Editorial:

There was a time when accumulated knowledge, experience, and education were valued in the work place. Yet, apparently, in the San Diego Unified School District these traits are seen as a hindrance. Instead of cultivating teachers with these values, the school district is doing their best to speed up the retirement of senior teachers and move them out in order to usher in newly scrubbed fresh-faced teachers.

Last week the school board passed a retirement-incentive package. If the incentive is successful, five hundred, or one-third of all the teachers in the district, would take early retirement and the district would usher in a wave of new hires.

The lead argument for early retirement is that the district will save $8.1 million dollars starting next school year. However, district’s annual budget stands at $1.1 billion dollars. $8 million dollars is a lot of money but in relation to a $1.1 billion dollar budget, it amounts to only 0.8% of annual spending. So at a minuscule savings to the budget the district has decided that years of experience, accumulated resources, and know how are no longer needed.

The offer is one year’s salary paid into an annuity over a five-year period along with their normal retirement benefits.

Taking early retirement is a personal and economical decision that each teacher has to make. We are sure that they will make the best choice for their future.

What we find more than a bit unsettling and what we are uncomfortable with, is the devaluing of experienced teachers.

These are teachers who have spent their whole adult lives learning, taking hundreds of training courses, and many have gone on and earned masters degrees in teaching to improve themselves. Not only do they have the type of knowledge needed to do a good job, they have the years of experience of dealing with every type of situation imaginable, not only with the students but with parents as well.

These folks became teachers because it was a passion to education our youth. Helping to shape future minds of our nation was a calling that they answered. Now they are being asked to leave early because, basically, they are too experienced!

Now that Common Core is the latest teaching philosophy, the school district is saying that the experienced teachers are not as capable and that recently graduated teachers are better able to learn and handle the new curriculum. We argue that teachers have spent multiple years adapting and changing to deploy various education agendas over their careers.

Common Core is just the latest education philosophy that is supposed to answer the puzzling question of how to education our students and reach minority students, and all the while close the achievement gap. Common Core follows other programs that were supposed to answer these same questions such as “No Child Left Behind” and the failed experiment under Superintendent Alan Bersin the “Blue Print for Student Success.” These programs were preceded by other programs that did not quite meet expectations.

That is the thing about education, there is no exact science to teaching, nor can you teach students as if on an assembly line. One program does not meet the needs of all, and it is a very personal agenda for parents. Education is an ever-evolving process.

We are not saying that Common Core is a bad program. It is just that we do not know! It does not have a record of accomplishment or the empirical evidence to show that it works. The Common Core curriculum is being developed as we speak and the materials to support this program are as of yet not available in the classrooms, teachers have to develop them as they go.

Our senses tell us this is more about undermining the resolve of the teacher’s union. With the teachers having to create the curriculum and develop new materials, as well as asking teachers to spend more and more of their personal time with extra-curricular activities, administrators are asking them to work way beyond their contracts. It is easier to ask a young person to work longer hours, with less support, and more demands on their time and resources. With a strong union asking, the district to live up to, their contract with their teachers, for accountability, for administrative support of such things as prep time, books and materials, it is not as easy for the administration to push the teachers to satisfy their needs. As it is now all teachers are already spending more time and hours in their effort to meet the current demands of teaching.

We are disappointed that the school board has made this move. You cannot run an organization without the backbone of your experienced workers. When Common Core has run its course, and as history has shown us all these programs do expire, will there be the experienced teachers who will have the knowledge and background to transition along with the ebb and flow of education?