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I do understand this frustration, as more often than not older teachers were hired under a different system entirely. They didn't HAVE special-needs kids in the classroom, and honestly, many of these much older teachers have NOT adjusted well to this change. (I've rejoiced on more than one occasion over a retirement.)

But some have done well. I don't think it's fair to paint with a broad brush, but I do think that what makes a "good teacher" has changed over the last 20 years, don't you?

In MY experience, "young and enthusiastic" teachers often also wind up pregnant and take six weeks off in the middle of the school year and/or move to wherever their husbands get a better job within three years. It isn't just a matter of burning out on the teaching profession altogether. :)

I can't tell you how depressing I found this piece--not your thoughtful arguments in favor of teaching as profession where experience does matter, but the links to the education "reform" blogs.

The "efficiency" proposals found on there are workable only if teaching is something that nearly anyone can do, with a few weeks' orientation. This is patently false--even those in the most promising labor pool for that model, Teach for America, will tell you that they were unprepared and not particularly effective.

Two points, and I will slink away and pop a couple of Tylenol:

#1) We would not advance these quick-replacement arguments for any other profession that matters to quality of life. Employers expect a learning curve, even in low-skill occupations. It makes no sense to cheap out on teaching--it's the ultimate penny-wise/pound-foolish strategy, and we can't possibly be optimistic about results.

#2) Other nations do not perceive teaching in this way. The bar is higher, the induction and apprenticeship period longer and more intense, ongoing professional learning more intentional and targeted.

Sad.

Why is teaching being singled out as the one profession where experience doesn't matter? Are we hearing calls to chase people out of other professions early-- other than professional sports, where careers are short, but salaries are astronomical?

Would we say the same thing of nurses, or doctors, or-- well, anyone? When did teachers become the punching bags? I don't get it. I love with your calculation that if teachers kept improving at the rate they are asking for, they'd be sending third graders to Harvard.

I will start my 19th year of teaching next week. I am just as enthusiastic as I've ever been. More importantly, we have a brand-new, fresh out of college teacher in my department. I have spent hours for the past three days--off the clock, on my own time-- helping her prepare for the school year. She appears to be quite grateful for my experience, but I wouldn't be sharing it if I'd moved onto a "real" job (selling insurance?--I'm not sure what else I'd do) fifteen years ago.

I have been teaching for five years in a very poor, urban area. The achievement gap hits my students the hardest. There aren't enough hours in the day to fill in for the deficiencies that my students have. But my colleagues and I try. If it weren't for veteran teachers in my school, I would have left after one year. They have supported me, mentored me, and helped me develop my craft. With that said, I make only $55,000 a year. My benefits are terrific, and I am grateful. But, I live in an area of the country where the cost of living is through the roof. My salary cannot keep up. I will remain in education because I LOVE my job. I wish teachers weren't being vilified as we are now, overall, we're a good bunch of people and we make a huge impact on kids. Considering that I have a massive amount of student loan debt, and I am a "professional," do I not deserve to make more than my local plumber? Can I at least have some supplies paid for by my school district (we get not even a pack of pencils or a notebook)?

I have to echo the popular sentiment here, and add a few more comments.

I think we greatly err if we define the value of a teacher strictly by their "test performance".

Lets take another basketball example. Have any of you guys heard of Derek Fisher? He was the point guard for the Champion LA Lakers, and fairly old by NBA standards. His main "stats" for last season were fairly modest...7.5 Points per Game, 2.5 Assists, in 27 min. For his money, the Lakers could have signed any number of younger players to put up similar numbers.

But not only did the Lakers keep Fisher, they just resigned him. His experience and work ethic rubbed off on Shannon Brown (a younger guard prospect) and Andrew Bynum (a high potential, if raw, center. He's the TFA CM in our little metaphor here). His calm personality was critical in keeping known headcase Ron Artest in line as well. If the Lakers swapped Fisher for say, Luke Ridnour, the Celtics beat them in the finals.

I think the same general principle applies for teachers in our schools. Sure, at a certain point, their value added test scores are unlikely to rise too much ('specially if you're already in a strong district where students are growing more than a grade a year), but that doesn't mean you'd get the same results if you swapped them out with Replacement Level Rookies. Experienced teachers can help develop and strengthen younger peers, manage difficult personalities, and strengthen the building culture and identity. These things can be a little harder to measure, which is why great administration (coaches and GMs) are important in making schools successful.

