Broken Record File: Another Thing Wrong With Charters
The NYTIMES today published an article about three teachers-in-training at a California charter school chain as they suffer the trials and tribulations of a year-long apprenticeship program. The apprentices spend a year in a classroom with a mentor teacher while earning a masters over three years, and, unusually, a small stipend. This is different than a traditional Bachelor's degree teacher-training route as well as the woefully negligent Teach for America model, and seems to be one popular on all sides of the education aisle.
Training a teacher through a year of hands-on practice, in tandem with an experienced mentor teacher and night classes in a content or grade-level area, has some promise. However, all of the teacher-training models I've heard of like this rarely seem to occur outside of the claustrophobic, kool-aid drinking confines of charter schools, turnaround corporations like AUSL, and other educational reform organizations.
The teachers-in-training showcased in the article experienced tears and doubts, as we all do, but my favorite guy was the one puffed up on his ivy-league hubris.
The Darmouth grad "...was assigned to teach 10th graders biology as well as 12th-grade anatomy and physiology, a subject he had never personally studied but figured he could master. After all, he had learned Arabic in college..."
I'll let that one hang in the air.
One of the many ways charters do the kids wrong is by having non-experts winging it in front of them in the classroom. Though each state is different, in Illinois, charter schools are required to have 51% of their staff certified (certified as in having the legal licensure necessary to teach in public schools). The other 49% can be, ya know, whoevz. And of that 51%, none are required to teach the subject area they are certified in.
What that means is Mr. Arabic is teaching physics.
A new gal-pal at my school, who I'll call Ms. J, came to my neighborhood school after being used and abused for four years at a Chicago charter chain. What was the straw that broke her back? I asked. Apparently, she had been asked to teach Spanish for this upcoming school year.
She does not speak Spanish, nor has she ever had any training in the practice of teaching a foreign language. She presented her concerns to her administration, who told her "she'd figure it out." As a secondary ed major with a math concentration, Ms. J now happily and proudly teaches high school students math, as she was trained to do. EVERYBODY WINS.
When reform schools put unprepared teachers in front of the classrooms, those teachers are unsuccessful and the children do not learn. When teachers feel unprepared, those teachers quit. This causes instability and high attrition and staff turn-over rates, all of which is bad for the kiddos and the school. EVERYBODY LOSES.
This is why certain regulations, of class-size, say, and licensure laws, should exist. Charters were supposed to exist in a legally-flexible zone in order to provide interesting, student-serving pedagogy and practice, but instead have become law-shirking inferior learning environments that tremendously hurt teachers, and in turn, the kids. Union matters matter for education policy.
As Karen says, teacher's working conditions are our student's learning conditions.
