There are several new books out on teacher education. They all deal with the question of how should education schools be training America’s future teachers.
After watching my kids’ teachers, working along fellow professors, and teaching myself, I have a few thoughts. 1) Educations schools could be doing a better job. 2) Some people are born teachers. Some people can be trained to be good teachers. Some people cannot be trained to be good teachers, no matter how good their training. 3) A good school is a combination of three closed intertwined variables — parental involvement, community wealth, and good teachers.
That said, there is another issue. We can use scientific studies and money to create the best teachers in the world, but the biggest problem will still lie on the table. How do we get the good teachers to where they are needed most?
Last year, Ian was in a special classroom in our public school for kids with high functioning autism. In that classroom, there was one regular teacher and four teaching aides. Teaching aides are typically local moms, who want to pick up some extra money while their kids are in school. They usually have a BA, but they don’t need to have any background in education. They are simply there to help out the kids who can’t focus on their work either because they have attentional issues or behavior problems. It’s a part time job with no benefits and low pay. They make about $14,000 per year.
Ian’s teaching aides last year were different from the typical aides. They all had BAs or MAs in education and were extremely young. When I came to school to volunteer for pizza day or special events, we would talk about jobs. The education schools have overproduced teachers in the past five to seven years. There are three times the number of teachers out there for the number of job openings. His aides were kids who didn’t have the connections to get jobs in fancy school districts. They took these low paying jobs, while living at home with their parents, in the hopes that they could make connections to teach at our school district.
There are jobs in Newark, I told them. Why don’t you teach there for a couple of years where you can gain experience and make a decent salary? Newark is about 30 minutes from here. They said no way. They were afraid of crime. Many of these young teachers came from middle class towns and heard stories about rapes and murders in Newark. When they went into teaching, they envisioned teaching smart, prepared kids, like themselves. They weren’t prepared and weren’t interested in dealing with the bigger social problems that arise in those city schools. They also were afraid of the major classroom management issues that they would face in Newark.
So, there are plenty of good teachers. The challenge is getting them from this school district, which has enough capital to get kids to college even with bad teachers, to places where they have very little social capital and really could use smart, dedicated, talented teachers. Higher salaries for teachers isn’t enough of a draw. Ian’s aides accepted slave wages in our good school district, rather than take a short drive down the highway to Newark.
In Education Week, Walt Gardner makes a similar point:
Teaching in these schools is extraordinarily hard. That’s why “combat pay” has not solved the problem – and never will. Even the most idealistic and dedicated teachers have limits to what they can endure on a daily basis.
Teach for America has tried to deal with this problem by infusing missionary mentality into their education program. But the program has mixed results. Teachers treat the program like the Peace Corps and do it for two years before moving on. And teachers don’t receive enough training.
Perhaps education schools should tackle this issue head on. Prepare future teachers for social work in addition to pedagogy. Urban school districts could bring in suburban unemployed teachers on charter buses. The school districts could employ behavior specialists to assist the teachers, so they can focus on education.
Apt. 11d 
A relative is a teacher. Accordiing to her, the education schools in our area prefer student teachers to teach in underresourced schools.
In reading articles about education, there seems to be a deep, abiding bias against teachers who teach in difficult schools. As a teacher, you don’t want to be shut out from the chance to teach in functional districts.
Our district does have fully credentialed teachers working as aides. Those who impress the teaching staff often become full teachers, in our district or similar districts. It’s a form of apprenticeship, perhaps. When hiring teachers, the district had the luxury of selecting from many applicants. Other than teaching in the district as an aide, the only way in would have been to be an experienced teacher with a good track record from a functioning district.
They did not hire teachers from the tought school districts. So young teachers who had teachers as relatives would choose their first assignments carefully.
I don’t have an answer. I wish I did. But no amount of money is going to draw young, educated people to work in places in which they aren’t safe. I found this article this morning: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/09/threatened_teachers_concerns_d.html. There aren’t enough martyrs in the world to staff schools in which the administration tolerates students making death threats to teachers.
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I’ve been following some posts on a forum from a guy who just got his first real teaching job after several years of semi-employment following graduation. He’s teaching at a Catholic high school and is struggling with classroom management while relieving his own high school demons about being an unpopular kid:
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?p=12360863#post12360863
Maybe ed students need counseling sessions where they get told, “You hated high school and were miserable there. Why do you want to spend the rest of your life working with high school students?”
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Laura said:
“Urban school districts could bring in suburban unemployed teachers on charter buses.”
