The Other Argument for Seniority

Now, let's take away seniority. Klein gets his way, and teachers can be laid off at any time, virtually guaranteeing that whenever there is a fiscal crisis, teachers who get paid the most get laid off first. Who would want to be a teacher under those circumstances?

You'd need to get an expensive bachelor's degree, and then devote a lot of time, energy, and money into getting that master's degree, all the while knowing that your own hard work is putting you ever higher on the salary scale and thus closer to the guillotine. No other school will hire you with those credentials and that salary, either, so in a few years, your career will be over. You'll have virtually no chance to ever make it to that 27 year retirement, even though you will pay 5% of your hard earned money into it as long as they keep you around. You'll never get very high on the salary scale because when you do, you'll be axed and you'll have to start at the bottom of some other profession.

Almost no new college graduate would want to start their working career in a job that will almost certainly be a dead end. With the security and the retirement gone, all you'll get as a teacher is far less money than in the private sector and some potty patrol, which is not a skill you'll need in your next career. Yes, you'll still get summers off, but like most new teachers you'll need to take a job in the summer just to make ends meet.

Besides teaching the actual subject (which is much richer than the stuff on the tests), a teacher offers insight, knowledge, experience, and wisdom, whether directly or indirectly. Over time, a teacher comes to see the education field and his or her subject in perspective. Newer teachers may be excited about new discoveries, but teachers with more experience can distinguish valuable ideas from passing fads. There are exceptions, of course, on both ends. But experience can bring humility, good judgment, and an ability to see and hear the larger story.

A student gleans these things. They affect the sounds in the room, the tenor of the lesson, the way the subject matter comes through. They can be sensed in the tones of the words. I remember how a teacher read Robert Frost’s “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” and the strange mixture of triumph, humor, and sadness in the last line, “And to do that to birds was why she came.” A younger teacher might have read it beautifully but without quite the same mixtures.

The point is not that veteran teachers simply read poems with more feeling. The point is that life experience and the immersion in the subject affect the teaching in all sorts of ways, large and small. Repetition brings not only fluency, but insight; when you teach a subject over and over (especially a subject you know and love), you see more in it and find different ways of presenting it. Your repertoire grows; you have more materials, ideas, and lessons in your mind and file cabinets. You know how to reach your students; you are less severely affected by the day’s or the year’s ups and downs, distractions, and interruptions. Experienced teachers are also a great asset to novice teachers who need advice, encouragement, and guidance. When a school goes through upheavals every few years — discarding one model for another, or firing half its staff–a veteran teacher can help keep the school and its purpose intact.

At the end of his piece, Winters acknowledges that decisions should not depend solely on test scores. But this qualification comes a bit late. Even at their best, tests are confined to the short term and reflect only a fraction of what students learn. Teacher experience — even after the first few years — does affect test scores, but it affects much more than that. What the student turns into habit or remembers years down the road, what continues to play in the mind long after the test is done — that is the stuff of education. That is the stuff that veteran teachers teach well, having learned to sort out the flashy from the true.