Two of my friends were in education and both stopped teaching when they were ~50. One had his doctorate and was a principal. He got tired of the politics involved, but didn’t want to take a pay cut to go back to teaching.
The other became frustrated because he was doing substitute teaching and was only being placed in “bad” schools. He’s a big dude. Women he knew who were substitute teaching were given offers all over, while he only got called for schools where getting out unscathed was a concern.
Well this is where I assume most of the teacher shortage is anyway, right? Having helped my kids with homework for the last 10 years, I feel pretty comfortable saying that content knowledge up to grade 10 or so shouldn’t be much of a problem for anyone who’s graduated high school themselves.
That’s a bit like a chef expecting a clean kitchen. Chefs don’t expect a clean kitchen, they create a clean kitchen.
Sure, there are other folks at the workplace who can undermine or sabotage or otherwise make a clean kitchen much more difficult, but it’s part of the chef’s job responsibility.
I don’t expect orderly and respectful classes to happen without significant labor on my part. I certainly expect them, but I expect them because I put in the work, and I communicate these expectations to students in a variety of ways.
They have a huge role in student behavior, no doubt, but so do classroom teachers, and so do parents, and so do students–and to a lesser degree so do police officers and real estate developers and the media. Student behavior is a tremendously complex set of phenomena, and everyone who influence children has a part to play.
A teacher who comes into a public school thinking that orderly and respectful classes isn’t their responsibility is going to have a shitshow for a classroom.
Admin has much more important things to fuck up than classroom behavior. That rests on the teacher (and parents and students.) If my classes are chaotic, it’s my job to make them less so, or to at least bend the chaos towards learning. The #1 reason student teachers don’t get hired is “lack of classroom control.”
I taught in the military and in industry where everything was very orderly due to strict administration. That was even true when I went to Catholic school. Irish nuns have a quieting influence on the class.
In the present situation, my solutions would be naive and impractical.
So, is there a solution? Can our public school system survive under current administrative and funding policies.
My wife is an elementary school art teacher and she’s been telling me about a shortage for a long while, but Covid really did a number on things. They have problems with getting enough subs, so a specials teacher (art, music, physical education, etc) has to rotate to cover. People aren’t applying for teacher positions, even though the pay isn’t that bad in our county.
I remember when during Covid a lot of teachers were wary of going back physically in the classroom and a number of conservative folks would go something like “if you are scared, quit, and give your job up to those who want to work”. Turns out, this massive pool of people who want to work as teachers aren’t out there.
It’s pretty obvious to me that the balance between knowing the subject matter and knowing how to teach depends on what level you’re teaching at, leaning increasingly more toward the former the higher up you go. People who teach at the college/university level typically are required to have advanced degrees in their subject but no special training or certification in education. On the other hand, put the average non-teacher in charge of a class of first-graders and they probably won’t know what to do, even though they know all the content that a first-grader is supposed to learn.
But it’s not necessarily a good example of someone with content knowledge. How much content knowledge does it take to read off a stack of transparencies or out of a book?
A good teacher with limited content knowledge might still do a semi-decent job of teaching the material if they had good educational resources (e.g. textbooks, videos, computer-aided instruction, etc.) to lean on.
A cousin of mine retired from teaching in 2012. It was an early retirement, he was only 55 at the time. He soon learned that his pension did not go far and the only work he could find was physical in nature. And because of a clause in the union contract, he could not return to teaching anywhere in the state of Washington. He ended up moving to Idaho and found teaching job in a small town. Besides being a math teacher, he also became the varsity basketball coach and led the school to state championships in 2 of his 4 years there. Because of Covid and the shortage of teachers, the state and union agreed to drop the no work clause in the union contract, he took advantage of this and is returning to the school he taught at for 30 years. Besides the teacher pay, he can also continue to collect his pension.
I had a professor who read out of the book he himself had written. He clearly knew his stuff but he was shit at teaching it. I had a TA for a basic math course who just wrote problems on the board from the book and then solved them. He was a mathematics graduate student so he certainly knew the content, but he had no idea whatsoever of how to teach.
That’s the fundamental flaw with using graduate students as teaching assistants - the assumption that content knowledge is the same as the ability to communicate it effectively.
There’s a crucial difference between the military and industry and the Catholic school on one hand, and the public school system on the other hand: we don’t kick anyone out.
Students who come to us with stable home lives and strong mental health and food security? We take them. Kids that come to us from their aunt’s basement where they’re living with ten other family members because there’s a restraining order out on their violent father, and they’re falling asleep in class? We take them. Kids that watched their older brother get shot in the street in broad daylight and whose own anger is on a hair-trigger? We take them. Kids whose mom ODed and kids whose mom is in prison and kids whose mom’s ex-boyfriend broke into their house and shot and killed half the family and kids who come out of the car in the morning reeking of the weed their parents were smoking on the way to school and kids who are homeless and kids who don’t speak a word of English because they moved to the country two weeks ago? They’ve literally all been in my class.
And with these classes, I can’t expect the same sort of orderly discipline that occurred in your Catholic school, where the administration could kick a kid out easy as by your leave, nor the sort of discipline you get in an industry where subpar employees get fired, nor the sort of discipline you get in a military organization that has a brig and dishonorable discharge.
I don’t mean to be glib, but what does “survive” mean in this context? The shortage we’re seeing now is one of the results of the policies that are in place.
Who’s organizing it? How do we ensure that enough people participate? What are the specific objectives? Whom do we negotiate with to obtain those objectives?
As someone who’s deeply involved in our union work, I can vouch that it takes a little more than three words.
I don’t think schools are going to close en masse. I think they’ll continue to exist. I think that they’ll be understaffed, or staffed with underqualified staff, and student learning and safety will suffer as a result.
My thoughts on the importance of content knowledge vs teaching knowledge: it’s a bit like asking about the importance of money when raising a child vs the importance of love.
With both money and content knowledge, it’s extremely important to have enough. A parent needs to have enough to put a roof over the child’s head and food on the table. A teacher needs to have enough knowledge to pass their own tests. There are ways to get to enough if you’re not there yet (food stamps, reviewing long division over the summer), but enough is non-negotiable.
Having a little more than enough is still pretty valuable. A little more than enough can buy you easier, safer, happier. A seventh-grade math teacher who also understands eighth-grade and maybe high school math can teach a little better.
But beyond that, the value drops off sharply. Being able to buy your kid designer clothes just isn’t that important. Having a Ph.D. in math when you’re teaching seventh graders is kind of gilding the lily.
But love and teaching skills also non-negotiable, and there’s no ceiling on the benefit of these. No matter how much you love your kid, there’s more to be gained by having more adults in their lives who cherish and look out for them. No matter how good a teacher you are, there’s always room to grow, and there’s always more you could accomplish.
An Apache friend of mine attended a reservation mission school. The facility and materials were funded by the government but their were no funds for teachers. So, the mission used priests who just handed out text books for the children to read. I’m sure his memory is biased, and they did more than that, but it must have been grim.
Substitute teachers, facing the challenges you describe, sound even worse.