Are we so sure that those teachers could function effectively in Newark?
I suspect that being a good urban teacher and being a good suburban teacher are essentially two totally distinct professions.
Also, principals are really important as people (for instance harry b) have mentioned. A good school has a good principal who insures a safe, orderly environment where teachers are supported.
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“I suspect that being a good urban teacher and being a good suburban teacher are essentially two totally distinct professions.”
My mom’s career suggests otherwise. And the phrasing sounds a lot like systems that are separate but equal. Which, ahem.
Very true about principals, though.
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What I mean is that you could be a “good” suburban teacher and then go into an urban school and be a pathetic disaster. If you watch “Entre les murs,” I think it’s clear that the teacher would be much more effective at a more affluent school, but he and his poor kids are from totally different planets. (In the movie, the tough kids say that they call middle class ethnic French people like him “camemberts,” which I think is hilarious.) I had a related experience myself when I taught in Russia for the Peace Corps, where I had one really well-behaved class of almost all girls and then several squirrely classes of boys the same age. If I’d only had the girls, I would have thought that I was the most awesome teacher since Jaime Escalante, but the boys provided a much-needed reality check. My daughter’s private junior/senior high school has a number of tweedy and unworldly academic specialists that are awesome in a setting with strong demographics and administrative and parent support, but I can’t imagine them lasting very long at a tougher school.
Likewise, a good urban teacher might be flummoxed by all of the social climbing, grade grubbing, college mania, and helicopter parenting that happen at a “good” suburban school.
I can imagine that a single skilled and very experienced person might well have the skills to manage in both environments (there are amphibians and salmon, after all), but it’s not something to expect of every single teacher, and particularly not of new teachers.
I would expect that Laura’s nice ed school grads wouldn’t last a week in Newark. There are easier and pleasanter ways for cute recent college grads to make a living.
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Remember that at a demographically strong suburban school, the parents are expected to carry a very high percentage of the work load of educating the child.
Any pedagogy that is based on mom and dad drilling the kids on their math facts at home or making runs to Michaels for last-minute craft supplies or getting tutors when all else fails is going to be a miserable failure in areas that don’t have those kind of demographic resources.
Upper middle class kids don’t fail (as a rule) because their parents do not allow them to fail.
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It’s also not at all uncommon for middle class parents to teach children to read (hence the huge assortment of boxed phonics readers available commercially). There are some things that are just too important to be left to the school to take care of.
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Could we maybe draw a distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘war zone’? There are certainly dysfunctional school districts, but the unthinking belief that all urban schools (aside from a few wealthy enclaves) are frightening and dangerous doesn’t make staffing the schools any easier.
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There’s also the commuting factor. If you’re living with your parents in the suburbs, getting in to the city can be more expensive than driving a beater to a nearby surburban district. I think taking the commuter rail in would cost around $14 these days, including parking. Probably more, as they’ve raised fares. Forget parking in the city, unless the school has its own lot.
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Cranberry said:
“There’s also the commuting factor. If you’re living with your parents in the suburbs, getting in to the city can be more expensive than driving a beater to a nearby surburban district. I think taking the commuter rail in would cost around $14 these days, including parking. Probably more, as they’ve raised fares. Forget parking in the city, unless the school has its own lot.”
That’s a good point.
There’s also presumably the comfort value in, “I know and love XYZ suburban town, some of my friends went to school there or have jobs teaching there, I’ve gone there for birthday parties, there’s a cute lunch place, and my orthodontist’s office is there.” If a particular nice town is a place you have lots of positive associations with and you feel safe there and your mom and your grandparents aren’t going to freak out about you working there, it’s going to be an easier sell. Also, if they give NICE Christmas and year end presents to teachers (and I expect they do), that’s going to be hard to walk away from.
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Amy P, I don’t think young teachers are that parochial. Good administration matters.
I gather pensions and seniority are big issues. In large districts, I gather teachers with seniority tend to put in for positions at the “best” schools.
If you change districts, you lose your seniority. I also gather that pensions might not be transportable, depending upon the state or district. This would logically tie a teacher to her district. So starting in Newark would mean remaining in Newark. (Someone, anyone, correct me if I’m wrong.)
If the teachers plan to have children, and want to be close to mom (I know people like that), draw a circle around Mom’s house. A future dream in which Grandma provides babysitting for your children to cover the time between enrollment in their good! school district, and the time you get home from teaching in a neighboring district, is not unreasonable.
