My favorite Woody Allen movie is “Love and Death”, hence the picture above. One of my favorite lines in any of his movies was not in it, but in another whose name I can’t remember. “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach-- and those who can’t teach, teach P.E.”

Sadly, it is true that many people believe that someone goes into teaching because he or she could not hack it in the real world. As well, most people believe they could do as good a job or better teaching students anything they happen to know (or think they know) something about. The Chicago Public Schools use this widespread feeling among the populace to lower their costs. Experienced teachers are fired, usually when a school is being “reorganized” because of poor performance, and replaced by new teachers recruited from industry to enter the teaching profession. This happened to a friend who taught in the CPS system. When his school was reorganized all the teachers had to re-apply for their positions; most of those hired back had five or less years of experience. He had taught for 20 years and was too “expensive” to rehire. His replacement was a woman who had left her job as a chemist in the private sector to become a high school teacher. She was paid at the level of a first year teacher, saving the school tens of thousands of dollars. He found out from a colleague that she quit after three weeks. Depending on who you talk to, this practice may occur frequently. School administrators get away with this by convincing the media that there aren’t enough teachers when no such shortage exists.

Recently, the federal government has proposed a new multi-billion dollar stimulus package which they claim will save the jobs of many fo the teachers that have been laid off. In reality, the money, if allocated, will be used to hire additional first year teachers—the experienced teachers that have been laid off will not be getting their jobs back. Make no mistake about it, many public school administrators believe that a trained monkey could do as good a job as many teachers; and would hire one if they could get away with it. With teaching salaries being 75% or more of school budgets, the incentive is high to purge the highest paid staff whenever possible. Union contracts usually prevent this from happening; but when a CPS school is deemed failing by the central office teacher tenure and seniority are canceled. It is a puzzle to me why the teacher’s union doesn’t put up a fight when these things happen. Maybe they don’t care; union dues are the same for everyone, regardless of their experience.

Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not implying that experienced teachers are always better than inexperienced teachers. Many experienced teachers have given up and are just “phoning it in” until they have acquired enough years to retire at full pension. I feel that decisions about teacher retention should be made based on effectiveness, not seniority or, on the other hand, how cheap someone is to employ. Seniority and salary are both easy to measure, so they are easy to use in retention decisions. Measuring effectiveness is much more difficult. In my mind, the best measure of effectiveness is to pre and post test students; measuring effectiveness by student improvement.

Allow me to illustrate. You are asked to determine which of two cars is faster. Both are on I-80, making their way to California from Chicago. You locate each vehicle using their GPS system and determine that one is near Denver, the other is in Omaha. You report that the car near Denver is the faster of the two; Denver being closer to California than Omaha. This is the equivalent of using post testing only, something like exams on state objectives, to measure the effectiveness of a teacher. Maybe the vehicle in Denver left Chicago a month ago, and the vehicle in Omaha left yesterday. Now which one is faster?

I am going to test my method this school year. Over the summer I generated a test consisting of 50 multiple choice questions that cover the major concepts in chemistry. I will give this exam to my students the first week of school and again the last week of school. By doing this I hope to verify that the students actually learned something this year.