Thanks to Jeremy for two links today engineered to get me all steamed up. One article was Rudy’s pick for the World Series. As if we needed another reason to not vote for the man. The second link will make for more productive discussion and far less profanity.
According to the Economist, an increase in the funding of schools has not led to improvement in test scores. They point to evidence from several countries. England has dumped money into their schools. No improvement. Australia – Money, no results. US – money, no results. While Singapore hasn’t spent any more money and their schools are great. So, what’s the deal?
Well, some new study says that the difference between countries with good schools, like Singapore and Finland, and countries with bad schools, like ours, is the quality of the teachers.
Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of
average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of
the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if
you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the
bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than
anything else.…The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a
non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from
the bottom third of college graduates.
…A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money
(governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly because other
aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has sought to reduce
class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes
mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries
and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after
primary school, there seems little or no relationship between class
size and educational achievement.
There’s
a lot in this article to fight about. First of all, I have major
problems with cross-national studies of education spending. Apples and
oranges. Education is going to cost more in a large country with aging
school infrastructure, a diverse population, and large number of
non-English speaking immigrants. It’s going to be hard to find
teachers, nevermind good ones, to voluntarily move to Appalachia or a
small town in Montana with a dwindling population. All the problems of
inner-city schools with their diverse and needy masses just aren’t
found in Helsinki. Cultural norms regarding education differ greatly.
Income inequality differs. Yadda yadda.
The article also points out that intervening early for kids with
special needs is another key component of the successes in the good
countries. Hello. That costs a lot of money. So much money that
administrators in our country are under the gun to cut those services.
If you want more special ed, it’s going to cost you.
But does more money mean better teachers?
We’ll be able to attract better people to the profession, when
teachers are given the opportunity to be professionals. Does being a
professional mean higher salaries? Some yes. Some no. Grad students are
willing to earn $2,000 per class, because of the prestige of the work.
Some creative reforms aren’t too pricy. The article mentions that in
Boston they have a period in the day to prep collectively for their
classes. However, the article itself says that professional status is
tied to higher salaries. There’s a lot of miserable, starving grad
students out there.
One cheap option for improving teaching quality is by reforming
other sectors of society. We’ll have better teachers when they are
other work options for families with small children. Right now, people
are choosing teaching for the hours, not for the love of the work.
The real problem with teachers is that we’ve got a lot of good ones
in big metropolitaran areas. But not a lot of good ones in West
Virginia and Montana and the hard-core inner city. It’s hard to get
eager young minds into Bed-Sty. Those are the same areas trying to
skirt around NCLB’s adequate teacher provisions. Sure, there are a few
Teach for America types, but there aren’t enough of the new
missionaries to go around. I’m not sure how we’ll get the good ones out
there and in there without more money.
So, don’t talk to me about Helsinki. Tell me how to get the Harvard
grad into a classroom in the Bed-Sty, when he is getting $80,000 offers
from Wall Street and when rent starts at $2,000 per month.
Apt. 11d 
Pay the Harvard grad 100K? Treat them like professionals, rather than automatons?
I don’t get why people don’t accept that in every other profession when you want to get the cream of the crop, you pay them more.
Grad students are a bad comparison, because they’re students. They’re hoping to win the lottery and get the real job, the one with benefits, tenure, and flexibility and freedom.
Now, the problem is that professionals have to accept consequences, too. Investment bankers and associates get paid a lot, but the demands on them are pretty rigid. Teachers (and society) have traded not being judged for poor pay. That’s a two way street, but neither side is going to give up their side of the deal (i.e. teachers aren’t going to agree to be judged for the same pay, society isn’t willing to pay them more unless their willing to be judged, and can’t find the real money anyway).
bj
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$100,000. That sounds a bit steep. Entry level, tenure track professors make $50,000 around here. They are also expected to work 12 months, by publishing and conferencing during the summer months. I’m working my tail off right now for a part time gig with no benefits. Maybe I’m insane.
The great thing about a teaching job is that it is possible to coordinate your schedule with the kids’ schedule. That flexibility is worth a slightly lower pay than other professionals. The problem is that as a society we look down on flexible jobs that are primarily occupied by women. That turns off a lot of Harvard grads.
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Having been a grad student teacher and now a teacher in a fancy private secondary school, I can say the answer is definitely money. Not only money for the actual teacher, who is a trained professional doing an incredibly difficult job with incredibly long hours (lots of us are still working after 3:00!), but many of my fellow teachers in public schools don’t have textbooks, access to working copiers, access to school supplies, etc. Check out DonorsChoose.org if you want to see why teachers get burnt out on the job. There are hundreds of creative, dedicated teachers on there begging for $$ for filing cabinets, dictionaries, air conditioners and other materials just so they can teach their classes. See that on Wall Street much?
Maybe more excellent teachers would stay in the profession if they were treated like they were valued.
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I read that economist article too, and while I haven’t read the McKinsey study, the main thing I got from it was exactly Jackie’s comment: “maybe more excellent teachers would stay in the profesion if they were treated like they were valued”. McKinsey (as reported by the Economist) suggested that successful countries had managed to make teaching a high status profession, not necessarily by paying teachers more, but by making it hard to get into, and valuing teachers in non monetary ways like giving them great training.
In Australia, at least, teaching has definitely slipped down the rungs of middle class professions in the last 40 years – I would say it’s definitely on its way to lower middle class now, and that’s not just about money (although money has a reasonable amount to do with it).
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Laura, a lot of the teachers I know are also working during the summer months– either doing course development, or doing a second job so that they can pay the bills during the year. There’s also SAT scoring, AP scoring, and other summer commitments, not to mention the amount of teachers who are also coaches and therefore are doing athletics for part of the summer. K-12 teachers go to conferences too, and present or publish during them.
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I don’t think the quality of teaching would improve if there were more family-friendly jobs available. To the contrary. One of the reasons that the quality of teaching has probably declined over the past 30 years is that bright women now have other options.
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That summer thing is an issue, IMHO. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people make disparaging remarks about how teachers only work 9 months a year. Also, to Jackie’s comment about working long hours, still being at your workplace after 3pm does not qualify as working long hours … unless you started at 3am.