There is a reason why veteran teachers should be valued. They understand students, human development, and education so well that they can reach into their "toolbox" and very quickly remediate an issue. Say you're a brand new teacher cutting your teeth in an poor area. Because you;re new and eager, you get a pretty rowdy group dumped on you (you wouldn't dare complain). You have a classroom filled with neglected, depressed kids that just want to lash out. You've never experienced behavior like this and things are quickly getting out of hand. On top of that, many of your students are reading 1-2 years below grade level. A veteran teacher reaches out to you and helps you. This veteran teacher even comes in and models group and 1:1 lessons with your students. Your worst kid, who is often throwing things out the window, knocking over furniture, spitting on peers, and telling you off, all of a sudden becomes entranced by this veteran teacher. The moment he drifts into destructo-mode, the veteran performs her Jedi-mind tricks and calms the child down. Your veteran teacher friend does this with ease, all day, and manages to teach students basic literacy and math skills, and even cater to the kids that are above grade level. The veteran teacher reassures you and tells you that one day, you too, will be a teaching Jedi Master, but it takes time and EXPERIENCE to get there.

I suppose that I could be defined as vintage, having been in a classroom for more than two decades.
During that time, I've mentored some of these dynamic, energetic, and enthusiastic new teachers that everyone is talking about. I've also mentored a few new teachers who thankfully decided that education was not for them...
Meanwhile I've worked with senior colleagues who are always excited to start the new school year, work with their new students, and try new things to make their programs even better. Sure, there are the 'burn-outs', but many of them burnt before completing their first decade in the classroom.
Enthusiasm and energy are not traits found exclusively in the young. The kindergarten teacher who was in my classroom before me taught with great enthusiasm for more than 35 years! I am hopeful that I'll be teaching passionately for at least another decade...otherwise, I hope they'll at least put me out to pasture on a sunny slope.

Thanks to all of you--veterans and (relative) rookies alike--for your thoughtful comments. (Nancy, I hope the Tylenol did the trick. Mr. Brown--I wish I had your gift for analogy).

I guess I'm concerned by the notion that if teachers don't get better and better every year according to a single measure, they're going to be deadwood. This is hardly a practical stance to take, given that we'll drastically increase the demand for new teachers--and limit the supply--if we think five or six years is the ideal tenure for a teacher. Just how are we going to make that work?

More to the point, a teacher in an average school will hardly have an opportunity to get better and better value-added scores every year, regardless of how good he is. The curriculum, the number of hours in the day, the natural capacity of even the very best students to learn--all of these things will cap the potential for growth at two years or less for the truest of miracle workers. So what should a great teacher do to show sustained growth over a 20-year career? Pace himself? So it makes no sense to read limits to growth in test scores as a necessary indictment of experienced teachers. The best of the best can hit those limits pretty early on. Do we want to discourage them from hanging around after year 5? Can we afford to?

You offer a compelling defense of experience. Given that the value of experience seldom registers in discussions of school reform, it's getting more and more important to identify and clearly describe that value. (Mrs C., you're right to argue that some experienced teachers really aren't adding much--we've all encountered them--but that doesn't invalidate the importance of experience). Stability, cohesion of culture, influence on peers, etc.--all of those benefits are hard to quantify, but people in thriving schools know they're important. Go to Viers Mill Elementary in Silver Spring, and you'll find a remarkable staff. Together, they've built a culture that is bigger and more valuable than any star teacher can be. The results for students have been tremendous. If you tell the older teachers there that they're too expensive, that they've outlived their usefulness, they might leave and open the doors for less expensive teachers. But they'll probably take the culture with them. A close friend of mine is teaching in a very "good" school that has only recently started to suffer from turnover. A once stellar department is now in shambles.

But it strikes me that we do need to think about alternative career trajectories for teachers. In other professions, people don't necessarily get better and better and better with each passing year--despite what some pundits seem to suggest. (If they did, all those folks in finance and industry would have have led us to Dow 30,000 by now--Remember that book?) Instead, they get new roles that offer them more responsibility. That way, they can increase their impact and take on new challenges. I wonder if we could give teachers the same kinds of opportunitie.

