OREGON EDUCATION SHOWS OFF

Rob Saxton: The Right Stuff In Oregon Education?

If you want a 9-5 job, don’t be a teacher.

Forget a quiet walk. Teachers run into students and former students all their lives.

It’s inescapable. They’re marked. You’re thinking of a teacher right now.

Teachers, aka Educators, are woven into societal fabric. Everybody knows that.

They must be stitched in to keep the fabric from tearing.

They know it whether you do or not and they’re very good tailors and sailmakers.

Teaching from the time of baby boomers has changed. You expect that.

If you have kids in local schools, then you’ve seen the changes.

In earlier times teaching was a fall back job.

As in “I’ll be a novelist and if that doesn’t work out I’ll teach English.”

Or I’ll be an astronaut, a general, a CEO, a billionaire, and if none of those work out I’ll be a teacher.

I’ll be an entrepreneur, a software engineer; I’ll be a professional athlete, a NASCAR driver, a blogger. Or a teacher.

Few teachers join Oregon education because their prison guard dream job didn’t work out, even if you had teachers who looked the part of guard. Or warden.

Do modern teacher/educators bring their bitter fruit of failure to to the job? Who doesn’t?

You just want teachers to put it away with your kid. Start with a clean slate.

You can’t tell who’s got the bitter until you see a look no one should see. Goes like this:

You’re the parent who attends parent/teacher meetings and keeps showing up until your kid graduates. Call it the parent burden, doing your part.

You show up for one after work, a long day for everybody. Your last name is near the middle of the alphabet. You watch the teacher on her laptop.

What you want to hear from Oregon education:

“Johnny is a joy in the classroom and makes me love my job more than ever. He finishes work early, scores at the top in everything, and isn’t a distraction to other students.

I’ve given him AP books to read in his spare time.

He’ll start college as a junior. He’s the most advanced and mature student I’ve ever had.

Thank you for being such gifted parents.”

What you hear from Oregon education:

“This used to be a great job. All we teach now is how to take a test. Next year’s Oregon education changes make it worse. I’ve seen the plan. Horrible. I’m glad I’ve only got three more years. Yeah, and your kid’s doing fine. High average. Could work harder. Seems to listen. Everybody likes him.”

What happened? The teaching profession just got professional. And it’s crushing the hearts and souls of the fall back teachers who made education work for them.

You want professional teachers, institutionally trained and state certified. Make a Masters the minimum.

You want teaching candidates who invest heavily in their education and pay them the same as the fall back teachers? Okay. Expect turmoil. Fall backs don’t have the same school debt.

Teaching turned professional when smart guys saw the back loaded career path. Rob Saxton is a smart guy. Smarter than you and I.

Go ahead and complain about the money he’s pulled, is pulling, and will pull. That’s a lot of pulling.

Consider the bitter taste in this teacher/educator’s mouth, a man born and bred of teachers, when he was forced from the classroom to local administration jobs, pushed to heading a district, railroaded to heading Oregon education at the state level.

That’s a lot of heading.

If Oregon needs an educational role model, who better than Rob Saxton?

Knock his cash tripping, double dipping, “doing it because I can” quote all you want, but look at the facts. Mr. Saxton knows how to read the social and economic winds, how to raise the career change mast and set sail.

And he doesn’t crash. Doesn’t run his Minnow into Gilligan’s Island. Instead he takes us all on a tour, lap after lap around Oregon education, collecting more and more rewards for 31 or 33 years of service.

This is success story any way you work it. Rob Saxton is a winner in the game of Oregon education. Winning teachers can teach winning the best.

Quick Quiz: What do winners do?

Winners do what losers won’t do.

Mr. Saxton’s been winning for three decades and he’s ready for more.

Most of us wouldn’t last a week.