Is the Rhetoric of Reform Turning People Off of Teaching?
If you're considering a teaching career, review the following job description:
- You must have missionary zeal. This job isn't just work. It's a calling that demands self sacrifice.
- You should expect to outlive your usefulness in five or ten years. You'll end up being a drag on this system unless someone can figure out how to freeze your salary after you hit thirty-five or forty--and someone might just do that.
So--are you in?
Yes, that job description is absurd, and no, things haven't reached that point. But the current rhetoric of school reform tends to reinforce that vision of the teaching profession. And that sort of rhetoric can taint reality if it makes teaching seem less viable as a long-term career.
I don't mean to argue that we shouldn't debate issues such as accountability and teacher pay. But let's not forget the effect of our words on how people view the profession. For years, teachers were in a sense paid in good will rather than money or status. If the bad teacher becomes the poster child for all teachers, then the profession may have a good deal less allure. Alarmist headlines like "The Problem with Education Is Teachers" (Newsweek) will alienate good and bad alike. The growing tendency to describe older teachers as expensive deadwood may prompt young people to see teaching as a brief pit stop on the way to a "real" career.
Some might argue that Teach for America (TFA) is making teaching cool again, but I'm not sure that all or even most teachers' stock will rise as a result. The TFA brand is certainly strong, but it's not clear that most teachers can bathe in the reflected light of their TFA colleagues. Too often, pundits use TFA teachers as a foil for all other teachers. If you're not entering the profession through the TFA door, your status may suffer.
Again, the rhetoric concerns me at least as much as the reality. I admire TFA teachers, so much so that I hired a TFA alumna. The program has a lot to teach us. But pundits have to consider how they use TFA when they make broad claims about the teaching profession.
And I'm at least as concerned by what's missing from the common rhetoric of school reform. Why can't pundits say more about the support teachers need to succeed, the climate they need to thrive, the career opportunities they need to grow, and the respect they need to maintain their sanity? Pundits who write about such things needn't go soft on issues like accountability or evaluation.
But a little shift in the rhetoric could go a long way.
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I have a pretty different
I have a pretty different look at the teaching profession as someone who really wanted to teach and then changed gear to work on education policy.
Right now, the professional looks like:
There are plenty of things right now that are keeping folks out that reformers are pushing to change. I would be happy to have a more complete career ladder, merit pay, more opportunities for feedback, a more flexible 401K/403(b)/whatever that can transfer with me when I change jobs, increased opportunity for collaboration, etc.
Missionary zeal is exactly what draws people to teaching. Outliving our usefulness, I think, is something my generation is coming to expect and want. Maybe my experience is limited, but most college educated folks I know have long adjusted to the reality and expectation that they will drastically change professions a couple of times. If not drastically change professions, than expect that they will drastically change roles in the work place. None of us want to or expect to be doing the same things but just better in the near future.
I'm curious what other folks in their early 20s think.
Hi, Jason-- Now I'm not in my
Hi, Jason--
Now I'm not in my early 20s, but I'm not sure it's a very good idea to convince people in a job like teaching that they will outlive their usefulness. You may well be right that many young people expect to change jobs more frequently--certainly than the baby boomers did. But bear in mind that there are some five million teachers out there. Some people have suggested that we should structure the profession to encourage people to leave the profession after 5 years or so. (I blogged on that today.) So that would give us a 20% attrition rate and create demand for 1 million new teachers each year. Even if reformers' calls for a leaner teaching force were in effect, we'd still have huge demand for new teachers. With huge demand and limited supply, how do we ensure that we have the best teachers in our classrooms?
it's true that people change jobs frequently, but how frequently do they change professions, and how feasible is that from an HR standpoint in a profession that employs as many people as education does? (There are about 1 million doctors out there, but what percentage of doctors leaves their practice each year? What percentage of lawyers?) It strikes me that we need a more fuller conversation about the kinds of teachers we need, the numbers of teachers we need, and where they're going to come from.
