As CPS prepares to close a record number of schools, the fate of students and communities is in question.
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Teachers can't thrive as 'lone rangers'
Teachers are charged with preparing an increasingly diverse student body to make its way in an increasingly complex and competitive world. None of us can do it alone.
By: Jacob Gourley / February 2, 2012
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Jacob Gourley
In my dozen-plus years as a social studies teacher at Thornton Fractional South High School in south suburban Lansing, Ill., I’ve become well practiced in the art of doing more with less. Most of my fellow public school teachers, I’m sure, know what I’m talking about. With budgets tight and resources scarce, teachers learn how to stretch everything from supplies to classroom minutes.
But two years ago, the current principal at Thornton Fractional South offered me and my fellow teachers a remarkable gift: The opportunity to do more with more.
For the first time in my career, my fellow teachers and I were given common collaborative time by subject. I was able to trade ideas, troubleshoot problems, and craft innovative lesson plans with other social studies teachers on a daily basis. It was probably the best year I’ve had as a teacher.
We tend to think of classrooms as sealed environments. And we idolize the heroic teachers who can go into their rooms, shut their doors, and mold young minds.
That Lone Ranger model may have worked in decades past. But these days, teachers are charged with preparing an increasingly diverse student body to make its way in an increasingly complex and competitive world. And none of us can do it alone.
Reforms won’t help if teachers stay isolated
In recent years, Illinois has joined a growing number of states around the country in passing strong education reforms. The state is ramping up more meaningful teacher and administrator evaluations. It’s changing the way teachers are prepared and supported and better equipping principals to be instructional leaders.
But in order for these reforms to bring real-world results, we have to change how teachers work. We can no longer afford to leave teachers isolated in their individual classrooms, wasting in-house expertise that they could be sharing with their fellow teachers.
I’m part of a group of about 20 award-winning educators that Advance Illinois has brought together from around the state. As a member of their Educator Advisory Council, I’ve had the chance to delve more deeply into how best to improve the teaching and learning that goes on in our classrooms.
And in our recently released report, “Transforming Teacher Work,” we talk about how to ensure we attract the best minds to teaching, and give those teachers the opportunities to use all of their talents to help our students.
Of all the ways to do so, collaboration is nearest and dearest to my heart. When you have a disease, you want a team of doctors pooling their brainpower to help you get better. If you’re in serious legal trouble, you might hire a group of lawyers. And when you’re trying to improve the state of American education, your best bet would be to bring educators together.
During the year of collaboration, my fellow teachers helped me implement a simulation of the Electoral College in my classroom. My students got to work through a presidential election state by state. It was something I had never tried before. My peers, in turn, adapted a mini-project requiring students to research landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases – something I had done for years – into their classrooms.
People were more willing to take risks because they knew they weren’t going it alone. They had support from their peers across the hall. There was a willingness to figure out what worked… and what didn’t.
But budget cuts forced us to go from an eight-period day to a seven-period day following that one year. We lost a dozen and a half teachers to layoffs. And the common collaborative time became a luxury we could no longer afford.
This year, I’ve been designated a division leader. I'm supposed to guide collaborations with my fellow social studies teachers. But these days, I’m lucky if we get sufficient time together twice a month.
Although our structured collaboration ended after just one year, the payoff has lasted. Teachers communicate now in ways that they didn’t before. And I can’t help but imagine how the benefits would multiply if we could find a way to restore that collaborative time.
In the summer after our one-year collaboration experiment, nine of the 13 social studies teachers in my department traveled together to Washington, D.C. We went because we wanted to continue to learn. The pictures of us together, taken in front of the U.S. Capitol, hang in our classrooms still.
Jacob Gourley is a social studies teacher and division leader at Thornton Fractional South High School in Lansing, where he also serves as President of the Federation of Teachers Local #683 (IFT/AFT). He is a 2010 winner of the Golden Apple Award and was recently honored by Illinois State University's History Department with the Frederick Drake Teaching Excellence Award.
Collaboration, Evaluation
Hi Jacob,
Retired teacher here - and I totally concur. My best years were full of collaboration...although sometimes we got so excited about our work that we created even more work for ourselves...but all to the good of students. One of the things I appreciated most about the teaching profession was that we, like soldiers, SERVE our country. As such, our pay was based on a common pay scale, according to education and experience (like military ranks are!). It was a fair system, and we COULD actually collaborate without petty jealousies, competitive back-stabbing, or any of that stuff that goes in on for-profit, corporate situations. Merit pay is a chimera, even in corporations - so much of what goes on in institutions is political anyway. So, since collaboration and cooperation and PEACE & FRIENDSHIP make for a better everyday world for the kids in school, measures such as how many ideas did you share with colleagues, how many workshops did you present in your school, district, state, or country, how many materials did you create and share should be chief among items used to evaluate teachers. Not test results!!! Working results. THE worst thing about retiring for me was the feeling that I was deserting my teaching buddies in the trenches. Teachers are on the front lines of childhood in America; they are sheroes and heroes for ALL of America!
