Next week the ANCS PTCA is helping to sponsor “Teacher Appreciation Week” at our school. The PTCA always does a wonderful job of finding ways to show appreciation for our faculty and staff—and not just during a designated appreciation week.
Outside of ANCS, over the past few years, the general atmosphere around the treatment of teachers in the United States has not been especially supportive. Whether it is ascribing full blame for U.S. students’ scores on international tests to “bad teaching” or establishing education policies that limit the voice teachers have in decision-making or that ignore teachers’ feedback, the public rhetoric around our K-12 teachers has tilted towards the negative for a while now. Yet, there are signs that perhaps this trend may be changing.
As the AJC’s education commentator Maureen Downey noted about the strong support behind a recent bill that would reshape the way teachers are evaluated in Georgia to be more in line with what educators think is best, “In listening to the hundreds of teachers who contacted them, the Legislature changed the education reform narrative in a critical way: Georgia educators are now seen as part of the reform effort, rather than an obstacle to it. Up until now, front-line educators haven’t been leading the charge; they’ve been ducking all the bad ideas, inane policies and political mandates lobbed at them by legislators.”
Educators pushed hard for support of this bill because (1) the changes make sense and (2) many of their colleagues are leaving (or not joining) the profession because of the many years of negative attitudes towards teachers that have been manifested in many of the “bad ideas, inane policies, and political mandates” of which Downey writes.
While this move away from widespread denigration of teaching is welcome, it doesn’t mean the best way to support teachers is to rubber stamp every policy idea that comes from a teachers’ group or to elevate those who choose to teach to mythic status, believing that they must make some sort of Mr. Holland’s Opus-type impact in the classroom every day. Instead, I’m often reminded of a quote from the late Ted Sizer who said that “Respect for students starts with respect for teachers, for them as individuals, for their work, and for their workplace.” The best way we can appreciate teachers is to listen to them, to meaningfully consider their informed professional opinion on matters of teaching and learning, and to create the conditions that will allow them to do their best work for students.