Where will we get our teachers from?

Great Debates
1

Inspired by recent events, I wonder where the United States will find enopugh qualified people to serve as teachers in our schools. During his recent campaign for reform of the tenure system in California public schools, the governator remarked:

and then proceeded to explain his plan. Reform the tenure system so that teachers must wait five years for tenure rather than two, and make other changes so that it’s easier to fire teachers classified as failing.

This brings up a rather obvious question. Suppose that we fire X number of teachers. Then we have X number of empty classrooms. Where will we find qualified teachers to fill these classrooms?

The nation already faces a teacher shortfall. Districts all around the country are having trouble filling vacancies. When the baby boomers retire, the problem will only grow worse. How much worse? Over one hundred thousand must be hired in the next decade. That’s not for the entire United States. We need that many for North Carolina alone. Now multiply that number by fifty and you may start to see the problem.

And why should we be facing a shortage of qualified applicants. The reason is not that difficult to understand. Teachers get paid $50,000 to do a $100,000 job. Other jobs requiring comparable skill levels pay a great deal more. A typical forty-hour-a-week job requiring a Master’s usually brings in well above $50,000. Teachers work sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week or more. And of course there’s no numerical figure for the stress of dealing with a class of sullen kids, pushy parents, micromanaging administrators, idiot state legislatures, and government bureaucracy.

Certain people love to say that “you can’t fix the problem by throwing money at it”. Regrettably, they’re wrong. To hire qualified individuals and keep them, you have to pay competitive wages. That’s simple common sense in any business, including education. If we want good teachers, we’ll have to raise salaries. That’s all there is to it.

2

If we want qualified teachers, we can do a few things:

  1. Reform the system so that outputs are more important than inputs. What I mean is that if someone has knowledge of a subject and the ability to teach, that person should be able to be a teacher, regardless of whether or not he or she has a degree in teaching or has gone through a complex state certification process more concerned with what classes the person took rather than whether the person can actually teach. It’s more important that we have knowledgeable teachers who can actually do the job rather than teachers who have taken all the required classes and jumped through all the certification hoops but who still can’t teach at all. Some states are starting to experiment with this kind of alternative certification.

  2. Allow schools to punish students in a more efficient manner. Many teachers get burnt out from dealing with a handful of trouble makers who are difficult to discipline due to complex regulations. Let schools discipline or expel the bad kids more easily and both teachers and students will benefit.

  3. Institute merit pay. Frankly, I think that most teachers are overpaid. A starting salary for a teacher is relatively low (although in many rural areas, it’s much higher than most people make). However, once you’ve been in the profession for a few years you make good money for nine months’ work, regardless of whether or not you actually do good work. I don’t support higher pay for teachers unless it’s tied to performance.

Do these things and I think you’ll see more people (and better people) head into teaching.

3

Do teachers at the public school level have tenure, and if so, should they? I don’t believe that teachers are the primary reason for educational difficulties but what can be done about a teacher who does a poor job of educating?

Do you have a cite, because in many areas of the nation $50,000 a year is pulling down some serious dough. In my neck of the woods the average household income is less than $40,000 a year. I’m also curious about the source that says other jobs that require a masters pays $100,000 and they’re working 40 a week. Most of those I know who are pulling down $50-100,000 work a lot more than 40 a week.

Marc

4

In talking to people who have considered going into teaching, money wasn’t the big drawback. The myriad frustrations of the job were. Piddling rules and politics were what they feared.

Now, I’m not saying (because I don’t know) that those fears are reasonable. But they exist. And every news story with something silly going on in a school just reinforces those fears. I don’t know what, if anything, can be done about that.

5

Er, 80 hours a week? Frankly, no. Having worked as a high school teacher for a bit (and a fairly good one, if I do say so), there is no way I ever came close to putting in 16 hour days 5 days a week on a regular basis. I know no collegues who put in that much time, and I worked with some very fine teachers.

I’ve always shouted from the roof-tops that teachers work more hours than the school day’s 7 hours, but I think you’re a little off base here.

