The firing of a good teacher: Where have all the odd birds gone?
Author’s note: I wrote this on the heels of Sullivan’s firing in 2015. He has never returned to the classroom.
“Imagination is the neglected stepchild of American education.” Eliot Eisner
High school history teacher John Sullivan is the first to admit he’s never been much of a “rules and procedures guy.” After 17 years teaching, he still gets distressed and annoyed by paperwork that has more to do with documenting than teaching. And, despite teacher evaluation methods that penalize teachers for not sticking to “the plan,” he has had no qualms about veering from his agenda if that’s where the best learning is likely to happen. Given the standards-based reform movement, it’s no surprise that Sullivan is a teacher who is increasingly at odds with the institution of public schooling. Lately, the feeling is mutual.
At the sound of the bell at the end of any given school day, Sullivan could be seen trailing kids out the door after class, lobbing reminders at them like a bath-robed parent chasing a late kid out to the bus with a forgotten lunch. “Don’t forget that PBS series!”…or “Work on your news montages!”…or, simply, “Revisions!” When Sullivan’s students want to rib him, which they have done often and affectionately, they rub their chins and gaze into the middle distance, asking his signature question: “Now, where were we?”
Up until this past June, Sullivan was teaching in an affluent suburb outside of Boston. Raised in East Boston, the only son of an Irish American father and an Italian American mother, Sullivan brought some townie cred to this tony high school. He came to teaching late– in his 30s. He’d already been a merchant marine, a drummer in a touring rock band, and a financial planner before setting his sights on grad school (he got his Masters in Teaching from Boston University). For 17 years, he enjoyed a reputation as a beloved, tough, funny, and gifted teacher; his formal evaluations at both this school and the one before it had always been glowing. Meanwhile, praise from students and parents (feedback that’s often more accurate and highly prized to teachers) was effusive.
But a few years ago, Sullivan’s professional life began to implode. With the hiring of a new principal and the promotion of a new History department head, the definition of good teaching seemed to shift out from under Sullivan. Brandishing the state’s new teacher evaluation instrument, his newly promoted administrative team seemed hyper-focused on Sullivan’s procedural shortcomings, while remaining unmoved by his strong bond with his students and his passion for his subject.
The newest teacher evaluation forms in Massachusetts use a lexicon that seems plagiarized from corporate America, with words like indicator, closer, outcome, rubric, and alignment, and Orwellian terms like accountable talk. Meanwhile, the words that most of us would use when describing our favorite and most effective teachers– inspiring, curious, compassionate, caring, kind, enthusiastic, interesting/interested, and supportive– are nowhere to be found. Despite years of only superlative evaluations from multiple evaluators in two different schools, within a few months under the scrutiny of this new evaluation system, Sullivan was deemed an “unsatisfactory” educator. Thereafter, Sullivan was required to do more paperwork in service of documenting his adherence to state standards. Over the following two and a half years of observations and probationary periods, copious paperwork, and confusing meetings, he began to lose his footing, then his faith in the system, then in himself. Finally, in 2015, Sullivan lost his job.
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My favorite teacher in high school was my Physics teacher, Mr. Nugent, a shy extrovert who tolerated our loud, dumb greetings (“TED!! The Nooge!”) When he lectured, his heels never quite touched the ground, so he often appeared to be bobbing up and down. Though I spent a portion of many classes counting these tiny bounces in cross hatches on the corner of my paper, I remember more from that class than any other in high school.
One time, Mr. Nugent marched a procession of our entire class of 28 hoods, jocks, nerds and in-betweeners through the woods near our rural high school up to a highway embankment to experience the Doppler Effect in real time from the 18 wheelers screaming past. (The hand-wringing mom in me needs to chime in that we were at a safe distance…) I’ll never forget the feeling of breaking free from the high school, of being trusted by this teacher, of walking and laughing with kids I didn’t know very well through the prickly bushes and experiencing the weirdness of being on the side of a highway on a mid-May morning in New Hampshire. I loved the Nooge. And now I loved Doppler.
