It is probably frivolous to create any extra ink about teachers’ rights or the plight this profession faces politically right now. You would think there can’t be a rock large enough that someone living beneath still believes teachers make too much and work too little, but there are plenty of rocks and apparently dwellers beneath. I am pro-kid, not pro-teacher or pro-government, in this debacle…er, debate. (I’m writing this after working in my classroom on report cards until 9:30 p.m. on a Friday, for six hours the following Saturday, then spending five more hours planning my week of lessons. I work a little, so many of us do.)
However, I’m thinking recently about the differences in how we approach things in this country. In almost every industry or environment I’ve worked, a premium is placed on the inputs. The reasoning goes, that the higher-quality inputs to a system, the better the outputs should be. This made sense when I made pizzas in high school, when I hung wallpaper, when I rescued the sick and injured, or when I developed marketing programs. In each there was a vast selection of ever-improving inputs of ingredients, wallpaper, equipment, technology and innovation. The difference was, I could and did have a choice in the quality of my inputs.
The newest healthcare plan for our country places a value on preventive care. Companies the nation over are putting in place “wellness” plans to help their employees reduce the healthcare they need, by improving themselves. They want to improve the inputs to the medical process, so that the outputs cost less and are better quality; understandable. I’m quite sure no one would consider valuing physicians as a whole, by the healthy capacity or state of their patients, our country. If we did, and as we’ve seen, doctors can choose which patients they treat, again an ability to control the inputs.
In education, the inputs I’m given are far less under my control. Inputs like children across the spectrum of learning abilities from families across the spectrum of educational and financial backgrounds; inputs like curriculum that is substantial and coherent, supplies abundant enough to support it, time to collaborate and understand our goals and trajectories; these are inputs to my current environment, none of which I have much direct choice or control over. Still, teachers paid with public money are expected to produce superior outputs, not only within our nation, but against other countries. I think I do alright, and I try to get better all the time with the things I can control.
When I stop to think about it, I like the variety of learner that the current system provides as one input. I don’t know that I would want to choose those inputs differently, though I would prefer our society support broader “preventive care” such as early childhood literacy. I don’t even need to change the input of money public education receives, but I sure would like it if the collective “we” (teachers, policy-makers, taxpayers, administrators) rethought how we work with the inputs. It seems that if we continue to expect particular outputs and we cannot control the inputs, then we must focus more on the process of how we transform them.