On your point regarding opportunities for advancement: I'm with you 100%. I'd like to see much more conversation on that point.
Jason - It takes YEARS to
Jason - It takes YEARS to grow a great teacher. Yes, I've seen TFA (and The New Teacher Project, which gets less press and operates in a much stronger way, developing teachers who have the skills and stamina to stay IN the field and become leaders, drawing not just from recent college grads, but also from people who have had another career and now are ready to commit to teaching). Sorry for the digression; anyway,I've seen TFA and TNTP (and several Ed. Depts) BEGIN to grow great teachers...but it is several years before those teachers hit their stride. There are several studies documenting this, but consider anything that you are learning to do - it takes practice to do it well. Managing a classroom, adjusting to a variety of students' needs, and finding increasingly effective ways to present material so that students retain it...these take practice, and your "5 year plan" would have teachers leaving just as they get good at it!
Perhaps my age and experience categorize me as "deadwood" (year 33 this Sept), but my energy, enthusiasm, passion, and dedication rival that of many, many new teachers - I'm in it for the students I teach. And I can't think of a more meaningful way to spend my life. (Honest!)
I just wanted to make it
I just wanted to make it clear that I said nothing about how long we should keep teachers around, etc, just that most people I know don't want to be doing the same thing for 30 years the way you have. It's super admirable and I'm sure you're stellar at your job, but the concept of having a "single career" like that is, I believe, a lot more foreign to my generation and keeps people out of teaching.
TFA just removes some of those barriers for two years, but I think more TFA folk would stick around if some of the issues I outlined were not there.
Thanks for your update - and
Thanks for your update - and i absolutely agree...the barriers to teachers staying, and to people choosing to teach are quite ridiculous, serving neither our students nor our teachers with respect. Everyone needs to be able to grow in their work, and, unfortunately, the current system does not encourage that unless you are very self-motivated. And, yes, at times, one wonders.."Why am i working so hard?"
I've seen labor economics
I've seen labor economics statistics that show that teaching is one of the most stable professions out there--the least attrition over time and more people doing essentially the same thing 10 and 15 years out than these other groups.
As for the comparison to lawyers and doctors specifically-- I think this is a comparison that is currently unfair and unearned, though I wish our teachers, their "professional organizations" (quotes because the function of bar associations and the AMA are quite different from the NEA or AFT), and their training reflected the expectations we place on the legal and medical field more closely. That being said, there are many people with law degrees who have, but no longer, practice law and work in every place from Deputy Commissioner of state education agencies to leaders of non-profit organizations to lobbyists. There's quite a bit of people who change spots with a JD from year to year. I imagine the number of people who stay with the same firm essentially their entire law career is VERY low.
It's not about kicking people out, though, it's about how we set up incentives. Right now most contracts place significant financial incentives on the back end of teaching, sometimes as much as 18 to 20 years into service. Rather than providing a significant compensation benefit to sticking around for, what should be, uncommonly long service, we should pay teachers more earlier on to attract more highly qualified folks into the profession, then incentivize them to stay long enough to get good at it. You should be hitting top pay when you hit top productivity, not years and years down the line so that people that might otherwise leave the profession stay for those crazy incoming benefits.
This was a big issue for me growing up-- I had quite a few teachers who had absurd retirement benefits coming their way if they stuck it out long enough. Many of these teachers were males who entered teaching after college to avoid Vietnam. Some of these guys were great teachers, some were not so great. Almost none of them wanted to be teachers, but all of them felt the need to stick it out so they got their benefits. Having teachers in their last few years with this kind of mindset was a big issue-- I gained a lot more from their younger, more engaged colleagues. A few of these teachers I keep in touch with an all of them were able to find jobs at 55-60 that paid well, while collecting on their big penchants, that made them much happier.
