We have chafed at the low regard with which we are viewed by the public. We have offered ourselves every rationalization one could think of about the importance of our work, lauding ourselves for our doggedness in continuing to carry it out in the face of every kind of discouragement. Still, the hoped-for vindication has not arrived. Our illusions have finally cracked; we must take matters more into our own hands. We realize that, before it is truly too late, we must begin to court those who we thought should be our suitors.
You must appreciate the bitterness of this realization. We had thought that our role as the transmitters of knowledge might have sufficed to draw our society to us. We realize that it is we all along who ought to have been doing the courting, and we recognize our vanity and foolishness for ever having thought otherwise.
We will offer ourselves, then, up for rigorous evaluation. But if you will allow one last impertinence, allow us to suggest the means by which it will be carried out. We sadly accept that the lexicon of commerce has permanently entered education, and we know that we are henceforth to be measured by "quantifiable" data. So, rigorously assess our work at least once yearly - we would actually invite it. However only 20% of our overall "score" should consist of test results. We are cleverer than you think: you will excoriate us for hiding behind tenure protection, for thinking of our jobs more than of "results" for the children. Then we will, to your astonishment, suddenly compromise and offer 30%, and ask whether it ever occurred to you that while we are obliged to impart knowledge and skills to students, it might be incumbent on those students to take an active part in learning them, or on their parents to provide a suitable environment for their children's educational advancement.
We will take advantage of your momentary silence to suggest a formula for the other 70% of our evaluation. Fully 10% should depend on our command of the spoken language. The misuse of grammar and vocabulary, even by our best-educated countrymen, is a constant source of consternation for me and, I would expect, the other members of our profession; as there are few people better placed than we to remedy this, we should be judged on our ability to speak in grammatical paragraphs, using the full richness of our language, with a train of thought that moves clearly forward. At least 40% should depend on the heart of what we do: our lessons. We hope you will see a high level of "energy", along with student oral responses reflecting engagement with and understanding of the material. When the lesson finishes, we would like to show you written "formative" assessments that reflect our students' further understanding of the topic. We would only ask that adherence to the latest in a long line of educational "philosophies" not be considered as part of our lesson evaluation. These philosophies come, are replaced, and replaced again many times in the course of one career, so please understand our (uncharacteristic) cynicism regarding them. We would like the remaining 20% to come from a somewhat intangible, but still essential measure: the "feeling" one gets when entering our room. This high percentage represents, we feel, the importance of classroom climate. That is, is there a palpable enthusiasm in the classroom? An appropriate sense of humor? An atmosphere of respect at the same time as there is a sense of order? Are parents generally pleased with what we are doing with the children?
We know that you will want more than just this evaluation. But your appetite is too ravenous; you must seek to satisfy it elsewhere. We will gladly discuss making tenure more difficult to obtain, and once obtained, making its continuation dependent in part on a high quality of teacher performance. But do not bring up the subject of eliminating it altogether. Ours is, lest we forget, an academic career, and the protections of tenure benefit good teachers as well as mediocre ones. Also, your argument against defined-benefit pensions needs to be settled elsewhere. We find this argument to be intellectually empty - effectively, you are saying that since only we public employees still get them, then no one should. Create a society in which all workers have the right to a pension. You have been told of your brilliance since birth - we can see this has been justified - and we are sure your rise through the meritocracy was hard-won. Restoring the middle class should not be beyond your prodigious abilities.
If we willingly propose to be more rigorously evaluated, it must be in exchange for greater pay, and almost as importantly, greater acknowledgement from the American public for the service we perform. Your attitude is full of contradictions: you want us to maintain discipline in our classrooms, but you are ambivalent about the exercising of authority in actual fact, so you have taken away the tools we need to keep order; you want us to impart meaningful knowledge, yet you are in disagreement about what that would constitute; you pay lip service to the importance teachers play in our society while undermining their efforts in myriad ways: starving them of resources, ignoring the discouragements teachers face that prevent them from committing to the profession, and, most damningly, in many cases not considering teaching a suitable long-term commitment for your products of "selective" colleges and universities.
