Every person in America wants every child in America to have a terrific teacher every year. That much we can assume. Why, then, is it so hard to craft sound policies yielding that universally sought result? Excellent question. My answer is that we've made ten basic mistakes:
- Out of deference to adult preferences rather than what's best for children, we've opted for quantity rather than quality, for hiring more teachers instead of demanding (and paying for) better ones. NEA data show that, for every 20 additional students enrolled in American K-8 schools over the last 10 years, we hired three more elementary school classroom teachers. Take a longer view and the numbers astound: between 1955 and 2000, the number of K-12 teachers in the U.S. almost tripled while enrollments rose by half. Instead of paying a smaller number of people more money, we opted to pay lots more teachers a more-or-less constant wage. We surely could have found ways to place better educated and better compensated instructors in our classrooms if we hadn't set out to hire so many millions of them. Why did we do that? There's a provocative economist's theory about changing labor markets, particularly for high-ability women (see, for example, Darius Lakdawalla's terrific piece in Education Next.) But there's also a simpler explanation: notwithstanding ambiguous evidence as to its efficacy, both teachers and parents tend to favor smaller classes. So classes keep shrinking - and that means hiring more teachers, able or no.
- We use paper credentials as the gauge of who will be allowed to teach, rather than demanding evidence of subject-matter knowledge and/or the ability to handle a classroom. And we entrust control of entry to universities, many of which do no real screening for individual aptitude, energy, or knowledge and almost all of which have an unquenchable self-interest in accepting large numbers of people into their teacher-credentialing programs. To be sure, any profession demands certain credentials, but they usually stand for some knowledge gained or skill acquired. In K-12 education, we count beans: tallying courses taken and hours spent in class while exhibiting alarming indifference to ability or knowledge.
- We sorely underestimate the importance of attracting intellectual talent into the profession, excusing this failure by saying there's more to teaching than being smart. That's true to a point, but doesn't mean we oughtn't do our utmost to shape policies that draw exceptional people into the classroom, if only as short-termers. No other profession is as disdainful of academic performance - and what could be more ironic for a profession charged with educating people? Yet because ed schools and teacher prep programs are money makers for universities, we let them enroll weak students who would likely struggle with tougher courses. Is that really who we want teaching our kids?
- In the name of fostering diversity in the teaching ranks, we avoid noticing the dire quality of many preparation programs that enroll lots of minority students. That oversight perpetuates a devastating cycle of underperformance and keeps the learning gap wide at the very time we should be directing at least as much energy to closing it for teachers as we're now doing for primary-secondary pupils.
- Given higher education's stranglehold over teacher preparation these many decades, one might suppose that by now the preparation process would rest on a bounteous and sturdy research base. Wrong. Our understanding of the sources and attributes of teachers' classroom effectiveness sits upon a stunningly weak foundation, which in turn cripples efforts to improve teacher identification, preparation, and evaluation. Worse, where we have robust evidence as to what makes teachers effective (e.g. in beginning reading), our campuses often shun or deprecate it. (If medical training were similar, doctors would still swear by leeches and mustard plasters.)
- We pay (and treat) teachers uniformly rather than distinguishing among them on the basis of (among other things) effectiveness, specialty, and work environment. And when we evaluate them at all, we base it on peer and supervisor impressions of their work rather than evidence of the value they add to children or the results they produce in class.
- We don't do any quality control, except via paper credentials at the point of entry, and we make it extremely difficult to move (much less remove) bad teachers or reward good ones. We confer tenure on teachers prematurely and automatically, linking it to time on the job rather than effectiveness. Then we hold it inviolate.
- We treat teaching's "short-termers" as system failures rather than human assets. Public education's personnel norms still assume that a person should spend his/her entire career in the classroom, notwithstanding evidence that today's young people in every field are career hoppers. In other words, a system designed for the "lifers" of our parents' generation has not been updated. (Hence we also have no proper career path for long-termers except out of the classroom and into administration.)
- We don't make key teacher hiring, assignment and retention decisions where they should be made - at the building level - even though that's where critical judgments can be made about a person's suitability for teaching specific content to particular children. Nearly everything about a teacher that's important and that cannot be gauged through objective means is best gauged by that teacher's future colleagues and immediate superiors. Yet we deploy teachers to schools via downtown personnel offices that are constrained by union contracts, seniority, tenure, and state credentialing. Worse, school principals who ought to demand full personnel authority often decline to do so, seemingly preferring the impersonal safety of having someone else make these decisions.
- Instead of better salaries, we spend top dollar for generous benefits but often in dysfunctional ways, such as not letting teacher pensions be portable. Rather than paying teachers better and letting them control their own benefits and shape their own pensions, we allocate huge percentages of school budgets for old-fashioned retirement systems that relatively few teachers ever benefit from.
Are these errors fixable? I don't know. But I'm sure that the starting place is to recognize mistakes we're making now - and have made for so long that we take them for granted rather than as problems searching for solutions.