I think one reason some veteran teachers don't improve much is that they are aiming at the wrong ideal. The prevailing progressive ed ideal is of the "guide at the side" --a nurturing, hyper-organized individual who deftly juggles six differentiated lessons plans and has a DSL line into each child's emotional core. I reckon that one can get really good at this and still see little educational yield because this model for teaching is essentially flawed. Sure, it's important to be kind and supportive and organized. But the main work of teaching is transmission of knowledge, and unless one hones one's skills at this (by, among other things, deep study of one's content area and honing one's lectures) one's educational "yield" will never get that large. I have no solid proof, but ever since I've embraced the "sage of the stage" ideal about four years ago, I feel my students have been learning a lot more. Recently the mom of a former student came up to me and told me, "I know J. was sometimes a stinker in your class, but he was telling me recently, 'Mom, I learned SO MUCH in Mr. F.'s class."

I appreciate many of the sentiments above, but let's face it, teaching isn't even remotely as cognitively difficult as surgery (teachers are always talking bad about rote memorization; well, they wouldn't last a day in an anatomy or pathology class with that attitude). Nor is teaching nearly as rare or high-level a skill as that of a professional basketball player.

I'd be more impressed with teachers' knowledge of the real world if they stopped flattering themselves by these kinds of comparisons.

John Doe, you're almost right that teaching is not as cognitively difficult as surgery -- if what you're looking at is how hard it is for the practitioner to master the content. But it's much harder in that teachers have to figure out how to get the students (supposedly, all of the students no matter what their challenges) to learn the content and the skills that go with it. Most come nowhere near reaching that goal, because it's an impossible one. And we do tolerate some who fall way short because at least they're willing to show up every day. Some of the best burn out because the goal is so difficult to reach and they buy the dishonest message that every child can learn every subject at grade level.

Ben, I don't much like the "guide on the side" vs. "sage on the stage" language, because it establishes a false dichotomy. I still see the use of lecture--I've enjoyed very good lecturers--but surely teachers shouldn't ONLY lecture, and surely there's more to education than MERELY the transmission of knowledge. Children must learn and own a great deal of knowledge, to be sure. I'm not at all persuaded by arguments that they can just find stuff on the internet. But students should also think critically about what they learn, discuss it, write about it, think about it--and not merely repeat or re-transmit it. (Think of Mortimer Adler's Paideia philosophy). I'm assuming that you agree.

As for your other point, lack of background knowledge might certainly hold teachers back. But even the most knowledgeable teacher on the planet cannot infinitely improve her students' value-added scores, because the curriculum, time constraints, the limits of normal human cognition, etc. would prevent it. That said, a knowledgeable teacher can call on so many more resources and enrich a students' experience in so many ways that current value-added measures might not be able to detect.

John Doe--Teaching may not be as cognitively demanding as surgery, but that goes for almost every other profession as well--law, finance, management, etc. And as anyone who has taught can tell you, especially those who have taught in struggling schools, there are plenty of other demands on teachers. It's not easy to do very well, so we need to draw talent from the largest possible pool of people and then help those people grow. Also, I'm not sure you fully understood Mr. Brown's basketball analogy, which had less to do with the specialization and rarity of the skill and more to do with the stabilizing influence of experienced members on a team including young, talented players.

No, his point was this: "Imagine a reformer minded GM for a basketball or baseball team who gets the first pick overall in a draft and picks someone who has never played the sport before but is enthusiastic."

Well, obviously that would fail, because to be a professional sports player, you need to have had thousands of hours of tedious practice ("drill and kill"), and moreover to have a huge amount of natural talent and physical aptitude.

You don't need any of that to be a teacher. Sorry, you just don't. You need some basic classroom management skills, and you need to know your subject. For early grades, knowing the subject shouldn't be that hard, and classroom management skills aren't exactly rocket science.

Claus,

I'm familiar with Adler's Paidea Proposal. I'm not sure I agree that discussing and writing hold an equal place with direct instruction. Maybe, but I need convincing. The matter is not quite clear to me yet. Discussion and writing seem to me good MEANS of cementing factual knowledge. My lectures are interspersed with discussions, and I have my kids write essays to demonstrate acquisition of knowledge. Sometimes I write essay questions in such a way as to induce analysis or synthesis, but is the true value of this in a strengthening of critical thinking muscles or in the utilizing of critical thinking muscles to embed the information deeper into neurons. I'm inclined to think it's the latter. Of course ULTIMATELY --say ten years down the road --the aim of all this knowledge-inculcation is better thinking (because knowledge is the mother of effective analysis, synthesis, inference making, etc.), but in the k-10 years I tend to think our primary job as teachers is to solidly implant a large library of facts. Activating thinking skills, at this stage, seems like it should be viewed as primarily as a means to embedding knowledge.

