A former Memphis City Schools teacher, Brian Palmiter and his blog, The Arrogant Aristotelian, reflects on his experience with bad vs broken teachers and how the current system of evaluations fails to discern the difference between the two:
From the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents, it’s the person standing at the front of the classroom… America’s future depends on its teachers.
- President Barack Obama
Photo: Gates Foundation, May 4, 2011
Study after study has found that teachers matter more to student achievement than any other aspect of schooling.1 Within the same school, a child’s achievement trajectory can be quite different depending on whether he or she gets an inspired and inspiring teacher or a textbook-bound worksheet passer-outer. Recent education policy debates have not ignored the importance of teacher quality to student achievement. “Teacher accountability” is the reform buzzword of the day, and education reformers continually stress the need to develop and implement tools that allow school districts to effectively compare their teachers’ student achievement gains and separate the wheat from the chaff. Furthermore, concerns about the role teachers’ unions and tenure play in keeping ineffective teachers in the classroom have been used with increasing frequency to weaken the power of labor, with much recent success.
“In the past few years, would-be education reformers, including advocates, politicians and district leaders—like Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Paul Vallas in New Orleans—have scored major victories in expanding charter schools, eliminating teacher tenure and including student test scores in teacher evaluations in dozens of states around the country. In Michigan and Wisconsin, unions spent millions of dollars trying to prevent Republican lawmakers from stripping them of collective bargaining rights—only to lose.” (Under Siege)
Personally, I am disappointed by how often the debate focuses on getting rid of “bad” teachers rather than training and retaining high quality teachers, but I recognize a need for both. (I am not so sure abolishing collective bargaining rights is the way to get rid of ineffective teachers, but that is a debate for another day.)
At the moment, however, I don’t want to talk about how to identify bad teachers or how to get rid of them. Rather, I’d like to focus on making sure “good” teachers never go “bad.” Most of what follows is based on my own experience teaching in two failing public schools in Memphis, Tennessee as a corps member with Teach for America.2 It is often anecdotal, but I believe my experiences have not been unique, and they deserve to be heard in the debate about teacher quality and why we have so many failing teachers in our failing schools.
Walking in Memphis
I have spent the last two years as a Teach for America corps member in Memphis. The middle school at which I taught last year was the definition of a failing school. Teacher turnover was high—when I was hired 50% of the teaching staff was new to the school—and student achievement was low—the second-lowest in the state. Among the eighth graders I taught, only 5% eked out a passing score on the state language arts test the year before, and no students scored “Advanced.” (I had intelligent students who did not know what the word “dangerous” means, despite living in the fourth most dangerous U.S. city.) Their results on the other subject tests were comparably poor.
On the basis of these results it seems reasonable to conclude that if there are “bad teachers” out there, my school would be a good place to begin looking. After a long and frustrating year in the classroom, I can confirm what common sense would lead you to believe: effective teachers were few and far between at my school. What I saw, however, primarily were not “bad” teachers; they were broken ones. I believe there is a vital difference between a bad teacher and a broken teacher, and efforts to improve teacher quality will never reach their full potential unless this difference is recognized and accounted for in education policy.
What is a bad teacher? If you’ve ever had one, you know there is certainly such a thing. Bad teachers lack the classroom management skills, content knowledge, motivation, organization, professionalism, judgment, and people skills necessary for promoting student learning. These are the people who, no matter their intentions, have simply chosen the wrong career path. Getting rid of bad teachers is sometimes painful, but it is necessary in the interest of student achievement.
A broken teacher, on the other hand, likely possesses the talents and skills of an effective teacher, but they have become beaten down and lost the drive to display those talents and skills every day over the course of a long school year. Burnout is not unique to teaching, but it is an especially potent threat to teachers because the classroom—especially in a failing school—can be a hostile, even abusive, work environment.
