"Managing" Teacher Professionalism
Twenty years ago, Michigan schools were in a funding down-cycle. Lots of belt-tightening and angry school board meetings with parents protesting transportation cuts and pay-to-play sports fees. I was finishing up my tenure (reign?) as Michigan Teacher of the Year. I was pink-slipped in the spring, but unconcerned; I'd been pink-slipped six times before--I'm a music teacher and music is always expendable in tough times-- and understood that mass layoff notices gave the district some flexibility. It also gave teachers a heads-up, should they be considering a job change, or retiring.
A reporter from the Detroit News called, saying he'd heard a rumor I'd been laid off. My matter-of-fact answer ("doubtful") was unsatisfying to him. The entire time we talked, I could hear him typing, as he tried to make a sexy story--Teacher of the Year Loses Job!--out of a fairly routine staffing practice. I would welcome a story in any newspaper about the critical importance of music in the curriculum, or the value of experience in building a dynamic classroom practice. But that wasn't the angle he was pursuing.
So I had an inkling of how the new Michigan Teacher of the Year, Gary Abud, felt when the Mackinac Center's
A reporter from the Detroit News called, saying he'd heard a rumor I'd been laid off. My matter-of-fact answer ("doubtful") was unsatisfying to him. The entire time we talked, I could hear him typing, as he tried to make a sexy story--Teacher of the Year Loses Job!--out of a fairly routine staffing practice. I would welcome a story in any newspaper about the critical importance of music in the curriculum, or the value of experience in building a dynamic classroom practice. But that wasn't the angle he was pursuing.
So I had an inkling of how the new Michigan Teacher of the Year, Gary Abud, felt when the Mackinac Center's
