by Dennis Green
The only questions being asked these days of the Alameda Unified School District is whether they have enough money. As if revenue and expenses, the balance sheet, is the only thing that counts in education. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
I spent many years as a department or business manager, and always knew that my primary task was the care and feeding of my employees, with moral and psychological support, not just income. It was my job to inspire them to do their very best. And that’s also the job of any classroom teacher vis-à-vis his or her students — inspiration, motivation, the conviction that they can do the work and the results will be valued when they do.
The rest is butt-kiss. Academic politics, interference, the demoralizing influence of someone who just doesn’t get it, the true dynamic of the process of learning. And ultimately, money has very little to do with it.
I’m told that young teachers leave the profession because they can’t support three or four kids, a family, on the salary, or that the lower pay discourages the very best scientists and engineers from even considering teaching to begin with. I have an easy answer to such objections. If you’re driven by the passion for learning — giving it to your students and getting it back from them — you’ll find a way. Because teaching is still a CALLING!
You’ll put the old lady to work full-time too, and let her share the task of supporting those kids you had together. Or you’ll get a part-time job after school, as many of my own teachers in Eureka did.
And if you care more about the paycheck than the experience, you don’t belong in teaching anyway. You will burn out rapidly and just sleepwalk and phone it in. You’ll need tenure and a union just to keep your job.
I don’t know whether the public schools in Alameda are well-managed, or not. But I have heard of some very questionable practices. One is the requirement that the district make up for losses to investments in the staff and faculty retirement funds.
As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, 3/10/10: “This week, CalPERS, the state retirement pension fund, lost $91.2 million on a Boston commercial real estate deal, after losing $600 million in other such gambles in the past 90 days, while the California State Teachers Retirement System, (CalSTRS), faces a loss of $325 million invested in a Manhattan skyscraper project.”
A complete lack of transparency on the part of management — the district Trustees, most of them, and the Superintendent herself — regarding where the money IS spent also fails the smell test.
Likewise, negotiating sweetheart contract deals with the teachers unions — reducing class size rather than laying teachers off in the face of deficits and declining enrollment, or bringing in intra-district transfer teachers at a higher pay scale than other districts — is simply bad business practice. Unfortunately, most “managers” in the public school district are administrators, i.e., former teachers, many of whom burned out on the classroom itself long ago.
They are loathe to evaluate, let alone discipline, admonish or even fire teachers who are cynical and uninspired. They regard them as more like colleagues, or even adversaries to be feared, than as staff members, employees, people they are responsible for actually managing. So, yes, I’m beginning to conclude, for these and a host of other reasons that our schools are so poorly managed it’s surprising they still function at all.
But try telling that to the nearly one-third of students who drop out before graduating from high school. Dysfunctional? Somebody is.
©2010 Dennis Green
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