Next year’s class lists are all set, pending the results of state examinations. Barring any surprises, I could tell you who will be in my classroom, who will be in the accelerated pull out, and who has been tagged as a risk to our district’s funding. Not surprisingly, the groupings are the same as they were last year. In fact, we began the process of dividing the student body into groups for the 2011-2012 school year as early as February.

To an extent, this makes sense. Students who perform at a particular level relative to the peers tend to do so month to month and year to year, with little deviation. But, I’ve spent the last two months wondering if that’s a direct result of the expectations we have for them.

The sad truth is that the students who are identified as low achievers in our district, will carry that tag regardless of the grades on their report cards or test scores. High classroom grades are informally perceived as the result of low expectations or soft grading on the part of the teacher. Possibly the student will receive credit for being the best of a sorry lot. But, even if the student were to earn a perfect score on the state test, she won’t be moved into an honors class. She was tagged back in Grade 2, and this will be her label thoughout her schooling. The best she can do is move up to “college prep”.

On the other hand, honors students with the parents who pushed to get them into the gifted program had better watch out. Our guidance team will comb over each of their report cards and test scores, looking for an excuse to drop them into the mainstream track. This strengthens the middle and culls the weak from the advanced class. As it is, 28% of our sixth grade students were in what are considered advanced classes. That’s four sections of Mathematics and five of Language Arts. I guarantee you that there will only be 3 sections of each by the time they reach eighth grade.

Weighing most heavily on my mind this summer are some of the comments made about student placement in our second to last staff meeting. Our lead guidance counselor spoke openly of his resentment of parent pressures on scheduling decisions, effectively saying that the parents should stay out of the process. In this era of rubrics and selection indices, the teachers in my district believe more in a less transparent, more subjective system. We know who the good (and not-so-good) kids are, and from what I hear and see, it looks like we go with our guts over the rubrics more often than we should.

There’s something wrong about hoping your low achievers don’t score too highly on the state test and disrupt the schedules made mid-year. There’s something equally troubling about giving unequal attention to the performance of the student body.

I would call for you all to be more involved in and aware of you children’s placement processes, but I know too well the repercussions you’ll face: increased scrutiny of your chlid’s work and a negative label for your whole family. I’m certainly no saint, and I’ve resented the input of involved parents on more than one occasion, but that’s nothing compared to what I’ve seen go on behind closed doors.

So what’s the answer? Probably to take your lumps and advocate for your child. You just need to ensure that from that point on you and your child follow through. If you ask for extra opportunities, you had best seize them. If you request support, you had best make full use of it. There are countless eyes looking to use you as a means of deflecting all criticism leveled at the process.

Educator x has been teaching related arts classes at a mid-size, suburban middle school since 2002.

Our position regarding the current elections here in NJ, and for all states, is that the most practical vote is a vote FOR the budget.

What the average voter does not realize is that the majority of the money spent in a school budget is mandated expenditures. When a budget is voted down, the school district cannot touch certain areas. Salaries and benefits for the coming year are already committed to, having been negotiated years earlier. State and federal laws mandate expenditures in the special education and special needs areas, and in the event of a budget defeat those expenses will still have to be paid.

A vote against your school budget forces your civic leaders to make cuts, and most voters do not realize that those cuts will HAVE TO come from the areas most voters like about their schools: extra curricular offerings, class sizes, field trips, activity buses, new textbooks, etc.,.  The issues that draw the most criticism from voters are often untouchable.

To get your local district to be more pragmatic with regard to teacher salaries and vendor agreement or if you are unhappy with the direction your school is headed, the school budget is not the place to to make an impact. If anything, you want to support the school budget so that a “no” vote is not used as an excuse for the path the school is currently on.

Where you can make a difference, is with the school board. Your school board negotiates the salaries, approves administrator hiring, and acts as your eye, ears, and voices in school decision making. You want to find and support candidates whose priorities are similar to yours, and who understand the concerns you have.

If you are unhappy with the salary the school principal makes, a “no” vote will not affect his/her paycheck. However, a vote for a specific school board candidate can influence the salary his/her eventual replacement will receive.

On election day, we encourage you to be informed. School districts are required to make their budgets available for public review, and many towns hold meetings to discuss the same. Any school board or administrator would gladly go through the line items and point out what is mandated and untouchable in the event of a “no” vote. They are not trying to be arrogant or diminish the power of your vote, they would prefer that the public understood that the “good stuff” is what is really being voted upon, not the things many people criticize when discussing school budgets.

Your local paper will also give each school board candidate a chance to outline their goals. It is important to know, most school board candidates DO have an agenda (their son plays lacrosse and they hope to see the sport move to full varsity status, their daughter is in the band and they want to ensure the annual trip to a band competition at Disney is in place for years to come), but so do each of you. There are things you want to see supported and areas where you feel investment is wasteful. You want to support a like minded candidate or even run for the school board yourself.

The best way to be informed and make a difference is to attend school board meetings.

School budget elections are a high profile time for families to become involved in the directions their schools are headed. Unfortunately, most misunderstand the impact they really can have.  Vote wisely today, and become involved… that’s the best thing you can do for yourself, your children, and your community.

