Merit Pay? Hardship Pay!

There was no keeping Ms. J; she was gone before October. My principal at the time asked me to pep talk her into staying. I did talk with Ms. J, but I didn’t shine the school up and make her feel like it was going to be easy. In the end, she hated the job, felt threatened by the students and had been humiliated beyond her wildest imagination all in the span of a couple weeks. My feelings when I last talked to her were basically, “If you need to go – go.” She left.

The 9th graders ran her out. She was a brand new Teach For America (TFA) English teacher. Last year, she was an outstanding student at a good university in the Midwest. She probably could have picked her job and had it, but she chose to “Teach For America.” The kids had a different idea for her, though.

During classes, they showed Ms. J misbehaviors that to her were completely foreign. She was unused to the cursing, disillusioned by the unruliness and disheartened by a widespread unwillingness by the students to listen to her lessons, which she pored over night and day. When she sent kids out of the room for misbehaviors that would warrant detention, suspension and possible expulsion in functioning school systems, they were often sent back to her room within minutes. Ms. J’s problems were similar to everyone else’s and the message from the administrators was to “Figure It Out!”

While she was trying to introduce new material or help students, kids running around in the halls pounded on her windows. They taunted her, calling her a “white bitch,” and other phrases not worthy of being reprinted. One day, a few boys followed her down to her car as she left the building. They did so to intimidate her.

Her tears after school one day were tears of a genuinely good person who had run herself right into a layer of hell that most people wouldn’t think possible in the United States. Several teachers tried to support Ms. J and reassure her that she had made the right decision to come teach in this city – that the kids were learning from her – that they needed her and would eventually come to like and respect her.

One veteran, an outstanding government teacher who helped guide me my first year, told her that the kids had made her life miserable her first year too and that she often thought of quitting. “It’ll turn around come March,” she said – the same thing she’d told me. This was only September. March seemed light years away; everything seems far away to a new teacher in a failed school who can hardly envision the end of a class period coming let alone the end of several months.

Many want to talk about merit pay and closing schools to reopen charter schools, but I want to talk about how to work more intelligently with what we have. This potentially excellent teacher was run out by kids who have gotten away with all but murder in this school system. All the teachers could think when Ms. J left was that the students and “the system” had won again.

Before any legitimate debate can be had about merit pay, we need to figure out what steps can be taken to make sure all teachers feel driven to work towards something positive in these challenging environments. I’m no proud union member, but the conditions in this school are not acceptable or respectable. Aside from teaching children who present some of society’s most vexing problems, many buildings are in disrepair. In our school, ceiling panels are out, the heater doesn’t work effectively, power sockets are dry, bathrooms are disgusting and there’s a bad rodent problem.

Before a merit pay system based totally on academic achievement, we could start by pushing for a hardship payment in which teachers put in situations like the one at my school are offered quarterly or yearly bonuses or some student loan forgiveness for doing the little things well: Showing up each day and being on time, keeping an attractive and organized classroom, having detailed lesson plans, documenting student actions, adapting lessons to fit children who read or work on various grade levels, and making every visible efforts to contact parents. All these things could be easily tracked by administrators, who would then have a much greater idea of which teachers are or aren’t performing up to par.

Perhaps this sounds too simplistic to warrant merit pay to an outsider, but there are real issues finding good people who will do these necessary things while working in the currently impossible conditions of low-income districts.

Coaching great John Wooden stressed the little things – tying your shoes properly and wearing proper athletic socks – to his eventual championship teams. The same could be applied to teachers in the worst schools in America: Have your systems in place, copies made, reading materials laid out, make-up work packets prepared, bulletin boards neatly updated. Do those things and you’re building towards something potentially great. Too many times, teachers are thrown into these hopeless situations and the little things go to pot.

Someone like Ms. J would have benefited greatly from an incentive program like this. At least she would have seen that her efforts to do her best with lesson planning, keeping an organized and presentable classroom and contacting parents were being respected on a professional level. TFA and some other programs do offer some forgiveness for student loans, but the reward is not tied towards excellence in any way – it’s tied towards sucking it up and finishing the commitment you make. So much of the experience of teachers and students in low-income areas is already based on sucking it up and getting through it.

Having a reachable incentive - one that would vastly improve the experience of teachers and students - would have made it easier for Ms. J to deal with the daily nuttiness in her room, and eventually she would have learned how to manage her classroom. Teachers won’t stay when the situation is hopeless and they are being asked to deal with and document all of society’s ills as well as come up with 90 minute lesson plans. Incentivizing it so all teachers were shooting to do at least the little things right would build pride and probably show teachers where their shortcomings are. If you can’t keep an organized classroom, which is ultra challenging in low-income areas because kids are rotating in and out of the classroom so much and low/sporadic attendance is the norm, chances are that your kids aren’t progressing as they should.

A buddy of mine got himself in some hot water with the organization last year when he said in a newspaper article that TFA teachers often seemed like a bunch of guilty plane crash survivors. He definitely didn’t lie. Inner city teachers experience things on a daily basis that make it hard to believe we are teaching in the United States of America in the year 2009. It’s wrong-minded to think we’re going to attract the best teachers into these areas without compensating them. Before we can compensate based solely on academics, which should be an ultimate goal, however, teachers need to believe they are working in an environment that promotes and supports their honest efforts.