6

Not around here. In my wife’s school district, teachers had to wait seven years for tenure. During her first seven years, she was laid off twice – not poor performance, but budget cuts (fortunately, both times, enough other teachers left at the same time that she was able to come back.)

Did waiting seven years for tenure help weed out the incompetent teachers? As much as I love teachers, I have to say no. Look at it this way. If your job had been eliminated twice due to budget cuts, and then restored only because people with more seniority than you had decided to quit, would that be an inducement for the most competent employees to stay?

7

These discussions of teacher pay always break down into regional differences. The problem is that due to the way schools are funded (basically according to how much the taxpayers in that district pay in taxes, at least here in NY state) the difference for starting pay from one district to the next is phenomenal. For every school that has teachers making 50,000 annually there are at least as many making far less (and some making significantly more). In “rich” districts, teaching can be relatively well paying, especially as you progress up the pay ladder. Unfortunately, starting pay in many poorer districts is so low it’s embarassing.

I think rather than casting the argument as whether teachers make too much or too little, it’s probably more fair to talk about how much teachers make based on the condition of the school system they work in. The problem is not that we’re short teachers so much as we can’t keep teachers in schools that need them the most. The way the system is set up now, the highest paying jobs are in wealthy suburban neighborhoods, and as a result, that’s where everyone wants to work. Meanwhile, poorer urban and rural districts can’t keep anyone due to low pay and intense working conditions.

8

Spouse of a teacher weighing in with my observations on Renob’s suggestions:

1. Reform the system so that outputs are more important than inputs.
Agreed, assuming you find a way to level inputs ( less disparity in pay levels, classroom funding). An awesome teacher in a poor district may me less productive than an average one in a better district.
I totally support alternative certification at higher grade levels. Lower grade levels demand a certain amount of early childhood education.
**2. Allow schools to punish students in a more efficient manner. **
Agreed. Big stumbling block: parents. And the parents that don’t care almost always outnumber the ones that do; moreover, the parents that think that junior can do no wrong totally smother those of us that see our children’s shortcomings.

**3. Institute merit pay. **
How do you define merit? Schools don’t start off equally- don’t you see it likely that merit pay would be less than equitable?

My thoughts on it? Teachers don’t go into it to be rich. But they deserve a better wage than they get now, and more importantly, deserve better work conditions. I don’t know of a teacher that would not pass on a raise in order to get another teacher for art, PE, or any of the other things being phased out. Too many of our teachers are burning out due to conditions- crappy schoolrooms, combative parents, and ineffective advocacy from administrators to remedy both issues. Given their skill set, a good teacher can easily find work somewhere they will be rewarded for their effort rather than used as a scapegoat.

9

Umm. No. Most of them do not work 60 hour weeks (MAYBE the first year or so), and if they do it’s mitigated by 3 months off, which is HUGE perk.

I have a Master’s, and I’m thrilled to have my $41,000 year-round teaching job; it’s more than I’d likely make in publishing, my likely alternative field.

Raising salaries by a grand a year isn’t going to bring people rushing in to deal with the problems you list; someone who doesn’t want to teach for $33,000 isn’t going to change their mind for $35, 000. In order to make it so much more attractive to so many people, you’d have to talk about BIG raises and corresponding BIG tax increases. Are you sure you want people getting into teaching for the money?

**Renob’s ** solutions are much more workable; unfortunately the teacher’s unions and parents won’t stand for them.
The OP does have a good point though, in another regard: one of the common panaceas commonly touted (especially bythe NEA) is smaller class sizes. Fine as far as it goes, but smaller classes means more teachers, and they never answer the question of where we get them or how goood they’ll be.

10

Renob’s solutions are very problematic. Let’s go through them.

  1. Output instead of input. How do you see teaching: is it a profession, like doctors and lawyers? Is it a semiprofession, like nursing? Is it a career, like waiting tables?

I see it as a semiprofession, and think we’d get far better educations for our kids if it were a profession. But let’s stick with semiprofession.