Many teachers I know go straight into summer school from the regular year, and many spend quite a bit of time grading papers etc in the evenings. But the fact remains that, in a world where many many of us work 50+ hours a week or much more all year round just to be perceived as treading water, even the erroneous perception of 7-hour days and summers off are a source of resentment.
Rational? Not so much. There are many other factors at work. At my office, at least I can go to the bathroom when I please, in great contrast to teachers. But it’s a reality.
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There are actually a lot of institutional barriers to getting qualified teachers. Here are some suggestions.
1. Make elementary math a “special” like art and music (I think they do that in a number of Asian countries). It’s too much to expect that the same person be a brilliant reading teacher and a brilliant math teacher at the same time. This also will free up more time for prep.
2. Pay math and science teachers higher wages to compensate for the fact that their knowledge has higher commercial value outside–there is a chronic shortage of math and science teachers. With somewhat higher pay and the traditional teaching schedule, I think a lot of bright women would be drawn back into the profession.
3. A teacher shouldn’t lose their pension or pay grade just because they moved between districts or states. I don’t know the exact details, but I’ve heard that there are very high barriers to teacher mobility. If it were easier to move between schools, I think many effective mid-career teachers would consider a year or two at a high-need school.
4. When I was in Russia in the 90s, I got the impression that while there were stand-alone pedagogical colleges, academic departments also qualified students to teach in their content area. So you’d take your physics pedagogy courses through the physics department, etc. This would bring content and pedagogy closer together than they are in the US today, as well as perhaps increasing the number of students who pursue certification in their academic area.
5. Lastly (and most controversially), I hear that new teachers get better and better for their first ten years and then level off. Maybe the pay scale should reflect this fact (if a merit pay system is too difficult to figure out). A steeper initial pay raise could help with the fact that teaching loses a lot of smart rookies in the first few years.
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I actually think teachers have less flexiblity than your average working person. They can’t take a quick break for a dentist appointment without finding a sub or even take a phone call during the day because it disrupts their class. Our school year ends the first week in June. The teachers then have 2 weeks of prof. development. It usually takes another week to clean up their classrooms. They then come back to work the second week in August to prepare for that year. So they have 5 to 6 real weeks off. During that time this past summer 6 of our 10 teachers were taking classes and engaging in more prof. development.
We want teachers who treat the job as a real career, who not only love it, but want to excel at it. How do we do that? Give them the respect they deserve and pay them like we pay other people who spend years in school and constantly strive to be better at their job.
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There was a post at half changed world about teacher autonomy which drew some useful responses (at least, I think so – three were from me…)
http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2007/09/teacher-autonom.html#comments
Blog proprietor Elizabeth talked up the ability of good teachers to enrich their classes by doing creative things. Skunk at garden party Dave.S. talked about the value of a rigidly defined curriculum which could enable even mediocre teachers to have good results.
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I almost became a teacher in Toronto, where teachers make a pretty good salary over (I think I would be making a bit more than I currently make, actually, had I entered at the time I was going to).
Fortunately I worked as an ed assistant first and that experience led me to back out. It wasn’t the students or the working conditions (although when a teacher who has recess duty is supposed to go to the bathroom is still beyond me). It was the crazy.
Curricula were changed frequently and without adequate justification or preparation (whole language… phonics… whole language… phonics).
Teaching training here is woefully inadequate – 9 months on top of a BA, with 9 weeks of that in the classroom – for an elementary school teacher that’s then “qualified” to teach a 4 or 5 grade span of curriculum. New teachers basically sank or swam, with little mentoring and no support inside the classroom.
But what really did kill it for me as the provervial straw that broke the camel’s back was the day I spent in the ‘best & brightest’ teacher’s classroom and observed a lesson on the apostrophe… where she taught the difference between “its” and “it’s” backwards. I decided if those were going to be my top colleagues, I was going to burn out fast.
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There was a very interesting discussion on Kitchen Table Math a few months back on what is a profession, and whether K-12 teaching is a profession. The consensus was that K-12 teaching isn’t a profession in the US today, but it could be, and it is right where medicine was 200 years ago. Back then, doctors had a very limited notion of what their treatments were doing to the patient. They’d bleed and cauterize more or less at random, with no clear idea of what effect they were having on the patient’s physiology. The patient might live or die, but nobody quite knew why, they’d just try a lot of stuff and hope something worked. Part of the issue with schools is apparently that educational research is fairly immature as a field. As a number of bloggers have pointed out, our movies and culture celebrate one-of-a-kind hero teachers who get results against all odds, through sheer will power and idiosyncratic charm. You never get the idea of teaching as a craft where you need a store of book knowledge, you start out green, but you stick with it and get better with experience. The hero-teacher is also isolated and misunderstood, rather than the product of a healthy school culture. (For an alternative vision of the successful school as a cohesive organism, see Joanne Jacobs’ book Our School, which documents the life of a charter school created to serve former D and F students from disadvantaged backgrounds.)
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Jen, I know MANY teachers who get to school around 6 am and are still there at 6 pm. Think about sports, clubs, band, drama. All require after-school hours. 12-hour days on campus are not unusual, but neither are 7-hour days on campus followed up by two, three, four hours of work at home. Teaching requires an incredible amount of hours to do it well.
Also, if you talked to those “best and brightest” teachers, they would be able to tell you what works in a classroom and what doesn’t. Teaching is a job best learned while doing it, so I’m not persuaded that it’s on par with doctors still using leeches just because educational research hasn’t figured out how to quantify great pedagogy.
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Interesting that no one mentions unions and IF there is an impact on promoting mediocrity. Are other scools in other countries organized in the same capactiy that US teachers are?
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Jackie,
There are a lot of popular educational practices that are pretty exact analogs to leech-using. Group work, “projects,” “discovery,” etc.
We can’t rely on the educational views of the best teachers without having a good way of figuring out who are the most effective teachers. So we do need research. In any case, we have to deal with the fact that 50% of teachers are below average, just as 50% of doctors are.
I’m not sure about all academic areas, but I’m pretty sure that there probably is a one best way to teach children arithmetic. So it should be possible to figure out what it is and implement it.
dave s.,
How about starting out newbies with a more canned curriculum, but then granting gradually more professional freedom as new teachers prove themselves? But once again, you’d need to be able to check the effectiveness of individual teachers.
