The Missoula County Public School Hiring Process is Fundamentally Flawed

I am writing this to redress what I’ve found to be serious flaws in a hiring process that is generally reflective of larger systemic biases in public education. It comes after I interviewed for a teaching position at Sentinel High School, after I was denied that position by the principal based on “a conversation” that favored another candidate, and after my own conversation with MCPS’s human resource supervisor. From this supervisor, I learned that hiring is broken into two, point-rated stages. The first stage is a screening of applicants resumes wherein education, work experience, and any preference points are allocated to determine who shall move on to the second stage–the interview. Although both stages are deserving of scrutiny, it is this interview I will focus on. 

During the interview, the principal and a representative for the department in which you are seeking to work offer approximately 10 questions. The candidate is told to answer them succinctly, so they may all be covered in a limited time frame. Each response is then rated from one to five with five being the highest. Whether the ratings are recorded immediately following the interview, with each interviewer scoring the responses independently, or the ratings are recorded later, after the interviewers confer with each other, as well as other staff members, is not dictated. However, because I was told that I was at the top of the conversation by the principal when she called to inform me I’d not been hired, I must assume the ratings were recorded in accordance with the latter.

At no time before the interview is it revealed what specific role the department is looking to fill–that is to say, the interviewee is not told whether the department needs an AP instructor, or a remedial reading and writing instructor, or any number of other niche positions. This, I’d argue, is the first flaw, because candidates are denied the opportunity to tailor their responses and instead must rely on the vagaries of their entire educational and life’s experience to make a case for themselves. This flaw, however, is minor compared to what education and life experience actually counts.

In my own case, I am an honorably discharged veteran of the United States Army, three times deployed–once to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. I have a secondary English education degree from the University of Montana, a Master of Arts in Education from the University of Montana, two years classroom experience teaching on a Native American reservation, and six seasons wildland firefighting and trail building  with the U.S. Forest Service. My situation could apply to a construction worker who after a number of years went back to school for their math teaching degree, a community activist who after a number of years, went back to school to get their history degree, or an EMT who after a number of years went back to get their science teaching degree. I have been shaped not only by local educational institutions, but also by larger working conditions that I know for a fact my interviewers or other department members have little context for. Their’s, to put it bluntly, is a professional world of education and education alone, and as such, it can only be expected that whatever working class experience a candidate brings outside of that, will have lesser value. This is precisely the problem.

If the nature of this problem is not already entirely obvious, I will spell it out further. The vast majority of students in our schools are not going to enter a world of education and education alone. Some may go on to hold professional degrees and positions, some may go on to struggle with the lack of health, retirement, and incomparable pay benefits of less educated fields–and if their experience in those fields is continual discounted by a professional class, they may find that no matter the education they receive, they will not able to leverage enough of their background to put them ahead of other candidates whose backgrounds are also education and education alone. For them, the American dream will always only ever be a dream, never a reality–their lived knowledge, invalidated where it is needed most. 

This lack of consideration I feel not only for me and other working class types, but also for other races and ethnicities. What could be said of their cultural background that is discounted? What of their upbringing? And what of their working experience– on a Native Reservation for instance–- with conditions unlike anything found in Missoula? 

Granted, I say all of this, knowing nothing about the candidate who did get the position I sought, and perhaps this could cause me to eat my words. I should expect that I was judged objectively in my interview, without my answers ranked in comparison to theirs as on any test that a teacher might administer. And I should expect that my responses were sufficiently low enough that even adding 5 points for my veteran status did not put me ahead of them, which is to say, I must have given a C quality interview or thereabouts. ( I didn’t). Finally, though, I should also expect to know just who this candidate was, after they were hired, as well as the complete educational and working experience of those who interviewed me and the staff where my own children could likely attend school. 

Public education, we must remember, is publically funded. If the schools are to maintain their credibility as institutions, this also means they must be transparent, and those who are influenced by them, as we all are, should know what is being taught, how, and by whom. After all, our backgrounds can not be separated from the knowledge we bring to an environment, and I should personally hope that this knowledge is representative of all. 

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