Great article, Jake! :)
Great article, Jake! :)
More with less?LOL
Jake, what exactly was keeping you from this "collaboration" all these years? I'm sure the district wouldn't have kicked you out if your departments wanted to get together after school (or over the summer} to develop into more effective teachers. If you were "isolated", it was in a prison of your own making. Perhaps one of the problems is your union is ataking more than it's fair share of the educational resources down in TF. Although 215 spends about the state avearage per student, teachers are paid about $82K for 12 years experience, while state average is about $65K for 13 years experience.
How has this generosity benfited the students? The average ACT in your district is only 17.2 compared to a state average of over 20.
One final question here, Mr Gourley. How do you spell high pay for poor results.....IFT!
Heroes?
Deapite spending more resources on public educaiton that cirtually any large coutry in the world, our graduates perform dismally compared to their global competitors. Our math and science skills, those most necessary for economic success, put us far below average.
I'm sorry, but taking resources away from education so that staff can retire at six figure pensions in their mid fifties, while the students fail MISERABLY in global competitiveness, is something less than "heroic"!
You want REAL heroes?Look at schools like sSt Elizabeths in Hyde Park where teachers make a fraction of that in the public system, yet do more good for the kids than their much higher paid public counterparts.
When ALL of our children make it up that mountain...
Read this link!
http://www.thenation.com/article/165575/why-congress-redlining-our-schools
Schools with 90% non-poverty students really ARE competitive world-wide! Please don't diss the whole system because of the failure of our country and our state to provide an adequate safety net in the form of free quality pre-school programs, adequate health care, parenting classes, equitable funding, etc. We won't be strong until our weakest link is strengthened as well. Teachers like Jake, as well as the teachers at St. Elizabeth's are there to guide this into happening. Average teacher salary in Illinois is about $60,000 per year. "Middle Class" in Illinois is defined as $65,000 per year. I congratulate all teachers who are able to make it into the middle class and then some! The Archdiocese of Chicago should also find some way to improve salaries for its teachers as well. If the public school teachers didn't have unions, their salaries would probably still be where Catholic school teachers' salaries are!!! Although all the best teachers are on a mission of sorts, we can't all live on missionary paychecks...
Not a teacher, are you, Bob?
Challenge: spend some time (a week would probably do it) in a non-selective-enrollment neighborhood public school in a low-income community. Then you'd have some standing to talk about teachers' pay and benefits, and about who the real heroes are.
--Curmudgeon
I walk the walk, curmudgeon
Curmudgeon:
In my early forties, when my kids were little, I took a "sabatical" from engineering mangement to teach. The first year I taught what amounted to a full load of college courses in math and science, and subtitute taught at over a dozen south suburban high schools, Including Hillcrest. The second and third years I taught were at a private West Suburban High School that had a higher percentage of low income kids from Chicago and inner suburbs than most over funded suburban public schools.On average we spent about half what Chicago and suburban public high schools spent on students without learning disabilities. We did, however, take kids with ADD and OCD and successfully mainstreamed them without stigma. We teachers just had to make the extra time after school and substitute ingenuity for bureaucracy and overfunding to help them succeed. Despite spending about half the operating expenses per student as those in Proviso and LTHS, Orland and Palos, We averaged about 1-2 ACT points higher than schools like Sandburg, where the "educators" are paid $120 for nine months by the time they're 43.
After teaching, I managed facility upgrades for CPS, back in the Vallas years when they were still serious about serving the kids and before the strike "privileges" were returned by Springfield. I've been in some of the toughest schools you could imagine like Orr, Robeson and Phillips and saw some incredible successes and the difference between having teachers for which education was a labor of love (such as Decatur Classical and Whitney Young) instead of what all too often we see in the South Suburbs where the "I get paid whether you learn this or not" philosophy rules.
If you don't think Carver Academy and Altgeld Gardens whre I worked are "tough enough", you have no clue about which you're talking.
Curmudgeon, you pretty much epitomize the arrogance and ignorance we too often see in union dominated public education in Illinois.
Unlike you, I sacrificed for education, not used it for rewards I'd have no chance of earning in any other endeavor!
Thre ARE heroes in education, but the unions abuse them
One time I was upgrading a 100 year old South Side public school and I noticed one class in particular was wearing what appeared to be a uniform; yellow boots, red coat and red hats.
I asked the building engineer what that was about, and he told me a new teacher was so concerned about her kids that she worked out a deal with a local clothing store so that they'd given her enough of a price break that she could give her kids warm clothes for the winter, since it appeared the public assistance that Mom was getting wasn't getting to the kids.