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Amy P– there is a large amount of research on the different learning styles of young children, so actually, there is more than one way to teach arithmetic. The “best” way to teach anything varies according to student population, demographics, teacher style and education, etc. The idea that you can standardize teaching is an affront to the tremendous amount of creativity it takes to be a good teacher.
I’m trying to address the idea of group work and projects being analogous to leeches, but my head keeps exploding.
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Interesting. What Dave says above is especially relevant. You kind of need a system where the best teachers are cut loose to do everything and anything that they think will work, will inspire, and so on–and the average teacher is given a relatively rigid curriculum to work with so as to “pull up” the less skilled teachers to an acceptable minimum.
But I don’t think you could do it the way Amy says, because the key thing is retention of the best teachers. You aren’t going to keep a really talented, skilled, imaginative person in teaching if they have to serve a long apprenticeship where they’re on a very tight leash. That’s precisely the circumstance under which someone imaginative is going to say, “Screw it” and take a job with better compensations of some kind.
The problem is that most of the stakeholders in these discussions are incredibly either-or: classrooms need to be totally autonomous or totally controlled; there needs to be extensive testing or none at all, etc. The answer isn’t some mealy-mouthed middle, but it’s instead that some teachers–and some students–need tight controls and some really, really don’t. Managerially, you need a heterogenous system, not a homogenous one.
Beyond that, though, there’s a lot of stuff about the mickey-mouse maladministration of education to think about–that a lot of the people in charge of public schools are as big an issue as the teachers, or more so, especially in districts where administrative positions in public schools are a patronage job directly tied into state and regional governments.
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Laura, I think without a doubt that teaching K-12 is a _harder_ job than teaching post 12 education. That’s at least part of the reason why so few post-K folks want to teach K-12. I do think that one is more judged in a R1 than in a K-12, but just being there, taking care of 20-30 eight year olds and their emotional and educational needs for six hours a day is really hard work.
The profession might not be underpaid with respect to the qualifications of teachers, but it’s underpaid with respect to the work and stress involved. Yes, it would be cost-effective for society if we could figure out a way to make an underpaid, high stress, difficult job high status, thus attracting well qualified people anyway.
In a free society, though (free, as in women are free to choose their job, little discrimination, and real choices about what jobs you pursue) that’s not going to work. It works for grad students and post-docs because we’re having them buy into a tournament model competition that has a perceived high-status payoff (a tenure track job).
Someone brought up unions, and I do think they play a role — because as I said in the first comment, teachers have traded the comfort of not being judged for the status and the pay. Getting rid of the unions wouldn’t help unless it really increases the desirability of teaching, and I don’t think that can happen with a lot more money, and there’s no political will (or perhaps, actual money) to do that.
So everyone tries to guilt teachers into doing a better job than they get paid for (you know, for the good of the children). And, a lot of teachers do. We buy mediocrity, sometimes get excellence (because our teachers just often enough love the job and the children) and complain when we don’t get it all the time.
bj
PS: Laura — why are you working your * off in a part-time job with no benefits? Maybe that will help us figure out how to get the teachers to do it too?
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Jackie,
So what are those different methods for teaching arithmetic to different children? Are the kids professionally tested by educational psychologists to figure out their learning style? Do you split the class up into eight (or however many) different math groups and send them off to do math in the math class suited to their style? Or does the teacher keep all the kids in one class and come up with eight different math assignments, according to learning style? I honestly don’t think almost anyone is doing this. Isn’t it more likely that teachers are just using a variety of different assignments for the whole class, to make sure that each student eventually gets an assignment on their wave length? If so, it should be possible to create a formula (showing what percentage of time should be spent on what kind of assignment) that would be generally effective, with a bit of tweaking here and there.
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By the way, I think Ken DeRosa from d-edreckoning.blogspot.com has said that the concept of “learning style” is often misused. He says that when a child is simply in the wrong level and lacks the knowledge necessary to be successful there, that that can be misdiagnosed as being their learning style. In this case, what they actually need is to be put in the level where they can learn the stuff they need to know before they can move on and be successful in the next level.
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bj is right that there is no political will to pay teachers more with more oversight of their performance. So, while it is nice to think what would happen if we paid teachers triple, it ain’t gonna happen.
Maybe we could sqeeze out a bit more money and then we have to decide if it’s going to go to Jackie’s file cabinets and school supplies or to better education schools or even merit bonuses.
Given the fact that money is a constant, how do we improve teaching quality? The Economist article said larger class size, more serious screening proceses, creative reform. We’ve got suggestions for more freedom for good teachers and less freedom for the mediocre. No sudden curriculum changes.
What keeps me working for a low paying job? Intellectual challenge. Ability to get the kids from the bus, by working into the evening. I don’t have to deal with dumb, crazy students. The prestige doesn’t hurt either.
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“Also, if you talked to those “best and brightest” teachers, they would be able to tell you what works in a classroom and what doesn’t. Teaching is a job best learned while doing it, so I’m not persuaded that it’s on par with doctors still using leeches just because educational research hasn’t figured out how to quantify great pedagogy. ”
First is the problem of identifying the best and brightest, with the caveat that what’s “best and brightest” in one area might not be in another. I totally agree that Hollywood has completely influenced this mythology that “good teachers find a way.”
Also, it’s funny how we don’t assume that other professionals just somehow “find their way” but actually have to spend time climbing the ranks. Interns, residents, passing the bar, your boss not giving you a million dollars to play with your first week… but teachers out of the box are given 25 students’ year and just – go, teach.
I honestly think that attitude sets a lot of the tone of why teaching is not that respected.
In elementary, a new teacher comes in with the same responsibilities as a 25+ yr teacher – to run a classroom – and there’s very little actual supervision of what they do every day. So where is the hands-on mentoring and improving, except via the goodwill of other teachers who may or may not be the best? Where are the signs that someone is becoming a master?
Just word on the street. Which may mean the teacher has become expert at people-pleasing.
Well, that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Sure, the top 20% will do what the top 20% always do, and probably the same goes for the bottom. But the middle?
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Would a bar exam equivalent change the teaching world? That’s an idea I could get behind. But, I’m pretty sure it would have absolutely no effect, ’cause it wouldn’t come with more pay. If you graduate from Harvard, with a law degree, and pass the bar, at 25 they’ll pay you $160K per year.
