Adequate Yearly Progress and Your Teaching Job

From Ravi for USTeacherJobs.com

We learned some weeks ago from the Washington Post that all teachers, administrators, and staff at Annapolis High School, Annapolis, Maryland have been “fired” and need to reapply for their jobs.

Could this happen to you after you come to the US to teach, and what would it mean?

Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, every school is required to make benchmarks known Adequate Yearly Progress. AYP is calculated on the test scores of the student body, who are divided into different categories based on ethnicity and other factors. Should a school fail to make AYP for a designated period, it is put on a watch list, and if it fails on the watch list, it can be taken over by the state board of education.

The state board of education has several options. One of the more drastic is to force everyone to reapply for their jobs. The theory here is that teachers whose students have inadequate scores need not be rehired.

The American educational system often functions in a land of fantasy, and nowhere is this more important than in the business of AYP. Obviously schools with predominant populations of lower-income students will have greater trouble making AYP than schools with higher-income students because so there are hard limits on what a teacher can achieve.

For example, a lower-income school can have students that are chronically absent, lack foundations, have been promoted socially, and have little support from parents for any aspect of school such as arriving on time, having all the materials needed for the day, and for homework. Such schools also can have very serious discipline problems, forcing a teacher to spend her/his time on class management rather than teaching.

Since so much is not in teacher’s control, it is highly unfair to blame teachers for the failure of a school as a whole. American society does not, however, want to address the shortcomings in the way it brings up its children. It is simpler to blame the teachers, and fair or not, that is the way America functions.

Well, as we will say repeatedly, its because of dysfunctions like the above that Americans don’t want to become teachers, and that is why there is a teacher shortage, and that is why you have the opportunity in the first place to teach in America! So it’s the very problem that creates the opportunity.

But what does this mean for you? You’ve invested time and money to come to teach in America. Should you assume you could be at risk for losing your job through no fault of your own?

Ominous as actions such as taken at Annapolis High sound, its not really as bad as that.

First, it’s not the individual school that hires you; it’s the school district. The district cannot fire you without cause. If you do your work honestly and sincerely, you will get good evaluations and that’s all that matters. Should you not want to interview again for your job at a school over which the Board of Education has seized control, you are free to interview for other schools in the district. The B of E will make sure you get placed in another school for the new school year.

Second, getting math and science teachers is a tough proposition for a school district. You will come highly qualified to the US, and your B of E will look after you: you will for sure get another school if you don’t want to return to your old school.

Last, this business of the school being taken over works both ways: it creates opportunities for you to apply to a better school!

Cases such as Annapolis High are rare, and the more draconian provisions of the NCLB are coming increasingly into contention. For example, Fairfax County, Virginia schools has told the federal government it doesn’t care what the federal government says, it is not going to set up its Speakers of Other Language students to fail by subjecting them to tests designed for students who are functional in English. Fairfax has a large influx of Hispanic students.

You will ask: Why cannot USTeacherJobs.com ensure that I don’t get a school that is failing to make Adequate Annual Yearly Progress?

The difficulty here is that if you don’t take the first job offer you receive, you will spend a lot of time going back and forth on interviews and you could likely have to wait out a year. Once you have a job offer, your district will match you with schools. You will likely not have the advantage teachers living in America have, which is interviews with different schools, which gives you leeway to pick and choose. You could end up in a school that is in trouble.

We recommend you do your time at such a school regardless. You are entitled to ask for a transfer to another school in the district after one year, or apply to another district altogether. Then it’s up to you to interview at schools wanting teachers. Within that year you will learn from your colleagues everything you need to know about which schools are likely best for you.

To sum up: to begin with it’s unlikely you’ll be at a school like Annapolis High, but if it should happen, stay calm and focused on doing your job the best you can, and take the first opportunity to change to a school you prefer.