I also observe that higher-order thinking gushes forth spontaneously from kids when they start to know things --especially when material is presented lucidly. It's what our brains DO when they possess knowledge. So, even if this high-order thinking were valuable in itself for kids, I'm inclined not to worry too much if teachers fail to actively elicit it.

Claus got my basketball story right. Clearly the labor pool for professional basketball players is smaller than it is for teachers (I suspect there are prob around 400 people in the country with the skills needed to play professional hoops..and there are at least 400 teachers a year coming out of my alma mater, THE Ohio State)...but I was talking about leadership dynamics.

As for classroom management being easy...have you ever been to an urban school? I saw a lot of TFA guys who are a lot smarter than me get turned into hamburger because they couldn't develop strong systems to handle their special needs students.

Does teaching require the intellectual horsepower that surgery does? No. It DOES however, require several different (and more uncommon than we'd like to admit) skills. I got into a top 20 US law school, and I was in the bottom-tier of Teach for America academically. I didn't stay in the classroom, and in a few years, most of my compatriots won't either. It won't be because we weren't smart enough.

"So what should a great teacher do to show sustained growth over a 20-year career? Pace himself?"

But surely this would not be the case. It's not as if all teachers will reach the same point after x years. A few teachers will excel at taking low-ability kids and moving them two years ahead in reading in the fourth grade. They will be consistently adding value year after year, and that will mean they get paid far more money than the teacher who takes those same kids and moves them forward 9 months--which is still more improvement than the average teacher achieves with this population. So these teachers don't have to increase how much value they add year after year, because most teachers won't get anywhere near that number--thus making them more valuable.

In suburban schools with few low ability kids, the teacher whose entire Algebra II class gets proficient or higher year after year, no matter the starting point, will get paid more than the teacher who can only get the high achieving kids to proficient. Again, there's no need for the teacher to improve on this standard year after year.

What we need, ideally, are teacher levels: Teacher I, Teacher II, Teacher III, whatever. The standards for moving to the next level is based on achieving a certain level of student improvement.

But even without a level system, I find it hard to believe that you really think that "value add" means the teacher has to increase the amount of improvement every year, rather than be assessed on the amount of improvement compared to other teachers.

As for experience: I find the rhetoric against older teachers to be alarming, particularly as it is often perpetuated by usually "politically correct" liberals who are pro-charter.

"But it strikes me that we do need to think about alternative career trajectories for teachers. Instead, they get new roles that offer them more responsibility. That way, they can increase their impact and take on new challenges. "

That's extremely incomplete, in that you imply the increased responsibility comes solely from the employer. In fact, many experts start their own business and/or go into consulting. For all those super-experienced teachers who help the young 'uns--why not cut their pay to something reasonable, and let them farm themselves out to school districts who recognize their value? Instead, their expertise is restricted to one school, and they are paid a fortune (in part on the premise of their senior expertise) whether they are actually good or not.

There are plenty of ways that teachers could monetize their expertise. But it would involve acknowledging that not all teachers are equally valuable, and would also depend on teachers being willing to act more independently.

I'm a new teacher (credentials in math, english, history), and before I was a teacher I was a tech consultant who made a nice living (low six figures but I averaged 25 hours/week). While I could make more as a tech consultant than a high-seniority teacher, my contract could end with no notice, I wasn't guaranteed benefits and a pension and only got paid when I worked.

Teaching is, frankly, an easy gig. So yeah, I submit that high-seniority teachers are overpaid given that they don't have to prove excellence or even competence to get the money. And since most teachers have never actually been at a job that paid more, I question their ability to make a comparison--or, in fact, argue objectively about their market value.

But I agree that I was using the word "fortune" as a taxpayer, not a teacher, so let me restate: a teacher with over 10 years seniority is getting paid well over $65K in most suburban areas of California, and the economic equivalent elsewhere. This is for working 186 or so days a year, 7-8 hours a day (anything over that optional). They get that money no matter what, plus benefits, guaranteed wage increases, and an outrageously generous pension. By any measure, teachers are paid well.