Good luck figuring out how to improve teaching without improving compensation. If it could be done, we’d be paying the first year associates in Big Law a lot less.
If standardized teaching curricula, with standardized instruction worked, and we new how to standardize it, we should be figuring out how to stream in video instruction to classrooms, with some kind of physical facilitator in the classroom. Or, perhaps, we could just strap all the eight year olds into their seats and prop their eyelids open. That might cost less (maybe). Of course, it’s a failed experiment.
Good teachers adjust their words, eyes, body to meet the educational needs of their kids. They do it a hundred times an hour. I’m sure that it can be taught, though some come to it naturally. Good practitioners in any field cost money.
Perhaps we can figure out a way to get adequate instruction out of mediocre talent, and sell it to the masses, but that’s definitely a program I’ll opt out of for my own children’s education.
bj
PS: mentoring and instructing of junior teachers costs money, too.
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Is there more to this than just money?
I keep thinking about another group of people who are highly respected, but yet often underpaid (relatively speaking): firefighters. What’s the difference?
At first blush I thought, well, no one can argue with the raw physical risk aspect of firefighting. We respect them because they do something so obviously brave. And yet, and yet, how many times have I heard people say their worst nightmare is to be stuck in a room with 25 first graders? Bravery comes in different shapes & sizes.
Also, firefighters have notoriously cushy hours. At least in Chicago they work 24 hours straight, which may be responding to fires or may be washing the truck, and then get three days off. Yet no one argues about *their* work ethic.
And then I think, is it because so few of us know actual firefighters? We don’t have first-hand knowledge of them, so we make some heroic assumptions and move on? Whereas almost all parents see teachers up so close and personal that we can, as one commenter noted, immediately see that they can’t spell, or don’t know the possessive form of “it”.
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“Beyond that, though, there’s a lot of stuff about the mickey-mouse maladministration of education to think about–that a lot of the people in charge of public schools are as big an issue as the teachers, or more so, especially in districts where administrative positions in public schools are a patronage job directly tied into state and regional governments.”
Bingo! Tim gets it in one.
The first school where my momma taught was a middle school whose principal was clearly using it as a political spring board. He neither knew nor gave a damn about teaching. Add to that immigrants (Vietnamese at the time), many war refugees, who were left to sink or swim, and the racial mix of being a young white teacher in a nearly all-black school, and it’s a wonder she stuck with it.
Legislatures drive school curricula with about as much accurate knowledge as you would expect. Patronage and textbook companies drive curricular decisions for entire districts, sometimes entire states. (And I know too little of the details to really pontificate, but what textbook companies think they can sell in the largest states clearly will drive what kinds of books they assemble.)
There are some areas where progress has really been clear. My mom mostly teaches dyslexic kids, and the methods there have improved noticeably over the course of her career. When her kids stick with the program, when she gets to keep them, when the administration doesn’t try to second-guess everything, when she can actually concentrate on teaching, she gets middle-schoolers who come in not being able to read and they leave as readers. Not fans of Proust, mind you, but people who will be able to go to regular high school and become well functioning adults.
But the amount of petty bullshit from the administration would do Dilbert’s company proud. And of course there’s a new principal every couple of years, so there’s an attempt to change almost everything and make a mark.
She’s seen the whole reading/phonics pendulum, or very similar debates, so many times now that it’s predictable that a swing will come every five to seven years.
Many, many times, teachers are doing good jobs not thanks to the system of management and administration, but in spite of it.
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And of course disbanding firefighters’ unions is not a staple of right-wing talking points…
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Doug, yes! Doing good jobs IN SPITE of all the structures that are supposed to be helping them, not because of them.
To whoever upthread talked about a bar exam, in most states teachers do have to be certified and pass exams given by the state, similar to how lawyers have to pass a state’s bar in order to practice there.
Higher upthread– I don’t teach math, nor do I teach K-5. But even right now, I can tell you that looking for that kind of formula is like telling a chef that the meal they prepared is fine, but really, you’d prefer a TV dinner. If you want instruction to turn into something we prepackage and heat up in the microwave, go for it. It’s certainly not how I want my kids taught, nor is it how I teach.
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Jackie,
Not everybody is a master chef–most of us are at best middling. You can’t hand a non-cook a bag of groceries and expect dinner to emerge an hour later. What I’m suggesting is handing over a bag of groceries along with a recipe, and probably providing a hot line for help along the way (like the turkey companies do around Thanksgiving to prevent the overwhelmed from just giving up and ordering in pizza). Hot sauce and garlic may be added to taste.
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Jackie writes: “If you want instruction to turn into something we prepackage and heat up in the microwave, go for it. It’s certainly not how I want my kids taught, nor is it how I teach.”
Indeed. I was going to compare it to McDonalds. But, systemizating education sure sounds like a way of sucking the life out of something I love, learning.
But, I leave open the possibility that that’s all society is willing to offer the people with no money or resources to find something else. Not me, though. I’d be happy to see my taxes go up substantially and I would use the money to pay K-12 teachers more. They would have to submit to being judged as a condition of that, but I think they would, if we came up with enough compensation. That really does mean spending more money, though, raising taxes.
According to payscale.com, the median teacher’s salary is 32K and the median firefighter’s salary is 65K. I’m not sure which I find scarier, 25 first graders or a fire, but I do believe that the 25 first graders are unlikely to kill me (at least quickly). But, I’m not sure the same can be said for 25 eleventh graders.
bj
PS: I’m not a teacher, at least not the K-12 kind, but I believe that good teachers, change children’s lives. I could easily come up with a list of teachers who made a real difference in my life, and I was an ordinary, privileged, middle class child .
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Amy:
I think you’re wrong to imagine that teachers don’t get any instruction. You may disagree with the kind of instruction they get, but it’s not true that society grabs random people with mediocre college degrees of the street and throw them into the classroom.
Anyone actually want to say what people do have to do to get a teacher’s certificate? I know that the requirements are not negligible in my neck of the woods, but I don’t know much about them.
bj
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My state is Maryland, and here’s our certification requirements:
There are five different certifications available, from conditional to advanced. There’s a mix of education and job experience required for each level. To get the initial certificate, you must present the required scores on two Praxis tests.
Praxis one: a reading component, a writing component and a mathematics component.
Praxis two: testing the knowledge in the content area and content pedagogy.
