, you're not... or so it seems.

Like I said earlier... OWCH!

So before I can really get my head around where to place our "best" teachers -- with the "best" students, with the "most challenged" students, or with the "middle level" students, I think we need to recognize that the current system of how we are placing our kids seems a little off-base.

(BTW, off-base is a euphemism for absolutely freakin' stoopid!)

Some schools, it seems, allow teachers to choose their own assignments. Other schools seem to have a system that requires all teachers to teach a mix of levels so that their is an "Ability dispersement" in evidence across the board. But these seem to be anomalies more than anything else. For the most part, it feels as if American education is trapped in some sort of dysfunction.

And how it all gets worked out is on a school by school by school basis. Is there no research out there to support an intelligent distribution? Would this not make for a good thesis/white paper/ PhD directed research project? Is what seems to be so obviously important a topic getting its due in the national educational reform conversation?

Well, we gotta lotta pink elephants.