I don't see how teachers whose experience is not making them better educators are well served by producing such a big carrot at the end of their careers that they stick around a lot longer than they want to.
What's the right balance? I'm not sure. But the notion that we should pay a pretty hefty increase to folks that's not based on CPI but some conception that they are higher productivity workers makes sense so long as they actually are higher productivity workers.
I think folks forget that seniority is the original merit pay-- it was objective and everyone seemed to agree on it from a common sense level. Except now we have the data, and the idea that seniority is a decent proxy for merit in teaching has been hacked up pretty good. So should we keep a system like that?
Jason, your take on things is
Jason, your take on things is decidedly more measured than what I've been hearing out there. But even then, I challenge you to consider the numbers. If we want to focus on teachers at the height of their productivity as measured in value-added scores, then we're focusing on teachers 3-5 years into their careers. Not many teachers will be getting much higher value-added scores 25 years later, because that's hardly feasible. (Should 30-year veterans give their kids 10 years worth of growth?)
So if you focus on a relatively narrow age band, you've just drastically reduced the supply of teachers. That just doesn't seem realistic, especially if we want the best of the best.
As for lawyers--sure, they switch jobs all the time, but do they leave the profession as a whole? I know quite a few lawyers, most of whom have changed jobs. Not one has stopped working as a lawyer. That goes for doctors as well. Teachers may change schools, but many reformers out there are suggesting that they should leave the profession after their students' value added scores level off. And don't forget--we need about 1 million lawyers. We need at least four times as many teachers. This is--among other things--a numbers game, and those who imagine most teachers bowing out of the profession before they hit 35 or 40 don't seem to take that into account.
And I think many experienced teachers bring much more than higher and higher value-aded scores each year. (Let me refer you to Mr. Brown's comment on my posting, "Is Teaching a Young Person's Game?" He explains this well.)
I agree with you that the career trajectory of teachers is currently no trajectory at all. Many teachers would thrive if there were real career pathways within the profession. I'm not arguing for the status quo. But I do think much of the current rhetoric is painting older teachers as ineffective full stop, and those kinds of words can have damaging consequences. So I don't support the status quo, but people have to be mindful of their rhetoric and impact it can have on perceptions of the profession.
I know of a lot of teachers,
I know of a lot of teachers, my wife and myself included, who are not necessarily forbidding their own children from going into teaching, but we aren't encouraging it, either. Teaching has simply gotten to be too stressful, and too much about all the wrong things. My chief incentive used to be my freedom to be creative in the classroom, which I am holding onto tenaciously. But that freedom is more and more threatened by a culture that wants drones, not teachers.
A 20-something entering the profession who I talked to recently said she had interviewed at a school that said, "If you have a lot of creative ideas coming in here, we don't really need that-- we just need you to follow the set curriculum that's been laid out for you." She didn't take that job.
It’s sad to see that aspiring
It’s sad to see that aspiring teachers are discouraged nowadays. I understand that teaching is not a lucrative profession and much of self-sacrifice but I’m still hoping that some students will pursue this noble profession called teaching. Thank you for the post. I truly appreciate your effort.
THE RHETORIC OF REFORM LEAVES
THE RHETORIC OF REFORM LEAVES TEACHERS ILL DEFINED - Oddly, There is a Legacy Fix.
The new administration’s role in the Accountability Movement seems to unwittingly shoot itself in the foot with teachers as the collateral damage on a Educational Reform beach that can not be taken without a strategic confrontation among the cross-purposed Allies & Suppliers who only appear to be marching under the same flag.