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bj,
My views are probably shaped by my Peace Corps experience, where my group got the standard three month training (lots of language, some culture, some health advice, some slapdash teacher training that didn’t make any sense before entering the classroom, then lots of practice teaching) before being tossed into our own classrooms for the next two years. The first year was tremendously difficult for everybody, as is true just about universally for teachers. It would have been difficult anyway, but it was made more difficult by our lack of knowledge of local practices (Don’t use black ink in the official grade logs! Use blue ink!), our lack of knowledge of English grammar, our lack of practice in creating lesson plans based on specific grammar points, our lack of experience using a textbook, and the lack of respect for local pedagogical norms that were inculcated by our nice but very inexperienced trainer (the person who was supposed to train us bailed for some reason, so we got her assistant). That last item (lack of respect for local pedagogical norms) was a biggie. We were Americans! We were armed with the best Western ESL methodology! We would show our (much older) Russian colleagues the way! This was unutterably stupid in so many ways. If I were able to go back in time to my 20-something self, here’s what I would tell her: 1) spend your first year working under your senior Russian colleague as a teacher’s aide, maybe leading conversation practice 2) buy classroom copies of the best local textbooks (Happy English) and hold the kids responsible for every line of them, rather than just making stuff up as I went along. Oh, and a number of years later, the Russian government booted the Peace Corps out, partly on charges of espionage, but also because of Peace Corps incompetence.
My Peace Corps experience makes me very dubious about Teach for America, which uses a similar model of short intensive training, followed by two years of teaching. Of course, they don’t have to spend so much time during training teaching volunteers foreign languages or how to avoid cholera. I don’t know anything firsthand about normal American education schools, but I do know that if you asked a random teacher how much they got from their teacher training, compared to what they learned once they started teaching, they’d probably say they learned 20% in college, and 80% in the classroom. A lot of people drop out of teaching during those first years–I think it might even be half of them. And then there’s the question of the kids–is it fair to them to give them teachers who only know 20% of what they need to know?
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“A lot of people drop out of teaching during those first years–I think it might even be half of them. And then there’s the question of the kids–is it fair to them to give them teachers who only know 20% of what they need to know?”
That syncs with my experience and concerns.
To the concern up-thread about the best and brightest leaving during an apprentice period – well in my field (editing) there are a lot of frustrations at the entry-level, sure, but there’s not that sense of “and this is how it’s going to be!” It’s a progression.
The “best and brightest” doctors do an internship and then a residency; I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to consider that teaching might benefit from something similar.
To bj: yeah, it’ll cost you, that’s for sure.
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By the way, I was looking up “learning styles” on Wikipedia (yeah, I know), and it sounds like it’s actually a very controversial theory among neuroscientists.
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Two comments:
There are actually quite a few fields where people drop out frequently in the first few years. As a computer professional, I am very aware of the high dropout rate among first-line help desk people. They typically simply burn out on all the people conflict and stress, especially if they do not find themselves really drawn to one of the ‘higher-order’ specialties such as server or network administration. (They don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.)
Secondly, I would remind us all that there are many, many areas of life where routinization is imposed in order to lower cost and raise overall quality — and it often has a detrimental effect on the job satisfaction of the people performing the work. Some examples: airlines moving from hub-and-spoke to shuttle models, so their flight crews now spend all day every day flying back and forth from Indianapolis to Chicago; hospitals insisting that one physician perform all of a certain type of procedure, in response to AMA findings linking quality to volumes; programmers forced to use frameworks and purchased third-party tools instead of writing everything from scratch.
Does all this stuff save money and improve the quality of outcomes? Absolutely. And it also takes even the most skilled individuals down a path of stultifying boredom and repetition. This is a challenge many of us face, especially early in our careers when we’re not yet skilled or tenured enough to have any leverage. So it’s not just teachers.
That said, it’s sort of a downward spiral for a really good teacher. Too many people leave, so the whole system tilts to ensure good performance on the part of the newbies, which in turn makes it even worse for the non-newbies, who then leave in even greater numbers. Yuck.
As many have noted, this is a classic staffing and management conundrum, having to do with finding good metrics and retaining the right people. And it would seem that the administrators in question may not a) have the resources they need to combat the trends, or b) be up to the task. Or perhaps both!
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Elizabeth is correct to say that part of the problem is that teaching can no longer draw upon a “captive labor pool” of women who have few other professional options. I also read that the percentage of male teachers has declined precipitously since the 1970’s. Partly this is because teachers’ salaries are so much lower now compared to what a man can earn in corporate America, wiring houses, or unclogging drains. It’s also because teaching is no longer seen as one of the best options for young men who are the first in their families to go to college. This wasn’t a captive labor pool like women were, but many, MANY first-generation college grad men went into teaching. Not so much anymore.
And while teaching isn’t the cushy, uber-family-friendly job many perceive it to be, it IS family-friendly in one respect: no travel requirement. I wouldn’t be surprised if teaching attracts some people just because of that. Business travel is a huge, huge PITA for most people, and especially for those who have families.
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I’m currently enrolled in the teacher education school at Hunter, so can talk a little bit about what New York requires in terms of teacher certification. (This is the standard pathway; you can get alternative certification through programs like Teaching Fellows, but these have real drawbacks.) Currently, to get certified, you need to have attended a state-approved teacher preparation program (apparently of varying rigor), either for a BA or an MA. My particular program will give me a Master’s (I already had a BA) issued jointly by the English and Education departments; it requires 24 credits in my content area as well as 24 credits in instructional methods, assessment, literacy, educational psychology, adolescent development, etc. (some programs are more focused on education courses and do not require additional content coursework at the Master’s level). In addition, New York requires that you pass three certification exams, one of which is a basic liberal arts and sciences exam, one is a professional knowledge exam, and one is a content knowledge exam. You also need 100 hours of classroom observation before you can begin your student teaching. Then, student teaching is sixty days of full-time classroom work while paired with a certified teacher. The state also requires Health & Safety training, so you are aware of mandatory reporting requirements, school violence issues, the AIDS ed program, which is integrated across subject areas, and so on. I’m nearly finished with the program, and will begin student teaching in the spring.
