Teacher+Morale+Hits+Rock+Bottom

Focus on tougher tenure, test scores weighs heavily
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=By Jennifer Brooks= =//Published in the Tennessean//= =//4/4/11//=

= For Principal William Moody, finding good teachers isn't the problem. = = "If these weren't good teachers, I wouldn't let them through the door of this building," said Moody, principal at Two Rivers Middle School. = = The problem is keeping them. It's getting rare for him to see teachers over age 30. Too many veterans, he said, are giving up on the profession and leaving for less stressful careers. = = "I don't know why anyone would want to be a teacher these days," said Moody, who was named Metro Middle School Principal of the Year in 2009. "I've never seen it as difficult to be a teacher as it is right now." = = Teachers never expected the job to be easy. The hours can be long, the students difficult, the pay lackluster. But lately — between the intense pressure to improve test scores and the political rhetoric about "bad teachers" who get overpaid to work nine months out of the year — some teachers are beginning to wonder whether society values them anymore. = = , like many states, is in the midst of a push to make teacher tenure more difficult to get and limit collective bargaining rights. It's an effort proponents insist is anti-union, not anti-teacher, saying their reforms will reward the good teachers and weed out the bad. = = Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey is the son, grandson and brother of schoolteachers. He's also a force behind the state's ongoing attempt to dismantle their collective bargaining rights. = = Tennessee consistently ranks toward the bottom of any national list of test scores and student __[|performance] __. The problem, he said, isn't the teachers. It's the teachers unions. = = "I know the hard job they do. What we're trying to do is help them," Ramsey said. "You have the unions out there that have the only voice in the schools right now. They're portraying this as being anti-teacher, when nothing could be further from the truth. Unions do protect mediocrity. Unions don't promote excellence." = = Without collective bargaining, Ramsey said, teachers would be free to approach the school board individually to talk about their salaries and benefits. How that would actually work in districts such as Metro Nashville, with thousands of teachers, is a detail he said the legislature is still discussing. = = "The teachers unions are a self-serving type of organization that almost uses the teachers for their political gain," he said. = = = = 'Best and brightest' may exit = = = =[| Middle Tennessee State University] education professor Terry Weeks said teachers, and student teachers, take criticism of their unions as criticism of themselves. This is a right-to-work state, which means that members of a teachers union are in it voluntarily.= = These days, Weeks listens to his students planning their __[|exit strategies] __ before they've even set foot in the classroom. = = "More and more of them are questioning whether they'll still be teaching in three years, in five years," said Weeks, an MTSU graduate himself who went on to be named a National Teacher of the Year in 1988. "What's particularly perplexing for me, a lot of them are my best and brightest students." = = Right now, Moody's teachers at Two Rivers Middle School are drilling to prepare for the TCAP standardized assessment tests in mid-April. For the first time, their evaluations will be based largely on their students' learning gains. = = At the same time, they're dealing with the boy who sits and screams at the ceiling and who has already been sent to the principal's office 63 times this year; the pregnant 13-year-old; the child whose mother was just arrested. = = = = Love of the job stretched thin =

="I don't __[|know how] __ much longer I'll be able to do it," said seventh-grade history teacher Anna Bateman, who has been teaching for five years. "I'm 29 and I'm getting gray hair."= = In Bateman's classroom, bright mobiles spin from the ceiling, made by her students to illustrate the three branches of government. Behind her desk, a cupboard and small refrigerator are stocked with food she buys to feed her students who come to school hungry: cereal, peanut butter, __[|power] __ bars, cheese and other healthy snacks. = = She has wanted to teach since she was in middle school, and for the moment, she says, her love for her students keeps her on the job. Not long ago, a class troublemaker from her first year of teaching came back to tell her he was heading off to college, so he could be a teacher, just like her. = = Robert Reynolds is a former probation officer turned middle school math teacher. = = "I love teaching. I'm not in it for the money," Reynolds said. "But there are a lot of things people blame us for. They blame teachers for kids' test scores, and they blame us for the U.S. not being a world power in education. Nobody blames the parents." = = He's teaching a small class of sixth-graders who are struggling with basic math concepts, such as how to recognize patterns in sequences. He works his way patiently around the room, explaining and re-explaining how to reason through the test questions as the students fidget, stare out the window or jump up to sharpen the same pencil again and again and again. = = = = Parents' role felt in classroom =

="We're just undervalued and unappreciated," Reynolds said. "I wish the legislature could make parents more responsible. We get kids coming to school who haven't eaten, maybe their dad just got arrested. … You think that kid is going to be interested in class that day? He's not going to be interested in learning about the slope-intercept to find y on the axis."= = Not every teacher bails out of the profession at 30. Science teacher Rita Salman has been teaching three decades and hopes to work at least 10 more years. = = But teaching and attitudes toward it have shifted. When Salman graduated from college, nearly every female member of her class was earning a teaching degree. When her son graduated from the same small North Carolina college a few years ago, only one student in his graduating class had education listed as her major on the commencement program. = = "If I were thinking about coming into teaching today, I might think twice," Salman said. = = = =**Contact Jennifer Brooks at 615-259-8892 or jabrooks@tennessean.com.**=

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