Ed. Board: "Ask yourself: In every school you've ever been in, couldn't you and everyone else identify the best teachers, the Frank Caros?"
Not to take anything away from Caros, but I bet you could find kids with whom he didn't do well.
The editorial board, with curious fervor, has condemned the decision of the Oregon City teaching community, scoffing and diminishing a democratic gesture by branding it capitulation to the union.
Probably the secretive union leadership has it right here for the wrong reasons; regardless, the powerful language in this essay (“far from the philosophy;” “closed minds of Oregon's teaching establishment;” “isn't even willing to try”) seems to place the authors in the same sort of stubborn, pre-determined mental state that they accuse Ms. Noice and her employer, the ominous OEA (cue sound) of inhabiting.
While all this brouhaha about unions and merit pay roils the news, real teachers (mostly oblivious) are still getting up early, buying supplies with their own money, greeting the janitors who arrive early and the blue-haired, red-eyed kids who are always there before the building opens. While the editorial board of the NW's most influential newspaper prints language that makes schools, like bakeries or banks, sound like free-market enterprises, real teachers continue to toil in over-crowded classrooms with challenging children, leaving late in the day with hours of work after meeting with overwhelmed parents or supervising some club of neglected kids.
In the '80's, the teachers at the American School for the Deaf, where I was working while earning my education degree, made in the low 20's to mid-20's, tops. Administrators made in the 30's. Houseparents like me made something in the teens. No one made noise about what they made. It was just a rewarding job.
The problem with this merit pay proposal is that it exacerbates existing inequities that already discourage a lot of good teachers—inequities that create a lot of dropouts, among teachers and students. Veteran employees who have stayed in the same district for decades--who in some cases have fled the classroom for the rewards of administration--are now in charge of deciding who will be paid as good teacher—often without being required to provide empirical evidence for their decision.
Who has earned that trust?
That is the problem that Oregon City teachers are addressing when they vote to avoid putting a potful of education money in another political kitchen. Who gets the meat and who gets the broth? They are trying to SHARE in the OC schools--it is not that way everywhere, I assure you.
Mr. Caros, for all his skills, has been elevated above his colleagues by people who systemically reward sycophancy—it is the nature of the beast in bureaucracies. I do not wish to detract from his good fortune but I hope he is humble and self-aware enough to acknowledge that there are, out there in Education Land, hundreds of others who routinely perform with at least equal skill and effort.
Some teachers, without public recognition, may even exceed his virtuosity in their different classroom settings but labor on in obscurity, unsupported by the entrenched bureaucrats who require unwavering loyalty, if not unadulterated sycophancy. These teachers, however deserving, will never get the Milken or any federal money. Not the way the system is now.
So, when the editors of The Oregonian diss the OC education professionals for not taking federal funds impulsively--without some ground rules established, without some safeguards to prevent the possibility for misuse—those editors seem to miss the point of public education, which is to mitigate the economic stratification inherent in a free-market system.
As we go forward, we will expect our public servants to grow more thrifty with our resources, too.
P.S. Mr. Caros would do well to share his reward generously. He stands on the shoulders of a lot of selfless, brilliant people who labored blissfully in obscurity.