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Nice summary. I still think the answer is pay. I think they have to be paid a lot more. I think people will teach in “combat” situations if they are compensated sufficiently, but the compensation will have to be a lot more than what we now think reasonable salaries for teachers (say 2-3X as much).
But, I don’t see that happening, because where’s the money going to come from? Not the kids. So, we’re trying other things — online education, scripted curricula (and trying to make teaching into a mcdonald’s scripted job), low-paid temp workers with missionary zeal. Maybe some of these things help a bit, but the real tragedy is if they help just a little bit but further undermine the profession so that even the suburban schools can’t get the good creative teachers I want for my children (and, presumably others do, too).
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I’m going to grossly gender stereotype here, but I think that male teachers (especially ones with large student loans or growing families) would work in Newark for 2X the pay, but that young single female teachers wouldn’t for any length of time unless they had huge debts that could only reasonably be repaid by doing one of the “underserved area” programs.
There are so many easier, safer and pleasanter ways to make a living than to be insulted and abused all day long while achieving nothing.
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How about forgiving student loans? How about teaching these teachers proper classroom management, even in tough situations? And having administration to back them up? Not all inner city schools are wastelands: there are some that have effective teachers. Give those teachers incentive to teach others. I don’t think this is a gift. I think people can be taught how to teach in schools with seriously disadvantaged kids. I don’t think this is a special talent. But we need good incentives and good administrations. How about team teaching?
I just read on Design Mom her experience with an Oakland high school that’s a 3. Her kids are happy there and learning.
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“How about team teaching?”
That’s a really good idea.
I’m now a long-term supporter for the idea of an apprenticeship model for new teachers, and I suspect that that would be particularly helpful in more difficult settings.
I was chatting online a few weeks ago with that struggling new teacher I mentioned upthread (the one who is being shredded by small town Catholic high school students), and I mentioned something about “positive reinforcement” and mentioned a few titles to read (Don’t Shoot the Dog and Transforming the Difficult Child). He had never heard of positive reinforcement and didn’t know what it meant…That’s a little hard to believe that you can get an ed degree and not know that, but that’s what the guy said.
I think it’s a huge issue that you can’t really teach classroom management effectively without a classroom to manage, hence the advantage of apprenticeship or team teaching.
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” He had never heard of positive reinforcement and didn’t know what it meant…That’s a little hard to believe that you can get an ed degree and not know that, but that’s what the guy said.”
I’m sure he was taught what it was. Did he hear it? Did he memorize it for the test then forget it? Unknown.
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Wendy,
Yeah, I was thinking memorize for the test, then forget.
But positive reinforcement is a big enough concept that that shouldn’t even be possible–it should be looming over you at all times. Is there enough positive reinforcement happening? Am I under-reacting or ignoring positive events and over-reacting to negative events? Am I unwittingly creating a spiral where I am going to wind up experiencing more and more negative events, sinking deeper and deeper into quicksand the more of a fight I put up?
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I teach in a private school in a suburban school district with other excellent teachers. We are down the road from an urban school district in the process of imploding. They’re taking out yet another multi million dollar loan to cover a budget shortfall. Classroom management at the high school level would scare me. I’m a 5’2″ woman who would be trying to convince 6′ tall young men to sit and listen to me and do what I say. I’m not saying I couldn’t learn to do it, but it would be hard. The pay sucks. Starting salary is 20k less than it is in the suburbs, though it is unionized while the suburbs are not. Also, teachers get moved randomly from school to school. A school closes, so they move everyone around, or they move people around to cover certain things. You almost have no choice. There’s no money for anything–not for conferences, paying for MA classes, or computers–all things that suburban teachers get.
How would you get me to teach at a challenging urban school? Pay me in the high 60s or 70s to start with regular increases when I’m doing a good job. Reduce the class size to no more than 20 so I have a chance in hell at managing the classroom. Give me a reasonable work load so I have time to plan and work with other teachers. Let me teach and not test. Give me some freedom over the curriculum. Provide me mentoring and training. Let me keep up with my craft through professional development. Respect what I do as a real profession and not babysitting.
While there are a handful of schools doing that right now, most aren’t and providing these things are not even on the radar, and if they are, they don’t have the money to do it. The testing thing is affecting suburban and urban schools alike. It sucks the life force out of anyone interested in teaching. Especially for urban schools, it’s all about the testing. Teachers in some places are evaluated on how well their students do on those tests. Studies show that teachers contribute little to test outcomes. Sigh.