As for your friend: either you make a lot of money, which means your "non profit" label isn't relevant, or you've been working just a couple years, or the teacher lives somewhere deep, deep in the sticks where a miniscule amount translates to a nice living. If your teacher friend is making less than $50K after, say, four years teaching, then she lives in the sticks and is still doing pretty well. The fact that she's got an Ivy League degree is irrelevant (my own teaching MA is from Stanford, and I have another from Cal as well--so?), since unions insist that all teachers are equal.

"But some of the best schools I've seen anywhere benefit from experienced teams of teachers that welcome the new folk, draw on their enthusiasm and talent, but bring them into a culture of collaboration that enhances the experience for all students. "

Oh, I see. You want the muscle car AND the hot babe in the passenger seat.

You can't get free market salaries unless you actually have a free market. In fact, I suspect most teachers--who are drawn by the stability of the job--agree with you. But you can't have it all ways. If you want to have excellent teachers to be paid what they are worth, then the teachers need to be able to sell their skills to the highest bidder--which would be the district that wants what they have to offer. They can't be locked down to one district--a district that may or may not appreciate them or have various competing interests to assuage.

If you want to have collaboration and yada yada yada all locked down with stability and district or school ownership of the talent, then you have to trade something. You can't have stability and collaborative unchanging teams and whatever without giving too much control to the school or district. Teachers will never accept giving them that control without controlled salaries--and on that point, I don't blame them for an instant. I wouldn't accept it, either. You either need to remove control from the districts by allowing teachers to sell themselves and their services, or keep control and guarantee all teachers a generally fixed salary. I don't have any proof beyond a basic understanding of markets, but barring wishful thinking, it seems pretty axiomatic.

" That's what I'm hearing from some in the reform community. "

Yeah, but most people in the reform community really don't think these things through. I'm sure that there are proposals like that, but if we ever got around to actually doing this on a large scale, we'd be doing something like my scenario. However, my scenario assumes that teachers are still locked into a district or a school--something that, in my view, is the most important thing to change. But let's play out the scenario.

So here's Teacher A's peak sees students improve 9 months in a school year. Teacher B's peak sees students improve 1.5 months in a year, given low ability kids, with whom she excels. Teachers C-F improve the average of 6-8 months per year with low ability kids, whereas Teachers G and H can't get past 2 months. Assume these percentages hold for all teachers coming into the district to teach low ability kids.

Does it not make sense that the obvious way to pay teachers for performance is to set their yearly raise based on their students' improvement? So each year, Teacher B gets a 4.5% raise, Teacher A gets a 4.0% raise, the average raise is 2.0% and the losers get docked for costing the district money (or let's say raise percentages are based on district income for that year, but you get the idea). Teachers obviously have to maintain their performance level in order to keep the higher raise.

How could it be anything but this? If all teachers reach the same peak, then all teachers are equal and no need to discuss rewarding excellent teachers. And if reformers don't want to give raises every year, they are basically arguing that it's better to have a constant influx of average teachers with the occasional excellent or lousy one, with no interest in keeping the excellent ones that see a year or more improvement--which would be entirely contrary to the scheme in the first place. So you have to continue to pay good teachers more, and the obvious way to do that is to base their pay raise on their percentage improvement--relative to everyone else's, not their own.

Now, the only reason reformers would disagree with this scenario is if they secretly believe that all old teachers are terrible and all new teachers are wonderful. I suspect some of them do believe that, but they will be rapidly disabused of that notion.

As I said, the above scenario assumes that teachers are still locked into a district--that they have, if not tenure, something approaching it, so don't think this is my own preferred scenario (although I'd use it as a starting point).

In any event, something like this has to happen UNLESS all teachers are the same and there's no need to differentiate between average levels of improvement. And if that's the case, why reward teachers for performance at all?

"And how can we reconcile the notion that teachers should be primarily young folk with the reality that we need four or five million of these young folk? "

I'm not sure why you're asking me this, since I reject the notion that teachers should be primarily young. I think we should accept the notion of mediocre teachers at all ages and just make sure they aren't paid well. Remember, corporations deal with incompetents all the time. It's hardly unique to teaching.

"Teaching is, quite frankly, an easy gig."