Teaching will be a second career for me (editing for publishing houses, now freelance, was my first), and I’m drawn to the profession for a variety of reasons, but I am having serious second thoughts, as are nearly all the intelligent, well-educated people in my program. The dopey ones appear to have no hesitations whatsoever. But the low pay, long hours, dearth of resources, difficult working conditions, lack of respect, some really troubled students, and relentless pressure brought by the testing climate that are evident in the New York City schools, at least, are raising questions about how viable a career teaching will be from an economic and a quality of life standpoint. Hoping to make a positive contribution is the only reason to move forward.
It’s interesting that the comment thread has focused so exclusively on schools and curricula, and most specifically teachers. Quality of teaching is critical, and I do think that better compensation and improved resources/conditions (this affects students as much, or more than, teachers) are essential to recruiting and retaining good teachers, but the demographics of particular student bodies can’t be ignored. There’s a reason that poor school performance and poverty are correlated, beyond district spending on education (though that’s certainly a factor). There’s so much going on in some of these students’ lives outside the classroom that school performance, and perhaps even attendance, are very low on the priority list. There’s a lot more than teachers failing these kids. We can’t excuse low-performing schools but we also can’t expect the public school system to fix or counter all the intractable problems of poverty, systemic racism, local cultures that devalue school success, and so on. Kids who are ill but untreated because they lack insurance, or who need to work or take care of younger siblings, or who don’t have the requisite language skills, or who are homeless, or who leave school for several months each year to visit a home country, or who don’t have enough to eat, or who see gangs or dealing as their best option, or who have a parent(s) who is ill, abusive, alcoholic, addicted, unemployed, or simply overwhelmed—these kids arrive at school stressed and exhausted and ill-prepared to learn, no matter how good the teacher is. In addition, it’s social suicide in many neighborhoods to do well in school. The rewards of school compared with the deficits don’t compute for these kids.
I love books and reading and writing and I know how to teach a kid to analyze a text or to write a great essay, and I know how to connect the work to their lives. But I don’t know whether I’ll be able to convince an eleventh grader reading on a third-grade level who only shows up once every other week and has to maintain his cred with his friends when he’s there that it’s worth his attention. Can I get that guy to a level where he’ll pass the Regents in 5 or 9 months? When I’ve got 33 other kids in the same class, of all different abilities and backgrounds and motivation levels, but many of whom have similar problems? That’s the task, and it seems like a Herculean one.
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“I do know that if you asked a random teacher how much they got from their teacher training, compared to what they learned once they started teaching, they’d probably say they learned 20% in college, and 80% in the classroom.”
Absolutely true story coming up. I used to work at a college where the most popular major was accounting. My sister was an accounting major when she was in college, and she has worked as an accountant now for about 10 years and is now the controller for a non-profit. I was running the tutoring program and trying to get a handle on the accounting tutoring, so I asked my sister a question: what kind of things did you learn in accounting courses that you need now in your work as an accountant? She thought a minute and said “debits and credits.”
My point (and I do have one) is that what you said about teachers learning 20% of useful info for their careers in college is a lot better than apparently what accountants learn.
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Haven’t read the thread entirely, so someone may have pointed this out already.
My impression of the “intervention” component is that it’s not about SPED per se. I believe it’s about intervening with any child the instant he’s faltering.
One of the reasons we have so many classified kids in this country is that we don’t do this, so kids’ gaps in knowledge continue to accumulate until eventually they’re far enough behind their peers to “qualify for services.”
When you have time, you might want to check out Morningside School in Seattle. They do something they call “precision teaching” and guarantee parents that their LD child will make two years progress in one year or their money back.
They say they’ve given money back just once in 21 years.
The formal term for these kids is “NBT”: “never been taught.” The other is “curriculum casualties.”
Another interesting place to look at is the Princeton Charter School.
They also do daily interventions for any child who is starting to fall behind, not just SPED kids.
I’m sure their funding is lower than other public school funding, since they are a charter.
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Catherine, I was just looking into PCS’s funding, and it looks like charter schools get 90% of the student’s public school funding. And then on top of that there are fundraising and donations. So I’m not sure they’re doing more with less money.
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Doesn’t just about everybody do fundraising and donations? (The really hotsy-totsy schools do more, of course.) Also, at least back in the 90s in some places, charters had to cover both instruction and building rental out of a lower per student allotment, while the standard public schools had their buildings already and weren’t paying rent. This left charters at a severe disadvantage. (If I remember correctly.) I don’t know how things work now, but a lot of charters still seem to rent.
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Wendy,
I was estimating, of course. I’ve actually heard the same from engineers. It’s interesting, really, because as a layman you’d think that if there were any field that you could learn from a book, it would be accounting.
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Our school’s PTO has a few thousand dollars.
Friends of PCS have donated 100s of 1000s of dollars for various buildings/programs/etc.
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Thanks for showing up, Suze. I owe you a call. I spent 6 hours in meetings today and have another 6 hours of prep work tonight, so you’ll get a very tired call from me tomorrow afternoon.
It’s interesting that Suze only has second thoughts after being in an ed school for a while. Many of the problems with schools that Jackie and others are described are only discovered after being in the system.
Why aren’t we getting more smart people like Suze and Jackie even contemplating teaching? The problems that they describe explain the dropout rate of teachers, which is a huge and perhaps different problem. Why aren’t we getting more smart people interested in teaching, before their dreams are dashed by reality? Why are education majors in my intro classes less prepared for college than the liberal arts majors?
Suze, have you read Joan Anyon?
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How does that match up with usual school building expenditures (on top of instructional expenses)? Don’t school buildings always cost multi-millions (if not tens of millions)? Hundreds of thousands are barely a drop in the bucket for facilities.
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Laura,
My mother always said not to say anything if I didn’t have anything nice to say, but there is an obvious explanation for your question. Presumably college students remember clearly what their school teachers were like, and what they were like to their teachers.
In addition, people who love books and learning don’t necessarily like kids or know how to deal with them. I’m a reader and a “lifelong learner,” I’ve taught before, but I’m also a serious introvert. I don’t know that I like being around people all day enough to go back to teaching someday.
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To attract bright graduates, the public school system needs more flexibility. The teacher salaries quoted are usually entry level salaries. Salaries rise with seniority, as does a teacher’s standing in the union. A teacher who has 8 years invested teaching in a system has a great deal to lose if he leaves. If your spouse has to move for a promotion, it’s not appealing to start again at the bottom of the totem pole.