I could go on. I looked into to teaching in a public school about 7 years ago. The certification process alone was enough to turn me off. Never mind having challenging students and feeling like you’re failing year after year.
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1, and 2 apply to almost any job, of course. There’s nothing _special_ about teaching there. I’m not _sure_ that wealth is necessary. In retrospect the schools I went to were pretty poor ones w/ people without much wealth at all. (All during my grade school the roofs leaked whenever it rained, or the snow melted, as just one example. Buckets collected water in class rooms and the halls.) But, while they were not great, they were okay, with some pretty good teachers. I think that, at the time at least (things seem to have gotten worse, as many years of fully Republican government have gutted public institutions in Idaho) a teacher could do fairly well cost-of-living wise in the area, and that mattered.
I have a friend who teaches middle school science in North Philadelphia. That’s a place that’s easily as bad as Newark, and probably worse budget-wise. He jokes that he mostly teaches “sit down and be quiet” when you ask him. It’s not an easy job. Many of the students come from families with very bad educational backgrounds, and that makes a huge difference. (Much more than wealth as such.) I expect that the hardest actual thing about teaching is such a situation is that it’s depressing. Most people don’t do well and won’t do well. It’s tiring. It’s probably easier to say to one’s self that it’s a fear of being safe than that one is depressed by one’s students. (Of course, “feeling unsafe” is, in these cases, almost never independent of the racial makeup of the students. That shouldn’t be underestimated.) But for me, it would be the largely endless hopelessness of the situation that made it unbearable.
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“I expect that the hardest actual thing about teaching is such a situation is that it’s depressing. Most people don’t do well and won’t do well. It’s tiring. It’s probably easier to say to one’s self that it’s a fear of being safe than that one is depressed by one’s students. (Of course, “feeling unsafe” is, in these cases, almost never independent of the racial makeup of the students. That shouldn’t be underestimated.) But for me, it would be the largely endless hopelessness of the situation that made it unbearable.”
Yep. Bear in mind that feeling unsafe, unsupported and continually disrespected while also failing to achieve anything has got to be particularly unrewarding. One can have a much pleasanter, more peaceful life being a dentist’s receptionist.
You may be being a little unfair about the race stuff–a lot of teachers are women and a lot of women are small, especially compared to male high school students. I never reached 5’3″, and what Geekymom said really is an issue. It would probably be a little different now, though. Having been married 16 years to a guy 9 inches taller than me, I have lots of experience in making myself heard from below, but 22-year-old college graduates don’t have that type of life experience yet.
46% of new teachers leave teaching within the first five years.
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One of my Peace Corps colleagues taught at a tough vocational school. (I’m not totally sure, but I assume that the students were mainly high school graduates.) How rough could that be, you ask? Well, he had at least one incident of a student setting a fire on his desk and another incident of getting shot at with a BB gun in the classroom.
My colleague was a really cool guy (everybody in our Peace Corps group loved him) and yes, given local demographics, those classes would have been almost entirely of European ancestry (although you do run into Koreans and Caucasians and various non-Europeans in those parts).
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On reflection, I’m not totally sure how the articulation works between Russian schools and vocational schools. When I was there, I worked with kids who were aiming for 5-year colleges, so I’m a little fuzzy on whether or not the pyromaniac BB gun vocational school kids would have been more high school or college age. (The war in Chechnya was raging at the time, so every teenage Russian boy was eager to go to a post-secondary institution of some kind to avoid getting caught in the draft.)
So, yeah, sometimes “safety” just means safety rather than being a racial code word.
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My kids go to a school that is 72% free/reduced lunch. If you only looked at our Race to the Top “school report card”, you would definitely consider it a failing, urban school. Most of the school is not white. Much of the school speaks English as a second language. (….as a result, most of our neighborhood opts for private schools or “open enroll” to other schools in the district with different demographics.)
It’s been a great school for our kids. The teachers and principal are phenomenal. They all want to be working in a school where they are truly needed, and are “change-your-life” kind of teachers.
I guess my point is that even if you *do* attract the best teachers/staff to a school in which poverty is a stark reality, it’s still not enough.
We don’t need better teachers. We need additional social workers and counselors. We need more winter coats and school supplies. We need snacks and buses for field trips. We need more after-school programs. We need instruments. We need better housing in the city for low income families. We need internet access for the entire city. We need mentors. (all of this costs money, of course)
I keep reading articles blaming the teachers. (not yours…but others do.) In my experience, it’s not the teachers we need to fix. It’s the poverty.
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