How comfortable would you be if nurses and pharmacists didn’t need to receive a license to fulfill their job duties? If anyone with a bachelor’s degree in biology could take a test and become a nurse?

We have licensing programs because we believe that certain jobs have specific, specialized skillsets. Teaching, I’d argue, requires such skillsets.

Due to our shortfall of teachers and our admittedly crappy method for training teachers, I’m not opposed to emergency licenses in the short term. They’re no long-term solution. In the long term, obtaining a teaching license ought to pay slightly less than, and be slightly less difficult to achieve than, passing the bar.

  1. Expelling Bad Kids: this is a terrible idea. Do you think that it’s going to cost our society less in the long run if we kick them out of school? Where are these kids going to go once they’re no longer in school? Unfortunately, we can’t abrogate our responsibilities to children so easily, even if we have no ethical problem with doing so: kicking them out of school is going to create much bigger problems a decade down the road.

  2. Merit Pay: This idea has been tried over and over, and it repeatedly runs into several problems. At its most flexible, it’s been a means for corrupt administrators to funnel tax dollars to their cronies and punish teachers that they don’t like. At its least flexible, it punishes teachers for working in poor school districts, where the students have fewer home advantages than students in wealthier districts. (And by fewer home advantages, i mean things like homes free of drugs, homes with involved parents, homes without violence, and homes).

There’s a recent proposal that an agricultural studies professor came up with that would award merit pay to teachers based on the improvement of individual students over the course of the year that the students spent in the class. I’m intrigued by this. On the one hand, it seems to avoid the problems of previous systems. On the other, it might encourage teachers to “teach to the test” even more than they currently do.

I’m an arrogant SOB, and I fully expect to be one of the best teachers in the school that I wind up in. Merit pay would almost certainly work to my advantage. I’m deeply suspicious of it.

I see three simple, expensive solutions to the teaching shortage:

  1. Give an across-the-board pay increase of 50% to teachers in this country.
  2. Require ongoing education, such that within 10 years, all teachers will have masters degrees in education.
  3. Reduce class sizes to a maximum of 15.

Take these major steps, and we’ll see a great improvement in the education our kids get.

Daniel

11

I’d like to see some objective evidence that there is, in fact, a plague of bad teachers.

The Governator can SAY there’s all kinds of failing teachers. Renob can SAY that there’s teachers who’ve jumped through the certification hoops but can’t teach. I’d like to see the proof (not anecdotes) that this is a common, widespread problem, and that the problem is in fact one of teacher competence, not a systematic problem that prevents capable people from doing the job.

I’m very, very skeptical when people say that teachers suck and so what we need are more people teaching who don’t have teaching certificates. This is predicated on the assumption that what you need to be a successful teacher is mastery of the subject (and usually the speaker is referring, specifically, to an industry or business.)

But that just doesn’t make any sense. Frankly, it’s preposterous to think that a chemist who works at DuPont has any inherent advantage over a certified teacher with some college chemistry courses in understanding and teaching eleventh grade chemistry. You don’t NEED a Ph.D., or even a Master’s, to teach that level of chemistry. I understand chemistry at that level. The knowledge difference between Chris the Chemist and Tanya the Teacher is just not meaningful to a 15-year-old who has to know what valance electrons are.

I do not doubt that there are many people out there without teaching certificates who might make fine teachers. There are also many people out there with extensive subject matters qualifications who would be shitty teachers, no matter how many diplomas they hold, because Tiffany the 14-year-old freshman English student just doesn’t need to know the intricacies of Edwardian poetry. Today, she needs to understand that an essay consists of an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. To get that across to a kid, you just don’t need a lot of advanced understanding of English; you need to know how to teach, how children learn, how to manage a class, how to structure a lesson, how to write a test, how to command respect.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not firmly on the side of teachers in every respect. I just do not believe that the average teacher works 80 hours a week, or indeed that any competent teacher needs to work that long. I think $50,000 is pretty good bread for a job where you get ten to twelve weeks of vacation, so on and so forth. But I just think it’s the height of insanity to think you can pull in anyone with a lot of fancy degrees or industry qualifications and think they can teach.