Teachers & Teacher Education programs need some serious self-reformation if they are ever to halt the control of their story and destiny by every kind of other professional from linguists to sociologists and even retired admirals. There are some great teachers, and even some great Teacher Preparation programs, but these are random occurrences where consistency is essential. The reason is simple: Professional Education is unnoticeably absent fundamental standards found in all other professions. Believe it or not, there is no standard curriculum, no sincere, systemic effort to identify Best Instructional Practices, no guidance in what and how needs to be further researched and developed, and truckloads of weak consultants and players with diluted degrees serving up their own brands of Faculty Development; teachers don’t resent change they resent the farce of the dog & pony shows by entertainers. To be called a profession it is imperative that a profession, one way or another, needs to convene a rolling forum to collect and prioritize the core content of principles and practices that every member ought to know. An honest Grammar of Teaching. Ironically, Teachers worldwide are being held to standards for annual yearly progress (AYP) of their students. Meanwhile, Professors, Learned Societies & commercial schools, and some painfully self-serving non-profit foundations and Universities never even address the fundamental need for solid pedagogic content. The current crop of in-charge “Leaders”& Reformers dangerously resembles the Investment Bankers who remain in charge of the economic systems that they nearly bankrupted. The US Department of Education should hold an ongoing “virtual convention” of the nation’s leading educators to consider and endorse a covenant of principles and more importantly prescriptive practices. Ideally this should be done on a website that transparently allows these to be challenged, tweaked and further specified for different age-grade-situational conditions. Sadly there is no free market in which a teacher can see bids & buys and the best ideas and practices.
While this very un-novel idea works its way through all that is crystallized to hold it in place, there is an action each caring person can take; consider joining the websites below offering a potential catalyst for jump-starting and getting the current system under review and possibly moving in the right direction for all who would teach, and let’s not forget all who need to learn – yes, students are invited to jump in and speak. They like gravity are a weak but all encompassing force; ultimately they trump our best thoughts and science. Taxpayers would be grateful since increasing classroom effectiveness could bring about efficiencies that could save billions of dollars with even the smallest degree of adoption. This is an orphan cause with no natural constituencies. Please join the narrative at: http://teacherprofessoraccountability.ning.com/main/invitation/new?xg_so... And…http://bestmethodsofinstruction.com/
Say anything, it will be something more than the nothing that continues to get us nowhere.
Anthony V. Manzo, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus avmanzo@aol.com
Posted by Anthony (Tony) V. Manzo at 5:21 PM
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Excellent post and excellent
Excellent post and excellent comments
Yes, the rhetoric has a
Yes, the rhetoric has a downside. While many aspects of education do need to be shaken up, communities also need to see that once the dust settles there will be a stable school with a fairly stable staff to send their children to. And while curriculum needs to become far more consistent across districts, since children are so mobile, to tell a prospective teacher that there will be no opportunity to develop her own ideas is horrifying. Constant turnover may be OK in the cutthroat world of consumer goods production, but it's not OK in institutions that serve developing children or impressionalbe teenagers.
Why is it if you want to be a
Why is it if you want to be a teacher you have to be an employee? What if teachers could write their own job description? Please take a look at this blog entry from Education Innovating and see if you can imagine the new profession of teaching
http://www.educationinnovating.org/2010/07/why-is-it-if-you-want-to-be-t...
As a middle school teacher
As a middle school teacher entering my sixth year, I've been given a lot of advice from my veteran colleagues about how to maintain longevity in the classroom. Sadly, at least half of this advice circles around the theme of doing less - not killing yourself over re-working lessons, not volunteering to coach, not serving in leadership roles, etc. While I understand the root of these sentiments may be self-preservation and care, I reject the premise that to remain in teaching, one must partially feed into the stereotype of the burned-out, frustrated, cog-in-the-system teacher.
I know how easy it is to become jaded by a system that doesn't always seem to be well-intentioned or efficient; however, I also know that I cannot change all of those factors. I do know that I can affect the image that I present of my profession. I can present a positive, professional voice and share that image with my students (our future teachers), their parents/guardians (my allies), my colleagues (my mentors), and our community (my support system).
This change may not lead to sweeping reforms of the education system, but it can create a culture of trust and collaboration - two elements that will build our profession from within and support teachers of all experience levels.
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