[Educator X is a fourth-year special education teacher. Her salary for this year and next were set during contract negotiations last year and will not be affected by the outcome of today's elections. Her position in her school district is a state mandated position and cannot be eliminated by a defeated school budget.]

Now that that’s out of the way, I feel a need to say that younger teachers are overrated. I’m not saying that they don’t have the potential to become excellent educators one day, but the buzz and preference to have a “new teacher, just out of college” is unfounded.

I understand that movies like Teachers and most television shows depict teachers over the age of 50 (which I am not) as sleepy, unmotivated, uninformed dinosaurs whose apathy and stubbornness impedes the education of our youth. As a foil, young teachers are depicted as being able to reach students in innovative ways and to be able to make the most dry subjects fun and interesting. While I understand the source of those stereotypes and cannot say there are no individuals who fit them, I must emphatically declare that it simply isn’t the case.

When I was first hired as a teacher, I liked to think I fit that stereotype. I’d just spent hundreds of hours studying the latest incarnation of my state’s standards and the national guidelines. I had drafted pages and pages of highly detailed lesson plans and familiarized myself with all the latest ideas on how to make learning productive and fun. I was hip (I used AIM and watched all the right TV shows). My student-teacher experience was positive, but in hindsight very sheltered. My cooperating teacher ran interference for me on much of the bureaucracy involved in being a teacher, and much of the planning that goes into a school year was already done long before my 8-week stint began.

I began my first teaching job, as one of a handful of young teachers. We “new teachers” stuck together and truly bought into the hype that we were somehow a better option for our students: that we understood our students, the material, and how to teach, better than our older peers. Our gung-ho ideas and right-from-the-movies enthusiasm ran into several obstacles, which we blamed on our older colleagues. With more than a dozen years of experience, I now see that our frustrations were misdirected and our perceptions of our peers were wrong.

Once my ego fell in check, I began to look more closely at what my older colleagues were doing. They were using some of the older, familiar techniques I grew up with, but there were some new ideas mixed in there. They were not resisting change or fighting against the progressive ideas bandied about in college – they were picking and choosing what they felt were best for their students. Using their experience as educators, their understanding of their students and the community in which they taught, to craft a teaching style which met their students’ needs. They had seen many “latest trends” come and go in their time as teaches, and knew better than to try and shift everything which each new journal publication. They were not ignoring what I had learned in college, they were adapting it… taking ownership of the suggestions and implementing them in a more effective way than I or any of the younger teachers were doing. What I had at first considered to be stubbornness, I now saw to be confidence and (again) ownership of their methodology.

By contrast, I look now at the teachers who are just coming out of college, and I cringe. They do things in their classrooms because someone told them to, not because they truly understand the reasoning behind it. They do not have the comfort, confidence, or wisdom to customize what they have been told to best fit their teaching situations. When something is challenged by a student or parent, they run to an administrator – most often because they cannot justify their actions. They genuinely do not know WHY they are doing things the way they are.

The younger teachers are happy to jump on any suggestion from an in-service day or workshop, and do not think twice about the consequences for students when you change style and focus abruptly. They have not yet seen the ebb and flow of support for various education movements, nor do they realize that the models sold by these traveling in-service salesmen speakers are purposefully generic and made to fit all schools on the surface, but none perfectly without some customization.

But the outside public doesn’t realize this. The thought is that these younger teachers are far superior to the burnt out, older teachers. I do not think there are nearly as many burnt out teachers as the public thinks, and I would contend that many of the not-so-good teachers have moved into administrative roles and are no longer in the classroom. I’ve seen more than ten colleagues who my peers and I felt were not strong teachers (I wouldn’t want my children to have them as teachers) go on to become vice-principals, principals, and department heads.

I would further contend, and I may well have been guilty of this 13 years ago, that the younger teachers are making it harder for the older teachers. It’s easy to sell out others to try to make yourself look good, and when you’re chit-chatting with the principal it’s easy to throw those veteran teachers under the bus for not rushing to support the latest administrative effort. Sitting squarely in the middle, age-wise, I see how little voluntary interaction there is between the younger and more senior teachers. I see the veterans shake their heads at the arrogance and quick-judgments of the newbies, and I feel badly for the veterans that they are stuck with this unfavorable image by so many.
If I had kids, I would not want them to have any teacher with less than 6 years experience. I share that advice with my neighbors and relatives all the time, but continue to see them clamor for the class with a student-teacher or the new hire from the teachers college down the road. I’m sure their children will turn out all right, but I strongly believe they are worrying about the wrong aspect of the education process. Instead of fighting to get your kid out of the class with a 22-year veteran because the son of a guy you know from the gym had bad things to say about her, fight to restore the school band or to see the school put a working pencil sharpener in each classroom. Contest the way winners of a county championship are each bought a $50 jacket (in addition to their varsity jacket) by the school when your school cannot afford to have their textbooks rebound.

There may be some brilliant young teachers, but you will find that they, like their peers, only get better with age and experience.