When I first met my coworkers last year before students arrived, I was excited for the venture that awaited us. They seemed like professional, skilled practitioners with a great sense of purpose. Once the demons3 arrived, however, I witnessed many of my coworkers break, one by one. Some quit within the first few weeks and never came back. Others quit mentally but kept coming back every day because they had a mortgage. Sometimes teachers would scream and yell and curse at their classes until administration had to intervene for fear the teacher was about to have a stroke. True story. Sometimes teachers would just hide behind their desks and pretend no one was there, like an ostrich with his head in the sand. I will not get into specifics and I will never name names, but on a daily basis I witnessed behavior from faculty and staff that would get any professional fired—and probably sued—by any self-respecting suburban school district in the country. Perhaps, upon reading what I have described, this echoes the thoughts running through your mind.Yes, fire them! This is what bad teachers look like, and this is why we need to get rid of them and place good teachers in their stead.
And yet, again, I would not describe my colleagues as bad teachers, but rather broken ones. They had all the talent and skills necessary to help their students learn, and they started the year with student learning as their only goal, but the environment in which they labored was too much for them to bear.
It is not easy to watch good adults be broken like this.
In many ways I have painted an unflattering picture of my colleagues, and you may be wondering where I fit within this picture. Did I, too, break, or was I the “lone teacher strong enough to bear the burden and still emerge triumphant in the end”? I like to think my trials did not break me, but I certainly emerged bent. I never exploded at a student or lost my professionalism in any way, but it was a constant internal battle, and as the year progressed I felt myself detaching from my students and caring about them less and less. I would do my professional duty and not worry about anything more. Every day when I entered my school, a little more of my empathy and compassion died. None of this was intentional, but I did it as an unconscious self-defense mechanism. If you try too hard and care too much, it hurts all the more when you fail. I left my school at the end of my two-year Teach For America commitment, but it would be naive of me to think I would not have broken eventually had I stayed.
Before experiencing a failing school firsthand I did not appreciate the level of abuse teachers can receive day in and day out. Teachers in failing schools aren’t bad, they’re just broken, you say? They must have been weak. Hire tougher teachers and the problem would be solved. Now I have come to realize things are not so simple. It is difficult to remain an effective teacher when violence is omnipresent in the halls and the surrounding neighborhood, your students are four or more grade levels behind, parent support is minimal and students’ work ethic is nonexistent, and the district is constantly calling for your job in the name of “accountability.” In such an environment some teachers lash out at the students; most shut down and appear to be “lazy teachers.” After all, if students do not seem to be learning anyway, why bother? You can only hit your head against a brick wall so many times before you give up or get knocked out.
Was I a bad teacher? I do not believe so. In fact, I think I could be a truly top notch teacher in a more stable school, and the same is likely true of my colleagues. I do not believe the hostile working environment that exists in many failing schools excuses a regression to unprofessionalism, but it does explain it, and it should not be ignored when discussing education reform.
A Decisive Distinction
There is a vital difference between a bad teacher and a broken teacher, and efforts to improve teacher quality will never reach their full potential unless this difference is recognized and accounted for in education policy.
Failing to make this distinction leads to two problems. First, broken teachers could be effective teachers in a different environment, so qualified teachers are being pushed out of their jobs. Second, since the environment is the problem, the teacher you hire to replace a broken teacher is likely to become broken as well. In our toughest schools we are systematically feeding promising teachers into schools that chew them up and spit them out as mistakenly identified “bad teachers” a few years down the road. Then, these teachers, too, will be fired so they can be replaced with promising new talent…that will be chewed up and spit out as “bad teachers” in a few more years. It is a vicious cycle that cannot be broken until the underlying problem is recognized: teaching can be a miserable, soul crushing job, especially in our nation’s lowest performing schools.
Counterintuitive though it seems, reforms that focus on teacher accountability can only help address a #firstworldproblem, not rescue our lowest performing schools, because student achievement data cannot distinguish a bad teacher from a broken one. Rather than focusing on how to get rid of bad teachers, I wish more reformers and policy makers would recognize the plight of our broken teachers and work to address this vicious cycle that is hurting our students, our teachers, and our society.
2 I am well-aware of the fact that Teach For America is a polarizing organization in the education policy arena, and I promise to address this at some point in the near future.
3 Sometimes referred to as “students.”
Posted on August 25, 2013
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