March 31, 2006

Time to Talk about Teachers

According to the No Child Left Behind act, every classroom in America is to have a "highly qualified" teacher by the end of the 2005-06 school year. While reasonable minds may (and do) disagree on how to define "highly qualified" and how best to recruit and retain such teachers, the underlying message of this goal is undoubtedly true: Teachers matter.

America's teachers are responsible for instructing and training the next generation of this country in the skills they will need to excel in the ever-globalizing world. If the next generation is not prepared for the challenges of the future, we will all suffer as the United States slowly falls behind. The numbers at the outset of the 21st century are not particularly encouraging -- American students are losing ground to international students in both levels of basic literacy and high-level proficiency, particularly in science and engineering.

Yet, despite the high stakes and the gathering crisis, efforts at education reform in general, and in the area of teacher quality in particular, have been repeatedly stalled, watered down, or underfunded. Hoping to create momentum for a new era in the teaching profession, a group of political, academic, and business leaders founded The Teaching Commission, an organization whose modest goal was to change the way public school teachers are prepared, recruited, retained, and rewarded. Last week, the Commission issued its final report, a stinging indictment of the way this country treats its teachers. "If teaching remains a second-rate profession, America's economy will be driven by second-rate skills," warned Louis Gerstner, Jr., the Commission's founder and the former chairman/CEO of IBM. "We can wake up today or we can have a rude awakening sooner than we think."

How did the teaching profession reach this point? A generation ago, teaching enjoyed a captive pool of well-qualified individuals --American women. Today, the teaching profession must compete with law, medicine, business, and every other field for the services of these women. This is a good thing. However, teaching almost always loses. This is not a good thing. Teaching loses especially dramatically when it comes to the most highly-qualified individuals -- in 1974, 24% of teachers came from the top 10% of high school students. By 2000, that number had dropped to only 11%. Part of the reason teaching is not the career of choice for many talented individuals is that despite the fact that it is the profession that makes all others possible, teachers are not compensated according to the value they add to our country. Average teacher salaries have not risen as quickly even as inflation, much less as quickly as salaries in law, medicine, and business.

The problem is not limited to the difficulty of attracting top flight individuals to the teaching field. Many who do choose teaching as a career don't stay. Nearly 50% of teachers do not stay more than five years -- one in four has moved on after only two years. Attrition rates are highest in low-income schools leading to the perverse situation where the students who need qualified teachers the most are the least likely to get them. Reasons for departure include the lack of a supportive community of peer-teachers, the inability for career advancement within the rigid bureaucratic confines governed by teachers' unions and local school boards, and the fact that the best and worst teachers are typically paid not according to ability or results, but seniority. The system is set up to reward longevity rather than achievement, so it should not be surprising that many would-be spectacular teachers do not stay -- or never teach at all.

To confront these problems, the Teaching Commission identified four areas for reform: (1) transforming teacher compensation; (2) reinventing teacher preparation; (3) overhauling licensing and certification procedures; and (4) strengthening counseling and support. After three years, only in the area of compensation did the Commission report even mildly encouraging results. The other, less tangible areas garnered very little support, a reflection of the fact that despite the professed goal of putting highly qualified teachers in every classroom, the difficult task of effective reform is not receiving the attention required.

Reform within the teaching profession is just one part of the broader effort to improve American education. Having a highly-qualified teacher in every classroom will not solve all education problems in this country, but it is a start and it is a goal worth embracing. To get there we must reward and respect America's teachers at a level that matches their pivotal place in our country. Our future is only as good as our schools and our schools are only as good as the teachers in them. The time to confront this crisis is now.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

no one can dispute that a lack of quality and an excess of apathetic, bored and bitter teachers is hurting our educational system, but that is not the real issue in my mind. The real issue is what the true purpose of compulsory education is vs what it should be. What it should do, imo, is to teach people how to think for themselves, how to critically examine issues,
how to be creative, etc. What it does, on the other hand, is operate more like a factory that teaches everyone to think the same way, and to hopefully become productive workers who don't question authority. If I am right and that is the true goal, then it seems that our education system is wildly successful and we have the ideal kind of teachers. Check out John Taylor Gatto, he is a former teacher who has written quite eloquently about this subject i think. I was looking around at his stuff online and i came across
this quote he pulled from H.L Mencken, which does a much better job of expressing what i was trying to say.

"the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else."

Anonymous said...

great article. great topic.
disappointed you didn't have any opinions on solution. you gave the problem, but where is your solution or ideas? you know what i mean?
also, another reason teachers leave after a few years at crappy schools is low parent involvement. i've heard that from more than one teacher. it's them putting all this time in during the day, just to have their efforts squashed, as once they go home the student is lost.

Uneven Kiel said...

I was concerned that the column would revoke just this "yeah, so" reaction but concluded that every so often it is OK to write such a column. So while many columns hopefully make a point, others (like this one) bring attention to a topic and invite others to think about it and make their own points. There are many solutions out there to pick from - merit pay in many different forms, charter schools that are not tied to teachers' unions, increasing standards for a teaching license or degree. But this was a make other people think column, so what are your ideas for a solution? (how's that for a cop out?!)

On the parental involvement, I agree. It is a problem, but it is not one that is primarily addressable by reforming the teaching profession. There are 2 effects of low parental involvement that call for different solutions - first, there is the detriment it causes to a child's education. This calls for a social solution in how parents raise their children, something immensely difficult to confront. Then, there is the secondary problem - the detriment to a teacher's psyche from dealing with a child who isn't given a chance because of low parental involvement. The secondary problem is what drives teachers out, as you point out. While fixing both problems is certainly ideal (and fixing the first would likely fix the second), teaching as a profession can really only concern itself with the second problem. Something Meggan complained of often was the total lack of support and community among teachers at her school - the "serious" teachers were basically up against the "career" teachers, two groups among which there was little crossover. One of the areas the Teaching Commission (mentioned in my article) tried to address was "strengthening counseling and support." This is absolutely critical in my opinion to address the constant frustrations (such as lack of parental support) that go along with being an underpaid, underappreciated, and underfunded teacher. Though it is also critical to make the teachers better paid, better appreciated, and better funded, we should acknowledge that teaching will never be easy and set up resources/outlets for teachers to deal with this fate.