12

Freakonomics points out that when you give people enough incentive to cheat, they cheat. Not the students, the teachers. Which is happening with standardized testing, NCLB, and performance funding.

Let me guess, the competent ones went and worked for corporate America for more money, less headaches and the same or better job security? Regardless of if we pay teachers only to work nine months, they need to have a salary that supports them all year. Many of them would be willing to work all year for a decent check if we’d change our school structure.

13

I’ve wondered at times if the way to approach schooling is through a series of specialists who come to an established classroom where a “teacher” holds sway. Almost like having guest lecturers.

14

I think that we should relax (in terms of paper qualifications) and raise (in terms of performance) entrance requirements. Right now, they are throwing obstacles in front of potential teachers. I considered that career, but looking at the req’s decided there was no way. "Education was simply not a major that interested me, and looking at it I don’t think it would seriously have helped me learn to teach. I think people whould be enouraged to take such classes, but that

Looking back, I don’t see a single thing that was done well on the elementary or high school level that college instructors - with not a single course experience in Education - did not do better. Better students helps, of course, but that’s not the sole reason. It’s because they cared about their subject. At the very least, the high school level should not require more than a bachelor’s in something related to the field.

Actually, fine if they demonstrated the necessary knowledge, or were just trained on the job. This was common practice for a great many years, and still is in many parts of the world. And it seems to cause no trouble. Push come to shove, nursing is not a terribly complicated task. It takes care and alertness, but no extrordinary education.

Please re-read Renob’s comments. Nowhere does he suggest expelling troublemakers.

And in the end, no amount of aducation or aducation degress can teach you that, either. It’s a matter of experience and adaptiveness, hands down. And your suggestion that people highly interested in their subject are incapable of understanding less focused needs is highly assumptive, at best. I’ve never met an english major who couldn’t give you fine five-minute talk any day of the week outlining what an essay is, what is does, and how it works. I’ve rarely met an english teacher (only two, actually) who could explain the same thing as clearly and concisely.

15

First thought: you’re paying to have two staff in the room rather than one. Huge increase in the wage bill.

Second thought: a proportion of the good teachers will move into the ‘school lecturer’ position. Assuming you have a decent selection process, the bad school teachers won’t stand a chance. The result: you’ve skimmed the good teachers and left the schools with the worst ones.

16

Daniel

17

Why, then, is pedagogy an understood and millennium-old discipline?
Daniel

18

I certainly wouldn’t argue with the soundness of that as an idea; the bottom line however, is that we as a society do not have the committment to education to give teachers the massive jump in status (and thus payroll) you propose. 50% across the board amounts to a correspondingly huge increase in taxes at one level or another.

In that context, I should point out that teachers in the US are not significantly underpaid compared to the rest of the world.

Discipline != expelling, and “expelling” != kicking a kid out of every school for life. In some cases, Johnny getting the boot from PS #25

That would get them even more firmly grounded in the educational paradigms that, IMO, are part of the problem. I’d far rather see them get Master’s in other things, and ongoing workshops for classroom skills.

Which is great for the kids that get you as a teacher. Not so good for all the kids that get one of the loser teachers schools now have to hire to fill the void.

19

Preview, dammit…

Discipline != expelling, and “expelling” != kicking a kid out of every school for life. In some cases, Johnny getting the boot from PS #25 might give him and/or his parents a needed kick in the ass, and he’ll do better in PS #26. Certainly the real possibility of it would give some teeth to otherwise empty threats.

20

Again; sorry, but I simply don’t buy someone’s anecdotes. I could just as easily tell you about all the terrific high school teachers I had and how my university professors were a pretty mediocre bunch of instructors, with a few being good but most being bad.

Unless you have actual evidence that there’s a problem with bad teaching skills, there’s no reason to believe we need to change the qualifications.