NO SUBSTITUTIONS, PLEASE

I am a public school person. Attended several, taught in a few, and still believe in the nostalgic, noble fable of the Great American Common School. So--when my daughter decided to attend a competitive-admission, all-girls Catholic college preparatory academy, I was fascinated with the day-to-day differences in public and private high schools. There weren’t as many as one might anticipate--a better class of cars in the private school parking lot, and a kind of despotic focus on uniform violations--but there wasn’t much to distinguish the quality of actual instruction in one school from the other.

The most striking difference was that the private school did not have substitute teachers. When a teacher was sick, the office left a note on the classroom door, informing the girls of the assignment and where to report—the library, the commons or other place where group work was possible.

After calculating how much my high school would save if they stopped hiring subs (somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000/year—enough for another teacher), I asked several teacher buddies what they thought would happen if we stopped hiring substitutes. The apocalypse, evidently—although they were, paradoxically, less than confident about the efficacy of many of our chronic subs. When told about my daughter’s school, they sniffed: well, those girls might be trusted, but our kids? No way. They needed baby-sitters.

And that concept—monitoring, not teaching—is at the heart of this recent article in the Washington Post, which muddles a complex subject and draws some pretty facile conclusions: time with subs is always wasted time, poor districts often choose a series of inexpensive subs rather than commit to hiring quality teachers, teacher absences result in lower test scores. Those things may well be true sometimes—but they’re not absolutes. The presence of a teacher (even a highly qualified teacher) does not guarantee learning. And the absence of the regular teacher does not always mean that learning ceases. 

The struggle to fill teaching positions in hard-to-staff schools is a serious national problem. Districts that fill in with questionable substitutes don’t have pools of attractive, qualified teachers willing to work for base pay. Establishing significant pay incentives for full-time positions in shortage areas is a better solution than the parade of subs, and certainly costs less, in the long run, than letting math, science or special education students flail.

What happens when someone’s missing in other workplaces? If the surgeon scheduled to do your emergency appendectomy falls ill, someone else will take it out. Someone fully qualified. And that’s the ultimate, systemic solution to the problem of overuse of unqualified substitutes: creating district-based pools of capable roving teachers (not subs—teachers) who establish relationships with staff and students, understand district curricular goals, and carry the mantle of being full-time, accountable personnel. It would cost more—but the rule in education is always pay now or pay later. Schools might start building these pools with tried-and-true retired teachers.

The WaPo article stirred a good dialogue on the Teacher Leaders Network, with many teachers feeling a little miffed at the implications that, once again, bad decision-making at the district level and lousy substitute teachers are responsible for all that’s wrong with public education. TLN member Ariel Sacks, who teaches in a middle school in Brooklyn, shared her experience in pushing her students to take charge of their own learning, on a day she had a planned absence:

I created clear plans and shared them with the class the day before. I put a student who has the classroom job of Teacher's Assistant in charge of playing what would normally be my role in the lesson—facilitator. The TA would run the meeting, calling on students with hands raised to respond to the topic, and record students' participation, actually writing down their comments on chart paper. The TA would check off who was in fact working during the period. Students also completed a self-assessment, which is a daily routine for my classes: 1) Did we get through our agenda?  2) Quality of work?

The next day, I had plenty of evidence as to how the classes did--the discussions on chart paper, the written work, and the self-assessments. The students reported on the experience as well. "Rashidah makes the meeting more fun than you do!" one class said.

In almost every class, I could tell that some students did less of the written work than they probably would have if I were there. But I think all students got something else out of it--a chance to govern themselves. And I got to really put my classroom structures to the test. 

I’ve been in plenty of adult-run meetings that accomplish far less. And there’s something important about the self-governing piece. Isn’t there?

Comments

[Mary Tedrow]

I loved Ariel's solution to the substitute dilemma. Kids respond to trust and responsibility far better than most adults give them credit for. In smaller systems, like the one I work for, teachers have substitutes they have come to rely on for years. Retired teachers are asked to give back a certain number of hours in the three years following their retirement to get a break on some of their retiree benefits. All makes sense to me.

[Nancy Flanagan]

Hey, Mary. Lots of school districts have no major difficulties with the occasional substitute, and take great pains to find someone competent for longer-term teacher absences.

What bugged me was the implication of carelessness, the idea that most schools would just stick any warm body into a teaching position. Schools desperate enough to do that have far bigger problems than daily substitutes;they have vacancies. And a school that can't fill open spots is a school in trouble.