Her kids seem to be the most respectful, well behaved, and motivated in the school.
That's exactly the kind of caring, industrious teachers we need to serve the kids, right.
Not according to the union and the CPS bureaucracy.
When I visited a year later, I asked about the teacher.
She'd been let go for two apparent reasons; CPS was firing even the best young teachers to prevent them from gaining tenure so that they could keep overpaying the senior "dead wood", and she had the misfortune of being the "wrong race" for the principal.
You see, she was a very literate, well educated white girl and the principal, who would be challenged to write a coherent paragraph, was of another race.
I'd bet I've worked in far more schools than you have curmudgeon, and I've learned how successful schools can be when their focus is in giving the kids the best education possible instead of focusing on how to fund paying teachers not to teach after age 55 and protecting the highest paid incompetents.
After those experiences, I became an education reform advocate, and work to let the truth out about what's REALLY going on in public education and why it fails.
Any person who cares a whit about this country's future would be compelled to do so.
The problem is that while we have private school teachers
who area succeeding with "would you like fries with that" wages, we're paying recalcitrant and incompetent teachers in public education like CEOs, with "golden parachute" benefits to boot!
Private education (and I have taught at both private and public schools) reflect the market value of teachers. Private schools need to produce efficient quality to survive.
Unions distort that marketplace, and the result is the failing school systems we have in the US.
The unions are too politically strong to allow necessary reform and reorganization, so the only hope for the kids is to privatize public funding for the kidsand have the money flow where it does the most good for the lowest price.
It is easy to paint everyone with the same brush...
...and it seems that is the direction that conversations like this tend to take. You mention three schools you characterize as some of the very toughest inner city high schools and I am proud to say that I spent 75% of my career in one of them. I saw a lot of heroes there over the years, many of whom could easily have gone elsewhere to teach but stayed because of the mission we all shared. And we worked just as hard as those underpaid staff in the private schools. Harder, sometimes, because we didn't have the option of transferring out the students with the behavior and attendance issues!
I just take issue with the general attitude that all teachers are overpaid incompetents, which is being promoted by the media, city and state governments, and all kinds of anti-union organizations. I heard an interesting comment the other day, to the effect that nobody cares how much (or little) teachers earn while they're doing better than the teachers are.... Resentment? Jealousy? I don't know, but that's what it sounds like, despite all the rhetoric about "the most good for the lowest price." The problems in public schools are not going to go away by deciding to cut everyone's pay and benefits to the lowest common denominator.
That's it for me on this topic. --Curmudgeon
If Mr. Gourley had not
If Mr. Gourley had not mentioned his union affiliation, would Bob have even launched on this tirade?
yes!!!
yes!!!
No curmudgeon
The problem won't be solved by cutting EVERYONES pay, just developing a system where the rewards are proportionate to the value received.
If a teacher is paid $100K and gets no better result than any $40K teacher, they shouldn't be paid $100K.
In virutally every government service outside of public education, raises once you get to certain level aren't an "entitlement", they have to be EARNED through a promotion to a higher pay grade.
I strongly believe in equal pay for equal work. Two teachers teaching the same level coursework with the same student and course workload, and similar student learning, should be paid about the same. We should have an "apprentice" and "journeyman" rate, with those who have the additional value of making those who teach around them significantly better should be at a higher pay grade.
Those teachers who have the gift to motivate and inspire students, especially in the toughest schools, should be paid better than those where the students are "self starters".
Payscales should be set by the market for the position. If a quality physics teacher costs more to recruit than a PE or english teacher, the school should be able to pay what the market requires to get them.
If you don't provide service commensurate with what you accomplish, you should be given an opportunity to improve or give the schools the opportunity to hire someone who can deliver.
That's the way the REAL WORLD works outside of public education.
You know, the REAL WORLD that we're counting on public educators to prepare out students for!
Back to the original topic
Mr. Gourley, Thank you for highlighting the longlasting benefits of teachers carving out time to work together. The tirade that followed in the comments section was ill-placed. Keep up the great work.
Great Article
Thank you for working to help pioneer what seems to be a dynamic, forward-looking way of educating. It's a shame we can't find the resources to continue it. Hopefully Advance Illinois can get the program moving forward again in the near future.
Best of luck, Jake.
incredible!
NOTHING is preventing you and your team of "professionals" from continuing to meet and plan, except your own lack of motivation. When I taught at private schools, this sort of planning was a common occurrence AFTER school. We wouldn't consider reducing student contact time for us to do our professional planning responsibilities.
That's one of the biggest differences between the way the "real world" and the world of unionized public education works.
When resources are low, the private sector finds a way to work smarter and harder to get things done. In public education when resources are low, you find a way to, well, QUIT AND FAIL.
Quit whining and get the job done!
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