LETTER: Teachers owe thanks to Cowan

Thank you, Teri Cowan. While your own heart is surely breaking at having to leave the position you love, perhaps your honest statements will help save heartbreak for other teachers and therefore their students somewhere down the line, by helping to upright this educational world that professionals know is so wrong-sideup.

It’s obvious that many perceptive students, as well as their parents and other citizens, know there is something very wrong with what’s happening but don’t know what to do about it. Many of us do know our state and country must do something or lose a lot, and I’m pretty sure the answer lies in your kind of professional.

What’s upside-down and backwards is the administrator-teacher relationship: the wrong people are specifying what will work and what won’t, experienced teachers are being told to abandon their “old” methods and “try this — you’ll like it.”  Don’t these “higher-ups” know that these teachers have never stopped learning, with or without these nudges?

The best teachers, professionals like you, have always known that change is the essence of education. They are never static: principles of great teaching never change, but content changes, and new techniques are always out there for examination, trial, and adoption IF they fit the teacher’s scene of operation.  And only the professional teacher knows that.

No supervisor, however qualified and talented, can — without fully knowing the subject matter and spending all day, every day, in the teacher’s classroom — know what will fit. How did this relationship come to be “them against us,” as it has in many schools besides yours?
It’s not the chicken-or-the egg controversy: we know who came first. In the beginning there were teachers and students, period. (Socrates didn’t even have a building, for pity’s sake!) Later, with schoolrooms and then more than one classroom, a principal teacher (or headmaster) was needed to help keep interclass matters organized. More positions were added, but how did we forget that everyone else in the system is there to enable the teachers to teach, not to tell them how?

Somehow we have let the money-controllers in Austin, who know even less about the classroom than local administrators, ignore their constitutional responsibilities and make much ado about “raising standards.” Who wants to raise standards more than the professional teacher? And — here’s the rub — who could better tell administrators, legislators, etc., how to raise standards?

There are a few administrators in Texas who know this and are secure enough to work with teachers to implement necessary changes.

Still —we cannot fully blame the ones who know not, as they are being pressured by “higher-ups,” who know the least. And what do these administrators know to do but pass that pressure on? Then pros are denigrated with statements such as “it is hard to adjust to change,” or “just try it a while and then you’ll get it.” Working backwards again.

But all over we have administrators who are uncomfortable asking teachers what makes for improvement. Or when they ask, person-to-person or in anonymous polls, seldom believe or act on the teachers’ responses.

But teachers are the practitioners, as in other professional systems. A hospital administrator is overall responsible to see that doctors have the materials and logistics for efficiency, and of course to demand that doctors do the job they are there to do. But who ever heard of a hospital administrator — whether or not he/she is also a trained physician — entering an operating room and telling a doctor how to do that job, which scalpel to use, etc.

Or the manager of a law office — well, there are several analogies for folks who want to see.

It’s hard for some to speak up when there are so many reprisals that can’t be identified as such, so many ways to make a teacher sorry for it if he/she wants to keep the job.

But I pray that your example will help more of the pros speak out and lead their education-loving constituents to demand better of their and their legislators and their administrators in providing for education, not politics.