With class sizes being what they are and the constant demands of the learning process, does true absenteeism really exist for the teacher?

Now the teacher’s responsibilities are more flexible and manegerial. You set the lesson plans, answer questions and problems that come up, and you only run lessons in person on specific topics that require it. This is how I would redesign the role of teachers, right now they are more than 50% babysitters.

My school once had the best attendance rate for teachers in the district, but that’s because we were mostly thirty and forty-somethings. As our faculty aged, and as we were unable to retain young talent, absenteeism became huge. I still remember the first time we knew that 20% of our teachers would be gone on the next day so we had a special meeting. Now its not unusual to have 20% gone. The State has been very understanding as they investigate our problems but its team was freaked by our absenteeism rate. But our small 700 student school had nine educators last year who missed significant time due to cancer, blindness, and other exteneded hosptial stays, others with ill parents, and one death.

We can’t forget why its impossible to keep young teaching talent. Its the interconnected problems of discipline and the magnets recruiting our best teachers. We’ve got two twenty-somethings who are superstars so we have to send them to professional development and other meetings. (one wakes at 2:30 am and rarely gets home before 7:00) But every time they leave the school the magnet schools keep begging them to come to a place where they can teach more easily.

The NEH has “Artists in Schools” programs. Why not recruit a cadre of twenty-somethings with video game skills to set up gaming programs in schools? I bet they would produce much higher gains in reading comprehension and the underwhelming results of “best practices.” David Boren was ahead of his time in advocating “circuit riders” or traveling teachers with special expertise. Remember the old Eduwonk readers contest that was won by a proposal, as I recall, for interns in classes. Think of how many Baby Boomers and career changers who would love such a career ladder. Pay people from the community to work in schools and pay for their continuing education. We’ve all known cafeteria ladies, security guards, bus drivers, contract coaches, etc. who were wonderful with kids, and who could provide even more help if we set out to maximize their talents. Unleash our imaginations and we’ll find plenty of creative people who want to join the front lines of the 21st century’s civil rights movements. (My first two years, technically I worked for the school system but I was first hired by a mental health institution and in the second year I was hired by the curriculum dept. Back then, those arrangements were sealed by a handshake.)

Lynn Canady correctly argues that we need to rework schedules for the benefit of students not the convenience of adults. He says that 20% of students are obviously failing by October, and we can’t come up with a better idea than to let them fail until June? Why not start some contracts in October so that those failing students can chose to take advantage of a second chance to take a real class, and not just hope that they will be passed on by some CYA “safety net.”

KIPP has a lot of inspiring stories, but if we want to bring them to scale in a sustainable way, we can’t depend on heros working 16 hours a day. Two qualified teachers working eight hours a day will produce far more good for a greater number over a longer time.

Besides, we rarely consider the down side of those heroes working themselves to exhaustion. In my experience, most really stupid ideas were ordered by people who were literally not in their right minds. They were so stressed out by political pressures and exhaustion of 90 hour weeks that you can only imagine the cortisal or whatever chemicals that were being pumped through their overstressed systems.

Why not grow community schools programs that work. Invest in efforts to get the community into schools and students into communities? Compare the costs of these programs with the total cost of instruction-driven reforms that have grown out of the Washington Consensus, and if you take into account the capital costs of computers, software, etc. and the operating costs in the Title and PD budgets, and I’d expect these new ideas would be very cost effective. And common sense and the professional judgement of teachers argue that they would be much more effective.

Of course, it would be impossible to pursue these ideas and continue to seek value-added or other test-driven models for accountability. Already its impossible to distinquish between what individual produced what gains. But if we created dynamic teams of educators, its hard to believe than anyone would try to create models to attribute blame and individual credit. We’d just have to reward teamwork, or be satisfied that our teams were better serving kids.

The additional staff could also be assigned more as teacher assistants, which would be a really great way to let first-year teachers get on-the-job experience and get their feet wet without having to handle 30 students and learning the curriculum and all the other first-year challenges.