There also aren’t many opportunities for teacher advancement within the system. Assistant Principal, Principal, Assistant Superintendent, Superintendent, yes. These are not teaching positions. Most other career paths have many more opportunities for greater responsibility and greater pay.
We need a national set of strict standards. A (demanding) national curriculum would also be a great boon.
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At Morningside Academy, tuition for the 2007-08 year is $18,300 for families and $29,280 for institutional contracts.
They’re a full year program, with some intriguing looking educational plans for children with special needs. But, it’s clearly expensive. That prize puts them above the cost of the hoity-toity private schools in Seattle (even normalizing for the full year school) and substantially above the per pupil costs funded by the state at the public schools.
Again, I think the schools need more money if they are going to do what we want them to. That doesn’t mean money and no other changes, but money, definitely. A high cost area like Seattle really needs to be spending more.
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Someone said upthread “I was looking up “learning styles” on Wikipedia (yeah, I know), and it sounds like it’s actually a very controversial theory among neuroscientists.”
It is controversial and it’s only one theory. The problem is, it’s taught as gospel in schools of education.
Another problem is that the education is far more affected by politics and unproven theories than research. Some teaching methods are simply more effective than others – no matter what the learning style. Here’s an interesting read about research and the politics involved: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ft/grossen.htm
I believe we need to get rid of unions, raise teacher salaries considerably, and ask that school systems justify their choice of curriculum and methodology in order to receive state and federal funding. How to make that happen? No idea.
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bj,
If Morningside is actually making two years progress in one year, that would seem to justify them being twice as expensive as comparable schools. Also, special ed is more expensive than standard education, so we’d really have to compare them to a public program serving a similar population. Lastly, Catherine’s Westchester district spends an average of $22,000 per student, so that would be her basis for comparison. (Although Seattle’s probably cheaper to live in, isn’t it?)
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If you want to know why people aren’t choosing teaching, you have to find out what they do choose instead and why. When I was going through bad politics at my university, my husband suggested I think of teaching as an alternative. I would not, for several reasons: (1) It must be completely and totally exhausting. I teach 4 hours every other day and am wiped out. I cannot imagine every day. When you are on that stage, you are giving 100% and you have to be completely on. Most people cannot do that for the majority of their waking time day after day. It is so not like working in an office it’s not funny. Doing work in office hours is much more relaxing. (2) People have no respect for teachers, including the people who run schools (and parents), and it is hard to be disrespected day after day. My students may be disrespectful occasionally (which is wearying enough) but I get tons of respect from colleagues. It is important to feel like you are valued. (3) The pay is frequently less, and I want to be able to take my children on vacations.
That’s it.
My husband teaches at a elite private school, and he suffers from all these problems. His family does not value his choice to teach. They think he undersold himself and should get back into academia, though he probably couldn’t get a job in the area where I have a job. (Basically he took the job he did because the academic market was tight and would require us to move/be apart from each other and we wanted to start a family). I think we should remember that the most learned people frequently come from families that value education, and that offspring from those families are frequently going to have many career choices, and are going to usually choose prestigious ones, making it harder for those few offspring who are interested in pre-college education to choose it and retain capital in their families. (My husband’s brother and father are doctors).
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Presumably college students remember clearly what their school teachers were like, and what they were like to their teachers.
But what really did kill it for me as the provervial straw that broke the camel’s back was the day I spent in the ‘best & brightest’ teacher’s classroom and observed a lesson on the apostrophe… where she taught the difference between “its” and “it’s” backwards. I decided if those were going to be my top colleagues, I was going to burn out fast.
Yep, and yep.
I considered becoming a teacher when I took up tutoring calc students during college to earn money and absolutely loved it. As an MIT math grad, I would have been one of those shining success stories of students who turn Wall Street money to become math teachers.
And then I remembered my 3rd grade teacher who gave a long, involved lesson about how the stamp goes on the left side of the envelope. And my 11th grade English teacher who taught us Shakespeare through dittos and movies alone; no pesky texts necessary! Or the 12th grade English teacher whose main ambition in life seemed to be to get that year’s crop of soccer players to think he was cool, even if that entailed picking on his developmentally disabled student for hahas.
And I realized I absolutely could not do it. I couldn’t work in a system where colleagues like that would make more than great teachers by virtue of having been there longer.
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Lisa SG, I hear you. My Harvard classmate who did two years of public school teaching after graduating heard over and over from his family that he was wasting his education. I don’t think there’s any way to make it palatable to these grads unless they are 1) super-idealistic, and at best their teaching time then still doesn’t last long, or 2) intentionally short-term and done abroad, therefore independently justifiable.
Suze, now I’m very interested to hear more about what the drawbacks of alternative certification are.
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All this talk about drawing good candidates into teaching is ignoring one of Suze’s biggest points: that the task is simply overwhelming, for anyone, of any background.
I am particularly struck by how lacking social services are, according to Suze’s anecdotes, directly dragging down public education. Things like a lack of health care and poor parenting are making the students Suze sees not even show up. At that point, what difference does it make whether the teacher is bright or not?
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“And I realized I absolutely could not do it. I couldn’t work in a system where colleagues like that would make more than great teachers by virtue of having been there longer.”
And this doesn’t happen in the private sector? Except you would change the sentence to:
“I couldn’t work in a system where colleagues like that would make more than great teachers by virtue of knowing the right people.”
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Sorry, to add on to my previous comment:
I love how the private sector is presented as this utopia of meritocracy. That’s probably the biggest delusion I’m seeing in these comments, or perhaps second to the idea that all teachers care about is higher pay.
Sorry folks, the surefire way to piss me off is to start trashing public school teachers.
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jen,
Weren’t all of these things (except maybe drug using parents) true or truer 70 years ago? And yet somehow our grandparents (who were often undernourished and overworked in their childhoods, as well as often being members of large families), grew up and managed to send children to college. I don’t think deprivation is quite the whole story here. The question that needs to be studied is not how people stay poor and ignorant (that’s the initial human condition), but how anyone manages to achieve exit velocity into the middle class.
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Amy, sorry but that is a ridiculous comparison. In 1935, only 40% of Americans even graduated from high school. The grandparents who were under duress at the time were not even getting their kids into the building — which of course made it much cheaper to run the schools!