Our favorite teachers are often, like Mr. Nugent, what my dad used to call “odd birds” for whom teaching was a calling. As educators, they take measured risks, bending those institutional rules that don’t serve teaching or kids. They’re devout about their subject (perhaps eccentrically so) and unfailingly committed to their students. They know when and how to seize a curricular detour, going off-plan to follow the scent of a surprising but fruitful line of inquiry– all while keeping their eye on the prize. John Sullivan is an odd bird.
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Back in East Boston in the 60s and 70s, Sullivan realized that school would be his haven, and his way out of Eastie. He says he always knew he wanted to be a history teacher. As a teen, he felt history pulsing all around him. Locally, there was the bussing crisis in Southie, mysterious plane crashes at Logan, the emergence of punk rock at The Rat in Kenmore Square. Nationally, there was Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Billie Jean v. Bobby, Phyllis Shlafley v. Gloria Steinem.
You’ve probably guessed by now that I am not an unbiased observer. First off, like Sullivan, I am a constructivist– a Dewey-inspired liberal arts teacher who believes that students are in school primarily to learn how to think, and that they learn best when teachers know them well, and when they in turn know and trust their teachers. Second, like Sullivan, if I have to make a choice on any given day between engaging in a task that is pedagogically or relationally important (teaching, connecting with kids) and a task that involves paperwork for the adults (revising my list of “outcomes” for an upcoming evaluation meeting) I will choose the teaching/kid thing every time. And third, John Sullivan is my friend.
But I’m writing this for more than John, my friend, or even for John, the talented teacher whose firing is deeply concerning to me. I am alarmed on behalf of all the quirky, wonderful teachers out there– the kinds of teachers that saved me from an otherwise mediocre high school experience, eliciting bouts of frenzied curiosity, deliriums of wonder, an appreciation for the eccentric outsider, and the kind of fascination with learning that drove me into teaching myself. Now the odd bird teacher seems on the brink of extinction. My own kids, now both in high school, have had only rare sightings. I worry about the kind of place school will be when there are no more Mr. Nugents or Mr. Sullivans, no more Jon Pfeiffers, no more (insert the name of your own favorite odd bird teachers here.) What kind of teacher will take their place?
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Every teacher I know agrees that we teachers should be evaluated and supported early, often and thoroughly–and that the bad ones should be counseled or mandated out of the profession. Unfortunately, our most recent evaluation instruments ask our teachers for so little of what matters (connection with and knowledge of students, cognitive flexibility, the cultivation of wisdom, ingenuity), and so much of what doesn’t (linearity, “covering” material, ritual proof of compliance to often baseline state standards), that it seems reasonable to worry that uninspired but organized teachers will edge out gifted and slightly disorganized educators every time. In fact, education reform seems to be borrowing only what’s safe and stodgy from the business world, and leaving behind what’s exciting: the calculated risk-taking, the team building, the innovation (the pinball machines, the catered lunches…) Since the “No Child Left Behind” Act came along in 2002, and then “Race to the Top” in 2009, we measure what we can count, and either wrestle the rest into quantifiable submission or leave it out of the curriculum altogether.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in 2009: “We've seen what happens when caution trumps courage. Nothing changes and kids lose.” Now, I’m no fan of Arne Duncan, and he said this at a meeting of charter school advocates (also not a fan, but let’s get into that another time.). But here, he’s right. Rigid evaluation tools like the one Sullivan’s evaluators used, and used by evaluators across the state, encourage teachers to be cautious rule-followers more than inspiring role models. Many inspiring teachers prevail, of course, but in public schools especially, it often takes contorting, some professional risk, and/or an allied team of administrators that can recognize, prize, support, and protect their great teachers. It’s exhausting, a principle of a high school once told me, “holding the wolves of mediocrity at bay.”
They say it’s hard to fire bad teachers, and I’ve witnessed the truth in that. But the firing of John Sullivan is proof that with a bad evaluation tool it is pretty easy to fire a good teacher. Teaching–the good, the bad, and the mediocre– seems much too complex an enterprise to be measured using the kind of summative checklists that are the bread and butter of the current teacher evaluation approach. Each high school student carries into class with them a decade of educational baggage. And each classroom is a complicated microcosm nestled within its own idiosyncratic school and community and cultural contexts. It’s a dizzying interplay of variables for even the most seasoned evaluator to consider, observe, and interpret. The best evaluators I’ve had are those former teachers who in their capacity as evaluators know the students and the context well; they are embedded observers who can read the room.