We see that this courtship, even though just starting, is bereft of tender feeling so far. But if you care about us, you will bear up under this effusion of bitterness and accept us for who we are - this is the lot of any suitor. Your forbearance might one day be richly rewarded in the form of a uniformly well-educated, economically competitive population; your love, when you begin to feel it, will not have been in vain.
You must appreciate the bitterness of this realization. We had thought that our role as the transmitters of knowledge might have sufficed to draw our society to us. We realize that it is we all along who ought to have been doing the courting, and we recognize our vanity and foolishness for ever having thought otherwise.
We will offer ourselves, then, up for rigorous evaluation. But if you will allow one last impertinence, allow us to suggest the means by which it will be carried out. We sadly accept that the lexicon of commerce has permanently entered education, and we know that we are henceforth to be measured by "quantifiable" data. So, rigorously assess our work at least once yearly - we would actually invite it. However only 20% of our overall "score" should consist of test results. We are cleverer than you think: you will excoriate us for hiding behind tenure protection, for thinking of our jobs more than of "results" for the children. Then we will, to your astonishment, suddenly compromise and offer 30%, and ask whether it ever occurred to you that while we are obliged to impart knowledge and skills to students, it might be incumbent on those students to take an active part in learning them, or on their parents to provide a suitable environment for their children's educational advancement.
We will take advantage of your momentary silence to suggest a formula for the other 70% of our evaluation. Fully 10% should depend on our command of the spoken language. The misuse of grammar and vocabulary, even by our best-educated countrymen, is a constant source of consternation for me and, I would expect, the other members of our profession; as there are few people better placed than we to remedy this, we should be judged on our ability to speak in grammatical paragraphs, using the full richness of our language, with a train of thought that moves clearly forward. At least 40% should depend on the heart of what we do: our lessons. We hope you will see a high level of "energy", along with student oral responses reflecting engagement with and understanding of the material. When the lesson finishes, we would like to show you written "formative" assessments that reflect our students' further understanding of the topic. We would only ask that adherence to the latest in a long line of educational "philosophies" not be considered as part of our lesson evaluation. These philosophies come, are replaced, and replaced again many times in the course of one career, so please understand our (uncharacteristic) cynicism regarding them. We would like the remaining 20% to come from a somewhat intangible, but still essential measure: the "feeling" one gets when entering our room. This high percentage represents, we feel, the importance of classroom climate. That is, is there a palpable enthusiasm in the classroom? An appropriate sense of humor? An atmosphere of respect at the same time as there is a sense of order? Are parents generally pleased with what we are doing with the children?
We know that you will want more than just this evaluation. But your appetite is too ravenous; you must seek to satisfy it elsewhere. We will gladly discuss making tenure more difficult to obtain, and once obtained, making its continuation dependent in part on a high quality of teacher performance. But do not bring up the subject of eliminating it altogether. Ours is, lest we forget, an academic career, and the protections of tenure benefit good teachers as well as mediocre ones. Also, your argument against defined-benefit pensions needs to be settled elsewhere. We find this argument to be intellectually empty - effectively, you are saying that since only we public employees still get them, then no one should. Create a society in which all workers have the right to a pension. You have been told of your brilliance since birth - we can see this has been justified - and we are sure your rise through the meritocracy was hard-won. Restoring the middle class should not be beyond your prodigious abilities.
If we willingly propose to be more rigorously evaluated, it must be in exchange for greater pay, and almost as importantly, greater acknowledgement from the American public for the service we perform. Your attitude is full of contradictions: you want us to maintain discipline in our classrooms, but you are ambivalent about the exercising of authority in actual fact, so you have taken away the tools we need to keep order; you want us to impart meaningful knowledge, yet you are in disagreement about what that would constitute; you pay lip service to the importance teachers play in our society while undermining their efforts in myriad ways: starving them of resources, ignoring the discouragements teachers face that prevent them from committing to the profession, and, most damningly, in many cases not considering teaching a suitable long-term commitment for your products of "selective" colleges and universities.
We see that this courtship, even though just starting, is bereft of tender feeling so far. But if you care about us, you will bear up under this effusion of bitterness and accept us for who we are - this is the lot of any suitor. Your forbearance might one day be richly rewarded in the form of a uniformly well-educated, economically competitive population; your love, when you begin to feel it, will not have been in vain.