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WendyW, we’re talking about what influences the decision to become a teacher. Most 22-year-olds will have spent a lot of time in the presence of teachers and very little time in the presence of private-sector workers, especially professional ones. I doubt that claiming that every workplace is just like “The Office” is really going to do the trick of offsetting their exposure to uninspired and/or incompetent teachers.
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“Sorry folks, the surefire way to piss me off is to start trashing public school teachers”
Me, too, Wendy. We ask so much of them, pay them poorly, treat them with little respect, and then react with shock and dismay when they aren’t paragons of perfection.
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Siobhan: you are indeed proposing a tough-to-change mindset, if people don’t go into teaching because of their adolescence-fueled evaluation of their own teachers in high school. If young people are anti-teacher because teachers are the authority they rebelled against as teenagers (and that can happen whether the teachers are objectively bad or not), it’s a tough preconception to change.
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jen,
Just a second. We can’t really compare the high school diploma of 1935 to the high school diploma of 1955 or 1995. Just as the currency was inflating, with the dollar worth less and less every year, so were diplomas and degrees (Laura had an interesting post on diploma mills a few days ago). The American high school of the early 20th century was highly academic and you are correct that not a lot of people graduated from high school. However, if you read educational history, the broadening of the high school population around mid-century was accompanied by the gutting of the academic program, the introduction of lots of vocational track courses, and of course the addition of lots of “life adjustment” courses, too. (Sorry, I don’t have my citations handy.) I don’t have a convenient personal data point for the 1950s, but my grandfather (born 1921) went to a small town school with a graduating class about 20, each of whom took physics. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, I went to the same school, with about 65 students in my graduating class. I took physics with three other girls–that was it. (Our teacher knew barely any physics and she was running a political campaign at the same time, so the whole thing was a bit of a joke. Needless to say, I was not an engineering major.)
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As the blogging host, I want to thank you all for excellent commentary here, especially from the teachers, relatives of teachers, and soon to be teachers. Some of the responses are downright disturbing.
The anecdotal stories do much to tear down the charts and graphs in the original Economist article. The challenges that we face in this country — low prestige for teachers, the overwhelming challenge of teaching kids from troubled surrounding, the buffets from political forces, lack of advancement structure and incentives for good teachers, lack of good management, union demands. These are problems that won’t go away over night. Even modest pay raises for teachers won’t change these problems. I love talking about education reform, though these nasty realities make it a bummer to try to find good and easy policy remedies.
Let me add one more factor to the low public perception of teaching as a profession. There is also little public urgency to do much to help children. Look at our childcare centers. In the grand policy agenda in this country, kids come last. Education and childcare have been a non-issue in the upcoming campaign.
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Speaking of “The Office” and meritocracy, you just know that eventually Staples is going to obliterate Dunder-Mifflin.
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Exactly, Amy (even though I don’t watch the show) – nobody (least of all those of us in the private sector) would argue that the private sector is free of nepotism or corruption, or that it’s a utopia of meritocracy. The point is that private-sector firms are typically subject to competitive pressure that helps to keep those factors in check over time, while public-sector bureacracies are (typically) not. (And where you find private-sector niches that are not subject to such pressures, you can often point the figure at government regulation…but that is a whole different rant, and I’ve already raised Laura’s blood pressure enough over the last couple of days.)
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OK, one more. Laura, I don’t think it is as simple as there not being any “public urgency to help children.” More like there isn’t enough consensus as to how to really make a difference, absent truly massive amounts of money and (probably more important) upheaval. Just look at this comment thread: suppose every cent of what has been spent in Iraq was made available tomorrow to “help children,” would that create consensus as to what to do with it? (Believe it or not, voucher proponents want to help children, too.) How much consensus is there, really, as to how to turn around failing schools & students?
And doesn’t that last question also embody a false assumption, that there is one answer that is scalable up to a nationwide level?
This is to say nothing about how “helping children” (or any similar lofty-sounding goal) is so easily trasmuted in our political system into “shoveling more money into the existing interest groups.”
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onebadbint,
I looked seriously at alternative certification programs, specifically the NYC Teaching Fellows program, and decided against it. It might be okay if you wanted to teach math or science, because those are deemed “high-need” areas and you would have some choices. The program assigns you to a geographical area that is identified as “high need” and also determines what you will teach, depending (theoretically) on your undergraduate background. I wanted to teach English, and it was clear, after I asked some probing questions and read between the carefully constructed lines of the answers, that I would almost certainly be teaching Special Ed, or possibly ESL. These are the high-need subject areas (in addition to math and science). Bless the people who have that special talent and training, but I it’s not me. I wouldn’t object to a “high-need” school (code for failing and/or dangerous) if I could transfer after a few years of putting in time there, if I didn’t like it or felt burnt out, but that wasn’t the case.
Conversations with people who’d started the program bore this out. One guy I met had been a music major and wanted to teach music; he was assigned to teach special ed social studies in a really tough school. Some of the kids had serious behavioral problems and several had violent tendencies. He told me his sole goal for each day was to end with no actual blood being spilled in the room. He felt that the system was just warehousing the kids til they quit or could be ejected. He quit after 4 months. A science teacher in the program told me she was assigned a lab science class with close to 100 students. Also, I didn’t think I’d feel prepared after a 6-week training program (though you continue and take classes toward a Master’s). I’d prefer to put the time in and be as prepared as possible, though I realize that theory and practice are nearly always worlds apart.
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Whenever I hear the “abolish the unions” criticism, I always wonder whether the person making the suggestion knows that three states DO have laws that prohibit teachers from collectively bargaining: North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.
Are these states renowned for the quality of the education they provide?
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Northern Virginia is.
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I googled “naep state scores” for those three states and looked at the state report cards. All three hold their own if you compare their state scores to the national scores, but Virginia is probably the strongest. (Texas’s school population is only 36.5% Caucasian and 48% of schoolchildren are eligible for free or reduced lunch.)
I may be reading the tables wrong, or not getting some important nuance, but it is not immediately obvious that these three teacher union-free states are suffering for it.
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I’ve been looking around for the references to that Economist article, specifically the studies in Dallas and Tennessee, but to no avail. I’m completely incompetent in the education literature however, so if you know where any of this is, I’d really appreciate it.
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