They know, for example, that my painfully shy (and whip smart) student Aram and I had an agreement that he’d be the first student to talk in class most days. Otherwise, his anxiety about talking in class, coupled with his slow verbal processing speed, would cause a cognitive logjam and he’d spend the hour-long class thinking up “smart” things to say, while saying nothing and missing everything. Because my evaluator knew this, knows me, and knows Aram, he has been able to read this student's engagement rather than his disengagement. A new team of evaluators coming into my classroom context-blind would miss, or misappropriate, some key interactions. Aram would look like a disengaged student, and I would get an “unsatisfactory” in the “Teaches All Students” category.
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After a few observation cycles with his new evaluation team, Sullivan knew things were tanking. Despite the fact that his students continued to love his class and learn the material, the evaluators seemed to be trying to catch Sullivan doing things wrong, and so they did. “Their total lack of confidence in me tripped me up. It shouldn’t have, but it did,” Sullivan says. The kids, meanwhile, rallied behind the teacher they loved and admired. Sullivan tried not to laugh after his kids mocked his evaluators’ complaints that his way of moving through discussion was confusing the kids because multiple things were being discussed. (Two students had overheard the administrators talking in the hallway post-observation.) They’d joke: “Mr. Sullivan, please- just one thing at a time! That’s all we can handle…” It was clear to both Sullivan and his students that the evaluators hadn’t read the room. They’d either looked at the wrong things because they wanted Sullivan gone, or they just weren’t good enough lookers.
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In high school especially, we loved the teachers we loved because they held a mirror up to us when we needed it most. They knew us, and they loved us anyway. To Sullivan, this was and always would be the point of teaching. In fact, even as he was being fired, his evaluators acknowledged–almost as an aside– that his students adored him and his class. They also begrudgingly noted that Sullivan’s students did well on measures of content mastery– as good as or better than the students of other more “satisfactory” teachers. So, what gives? The latest teacher evaluation standards seem to reflect not our boldest aspirations for the people who work with our kids, but our collective fear. And sadly, what happened to Sullivan is happening in schools across the country, all in the name of controlling and predicting outcomes. We are, as the anti-standards movement says, racing to nowhere.
It’s summer now, and despite protests by parents, colleagues, and students, Sullivan won’t be getting his job back. Still, he says, it was validating to hear kids and parents speak on his behalf during the final school committee meeting of the year. All kinds of kids stood up to protest the firing of their favorite teacher: There was the Brown-bound girl who described how challenged she was in Mr. Sullivan’s classes, the jock boy who admired how Mr. Sullivan combined toughness and humor and never let him off the hook, and the school-averse kid who said he’d never done any homework in 11 years of schooling, until he landed in Mr. Sullivan’s class as a Senior.
Anyone who has stood in front of a class of 25 teenagers knows what a head game teaching can be. It’s impossible to teach well when you’re constantly questioning yourself, scanning for the “unsatisfactory.” John Sullivan spent much of the last three years of his teaching career looking nervously over his shoulder, trying to prove his worth. The teachers’ union got involved, but all the doubting, fretting, and paperwork took its toll, and Sullivan lost his will to fight for his job.
According to his students, colleagues, and his past evaluators, Mr. Sullivan was not just satisfactory, but exemplary. He modeled what it was like to be real– a little messy, a bit absent minded, smart, funny, and passionate. He was in love with teaching, and delighted by his students– the latter being the foundation of great teaching–and the thing most of us remember and love about our favorite teachers. We remember the way those teachers saw something in us we didn’t yet know was there. They looked at us, and they saw something exemplary.
Afterword: Aspects of the Massachusetts Teacher Evaluation instrument have been updated periodically, once in 2017. The changes, as they pertain to the primary points argued here, have not been substantive.