Last Friday and Saturday we reviewed the Democratic Candidates plans for Higher Education. A few of them, particularly Representative Dick Gephardt have proposed a program where some get their education payed for in return for teaching a few years after college. I passed along the proposal to a friend of mine, Conrad, who is an education major, and this was his response.
"Although I think that Teacher Corps sounds like an excellent idea and I would personally support such an initiative, I think that it is yet another band-aid fix that is supposed to help a problem (teacher shortage) that is really only a superficial symptom of the cancer that festers underneath the surface of American education.
There are several factors contributing to the rotten core of American education, and most of them are firmly entrenched in the system as legacies from the country's entire educational history.
One: Teaching is "women's work." As progressive as we like to pretend we are, and as much as we call teachers our heroes and bandy about how noble the profession is, in the end, like so much of what we hear /say / think / believe, it is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Historically, in the American collective consciousness "teacher" is a job for one of two kinds of people: first, the old maid, a matron too ugly or with her head too filled with book-learning to ever find a decent husband. She lives alone or with her parents and she always will, so she doesn't need a large income, just enough to get by. Second (and this is sadly the more progressive of the two), the housewife who takes a job outside the home but one where she only has to work when the kids are in school themselves. Her income is only a supplement to her husband's, so she also doesn't really need a large salary. Consequently, men avoid teaching like the plague (especially grade school) and women with a lot of potential would rather prove themselves in the competitive world (business, technology, all of those high-paying jobs that used to be and all too often still are reserved for men). Thus in many cases the stereotype becomes the reality.
Two: Ironically, probably as a result of increasing post-WW2 opportunities for higher education coupled with serious degree inflation, Americans DO NOT value education. Again, we say we do, but it too is all sound and fury. What we value is the degree or the diploma. In our society we set a great deal of store by certificates, certifications, diplomas, and degrees as a way to move up in the world both concretely (increased job opportunities, higher pay) and in the slightly more abstract (prestige). What we do not set much store by at all is the education itself. In American society, learning is merely a means to an end. Look at the commercials that exhort kids to stay in school. "Stay in school so you can get a good job." "Stay in school to get somewhere in life." They never say "stay in school so you can become more wise" or "stay in school so that you can be smarter." That attitude then is reflected in curriculum. Classes we take in school are something to be endured, not somewhere to learn. Nonprofit educational organizations decry the American ignorance toward history and geography, and foreign countries mock us for our general inability to speak anything but our native language. Hey, almost every high school requires social studies and foreign language classes for graduation. Everyone who graduates high school (and these days that's most everyone) had to take and pass those classes, yet mysteriously learned nothing. This problem persists all through college/university, at least on the undergraduate level. I imagine and hope (probably idealistically and naively) that it sort of goes away after that, but I don't really know from experience.
Three: teaching means working for the government, which mostly means not making very much money. In the military, this is to a degree offset by the many benefits offered (BAH/Housing, base living, Tricare, money for education, etc.). In most other government work, it is not. I name this point more for completeness's sake to round out my argument, but I don't know how much can actually be done about it.
The result of these is that there are very few quality candidates for teaching careers who want to pursue them, especially when compared (again) to the worlds of business and technology. Preservice teachers are absolutely not the best and brightest of their generation because 1. teaching is seen as a job for people who are not really ambitious, don't have a lot of potential, and don't really need a lot of money, 2. education is generally not seen as important in and of itself but as a necessary evil, a means to an end, and 3., the bottom line, education in most cases pays incredibly low wages and doesn't have enough benefits to counterbalance them. Look at any college or university, and if you compare averages I would make a high wager that the students in the college of education have the lowest test scores, the lowest GPA (not counting cake-walk COE courses), and the lowest standards of academic excellence.
What rising star with a lot of talent, a lot of ambition, and a lot of potential, a lot of opportunities is going to pick teaching, a career that is not respected and gets paid diddly-squat? Only the rare student like me who is somehow other-motivated, and we're really few and far between.
Also, the system is self-perpetuating. Future teachers see their own education as merely a means to an end, a set of hoops they have to jump through to get into their career and thus they come out of college with nearly no content area knowledge and astoundingly little pedagogical skills/understanding. They don't know what to teach and they wouldn't know how to teach it even if they did.
There's this unspoken idea pervasive among preservice teachers that what really matters is caring about children and wanting to help mold and shape them into citizens of tomorrow. I say that without content and pedagogial knowledge, caring only qualifies you to be a child care provider, no matter what sort of degree you have.
Everyone knows about this problem with low-quality teachers and teaching, so what do we do? We mandate more coursework, recertification and such, which doesn't help any more than the coursework did the first time around. Or we start holding teachers "accountable," checking to make sure their performance meets some sort of state-mandated standard. I predict that the latter approach, which is an increasingly popular political stance towards education, will only make the problem worse. Cracking down on current teachers itself won't increase the quality of teachers. All it will do is create one more deterrent to becoming a teacher in the first place. Not only will it (as it is currently) require a lot of education and pay next to nothing while not being respected really at all, but on top of that it will be tightly regulated
with the likelihood of being fired if your performance (or worse, the performance of your students) ever dips sub-par. Who the heck wants that kind of job? I'd start reconsidering.
Teacher Corps would in all probability just make college a little easier for the people who already are going to be teachers. While I support this (but then again I support a European-style educational system where college is free for everyone but only really necessary for a few), I do not think it will on the whole improve America's teachers and/or teaching, and while it may recruit some new teachers, I seriously doubt it will recruit very many of the high-quality applicants that we need to start seeing if education in our country is ever going to change."
Anyway well worth thinking about.
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