Well, with all due respect, I'd have to wonder how good a job you're doing then, or at the very least, what subject you teach or what variables you have in your favor. Most of the teachers I hear who refer to their jobs as easy are the weaker ones who are unaware of what excellent teachers do.

If you have small classes, or teach out of a textbook or canned program, and don't put any effort into creating your own materials, your job is probably easy. If you don't assign any writing, your job is probably easy. If you don't spend much time grading, your job is probably easy. If you don't spend much time making parent contacts, your job is probably easy. If you have well-behaved, easy to deal with students, your job is probably easy. There are certain subjects I think are easier to teach than others. If no one is making demands on you to reach every single student, your job is probably easy. If you don't do any after school or extra tutoringd don't take on any leadership role at your school, your job is probably easy. If you have all those things going on, and think it's easy, I'm not sure what your definition of easy is.

I love my job, but it isn't easy. If you are doing it right, you are "on" every second of the day, including your planning period. "Easy" is a relative term, but and although I think you make many valid points later in your response, to say you find it easy, so it must be an easy job everywhere, for everyone, assumes an awful lot. If it's so easy, why do we have so many weak teachers?

I think you've hit on a perception of teaching that I find ironic. I think a lot of people think it's an easy gig, yet they also complain about all the weak teachers. If its so easy that anyone could do it, why do we have weak teachers? Is teaching easy, or is teaching demanding? It depends on who your asking.

Well, if you google "jay mathews" with "cal lanier", and after that search on "surviving stanford", you will be able to find out quite a bit about my approach to teaching.

I taught geometry, algebra, and humanities last year. That's three and a half preps. All math courses were taught independently at the school, which means I had to develop curriculum for both geometry and algebra (including all the tests for both classes), and I was the only history qualified teacher for freshman humanities, so I developed almost all of the history curriculum. I enjoyed doing it. I didn't feel overworked.

In addition to that full-time job, I tutored about 12 hours/week, and taught private instruction from 3-9 hours.

I love all my kids and stayed after school or worked with them at lunch whenever they needed me, and always was in contact with parents.

Plus, in April, I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post.

I'm a good cook, too!

I mean, really. All the above is true, but so what? Teachers are like women--they can't debate policy without bringing in the personal. Disagree with me as you will, but stop insinuating that my opinions make me a bad teacher. I gave you facts as to why teaching is objectively not a terribly difficult job. Try and disagree without attacking me as a teacher.

One of the reasons it's so difficult for teachers to get involved in public discourse is because people like you link opinions to teaching quality. It's dangerous.

"If its so easy that anyone could do it, why do we have weak teachers?"

First, we don't have lots of weak teachers. We have mostly solid teachers, although we can't fire poor teachers. What we do have are conditions in particular schools in which no one--not even strong teachers--can do a good job.

Second, teaching can be easy for smart people with the right temperament, and hard for less intelligent people, or those with the wrong temperament. It's not an impossible dichotomy.

Hey, if Sam Jackson can say the "n" word, I can diss chicks.

(It was a joke. Perhaps I should have said "like feminists"--the personal is the political?)

"But when you make the assertion that teaching is a 7 or 8 hour/day job with all those lovely weeks of vacation, you can't blame people for feeling a bit ticked off."

Well, it's not "people" who feel ticked off, but teachers and those who like to support teachers.

But sure, I can blame teachers (or "people"). The gravamen of the charge was not "don't be ticked off" but "don't attack my teaching just because you don't like my opinion" and not because my feelings were hurt but because it epitomizes the reason why teachers are at risk for expressing opinions.

"Second, it sounds like you're marvelous at what you do,"

I said nothing about the quality of my work. I only said that I don't feel overworked and that, despite a "ticked off" assertion to the contrary, I don't phone it in. I was not asking for congratulations, just pointing out the absurdity of Mr. Ticked Off making assertions about my teaching commitment.

"I've had a birds-eye view of some English departments for some time, and those teachers put in way more than 8 hours/day--grading essays, planning lessons, advising the poetry club, advising the literary journals, calling or meeting with parents, coaching sports, and showing up to student performances and athletic events."

About half of your list is covered by stipends. Planning lessons and grading essays are why teachers get prep periods. They have to show up to a certain amount of events as part of their contractual agreement, so that's covered in the pay.

And oh, by the way, outside of planning, grading, and parental communication, none of your activities are "the standard of excellence" by any universal agreement. The only universal "standard of excellence" for English is students who can read, engage with, and write about age-appropriate material. Poetry and literary journals are fine, in no way the standard of excellence. Attending sporting events and student performances are signs of community involvement, having nothing to do with quality of teaching.

Furthermore, I wasn't arguing that teachers *should* only work 8 hours a day. They're professionals. They should put in some additional time. But they have more control over that time than most professionals, and any extra time is entirely optional. If they do a bad job, they can't get fired, remember?

In terms of your overall remonstration:

There's no need to play peacemaker. Ask yourself instead why anyone would be "ticked off". Of course, you know the answer. I am saying that teachers are well-paid and not terribly overworked. That would be fine, except I have the audacity to actually be a teacher, which robs some people of their usual sneering rejoinder, leaving only "Well, you must be a very bad teacher."

I didn't make that comment with "bravado", because that would mean I got a frisson from upsetting people and for me, upsetting people is about as unusual as breathing.

I made the comment for two reasons. First, it's objectively true. If you think otherwise, the way to do so is to come up with facts. Not "I know a teacher who works rilly rilly hard" but "studies show that teachers who don't work more than 12 hours a day never get tenure" or something. When I read conversations that ignore reality, I try and point that out.

Second, I just started my second year as a teacher in a different district. While last year's pay was relatively low for the area, I still thought it was a good gig. This year, I'm cracking up--far more money, fully paid bennies, and a Mac. It's hysterical--and this district is only in the top third! So when I hear all these teachers complaining about their pay, I feel pretty compelled to disagree. It's my way of paying back the taxpayers.

But on a serious note: It's a disastrously bad strategy for teachers to attack other teachers for saying that they are happy with the pay and don't think the job is all that hard. I mean really, really stupid.

The correct response, if I may be so bold, is "We must never, ever, ever let you into contract negotiations."

Teaching Isn't A Game for Newcomers or Veterans

Wow!

I've been teaching 38 years and still love it, but after reading the article, it reminded me of how those with the talent and passion to teach can be made to feel unwelcome, undervalued, and subject to everyone's public opinion. We currently have a shortage of teachers in many areas (special education, bilingual education, math, science and other areas). We desperately need new and veteran teachers who really care about kids, are highly effective teachers, and view teaching as a profession and not a "game" anyone breathing can play.

I'm currently a teacher educator and involved in helping students explore teaching as a career and recruiting middle school students through adults into the profession. I see the enthusiastic future teachers, newcomers and veterans. Each one brings talents, wisdom, and perspectives to an ever changing educational system that must meet the needs of a rapidly changing world.

But most troubling to me about the article was implications of underlying age bias-- young as better than veteran. Perhaps I'm sensitive because I'm in the veteran category and believe that everyone should be valued and respected for what they can bring to the table no matter what their age category is for however long they wish to bring it. We need everyone in a profession that educates everyone for every aspect of our society.

I know that I am coming in really late on this thread and that most traffic has come and gone. I also do not make a habit of posting on forums like this one. However, I just wanted to address one logical breakdown in this analysis as it applies to the use of value-added scores. It is important that discussions about value-added be accurate and well-informed so that legitimate criticisms can be leveled against it as well as meaningful applications for value-added analysis can be found.

Quite simply, where did you get the idea that teachers value-added score would level off as they advanced in their careers? It is important to remember what 'value-added' is measuring. It is NOT measuring the way a teacher improves over time (as you suggested with your analysis of one year's worth of growth versus 3rd graders attending Harvard). Instead, it is measuring a teachers value-added to a given set of students within that year (irrespective of what the teacher accomplished with different students in a different year). Therefore, let's start with your hypothetical example of a teacher who is achieving 1 year's worth of growth (or hopefully 1.2 years worth of growth--important for students who come in below grade-level)after five years of teaching. If that teacher sustains that growth over the course of his or her career, he or she would continue to be compensated (under a value-added model) according to the growth that he or she achieves each year (it is more complicated than that--as it accounts for a students actual growth compared to his or her expected growth) accordingly.

There is no expectation that a teacher would make increasingly greater gains with each cohort of students, but rather that he or she would consistently make gains with each cohort.

Teaching is anybody's game as long as she/he is stocked with enough knowledge to teach. Veteran teachers should be proud of what they are and continue their profession but still they need to develop new strategies.

Nadine Thomas