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Why The Teacher Crisis is Worse Than You Think (And What Can Be Done About It)

An Interview with the Authors of Who's Teaching Your Children?

Who's Teaching Your Children?, a new book by HGSE lecturer Katherine Boles (co-authored by Vivian Trn), contends that teaching in America has deteriorated for decades to reach a low point unmatched since the era of the one-room schoolhouse"”despite billions of dollars spent on school reform efforts and millions more spent to recruit bodies to teach in U.S. classsrooms. In this interview, Boles and Trn explore the depth of the education crisis and some proposed solutions.

Q: How do you suggest attracting stronger candidates to the teaching profession? How can these teachers be retained?

A:In order to attract better candidates to the teaching profession, we must professionalize the job of the teacher. We must establish a real career ladder for the individuals who enter teaching.

The question of how to retain people once they have become teachers is a difficult one, but we don't believe it's just a question of retention or recruitment. It's about the nature of the job as a career. Teaching is a flat career where the job description on the first day is exactly the same as the description on the last day. This allows schools to justify placing young people into classrooms to do the same job that other teachers have been doing for thirty years. One of the major problems of the teaching career is the fact that there is no structure of professional growth; there is no visible career ladder. We need to give teachers the chance to get good at what they do. There are few opportunities for advancement other than to leave teaching. In far too many schools, there is virtually no support for new teachers and no opportunity to be mentored effectively.

Some would say that teachers leave for better financial opportunities, but we don't believe the difficulties of teacher retention result from concerns about money. No one who enters teaching thinks that he or she is going to make a lot of money. Most young teachers enter teaching for all the right reasons: they want to change the world, and they want to have a positive effect on children. But because they find, after they enter the classroom, that they get little or no supervision, no meaningful professional growth, no opportunities to discuss or improve their practice with other teachers, many become discouraged about their own effectiveness, and leave. About half of all new teachers leave within the first five years.

Q: How can teacher-training programs be made more useful? What can be done to improve ongoing professional development for teachers?

"Teaching is a flat career where the job description on the first day is exactly the same as the description on the last day."

A: Teacher education programs around the country are caught in a bind. They have to fill their seats in order to run programs that are economically viable. If their standards for admission are set too high, they won't be able to fill the seats they have. This problem affects the selection and quality of the candidates in most of the nation's teacher education programs.

Another problem is that teacher education programs rarely form effective collaborations with local schools. This separates the learning that gs on in these programs from the real world of teaching. We are advocates of professional development schools, which build strong ongoing collaborations between universities and local schools.

Teacher education programs need to consider the real lives of teachers and the actual work involved in doing the job well when they design preparation programs. Novice teachers are the first to understand when they are not doing the job well. They usually have to live with that realization privately and alone. For example, many elementary school teachers have not had courses that equip them to help children who have a harder time learning to read. Every day they face the limitations of their own training but there's almost nothing they can do about it, except to go to work each day and "try their best" alone with the children whose needs the teacher knows she is not meeting. A reorganization of our school structure could allow chief instructors, or head teachers, to help novice teachers acquire the skills they need to do the job well. In the long run, this makes sense and is more economically sound that pouring money into short in-service courses that are very limited in relation to what novice teachers know they need.

Q: What changes are necessary to better the position of teachers in the educational power hierarchy? How can good teachers be recognized and sought out for input/advice?

"Novice teachers are the first to understand when they are not doing the job well. They usually have to live with that realization privately and alone."

A: We believe that we have to change the professional structure of our schools by creating a career ladder within teaching in order to attract and maintain good teachers. This career ladder would begin with a novice or associate teacher who teaches a partial day under the guidance of a professional teacher using the same curriculum. This is contrary to the common belief that teachers should always decide what to teach and how to teach it. New teachers have their hands full with implementing a curriculum. It is foolish to expect every new teacher to invent every best method from scratch. It is fine for these new teachers to use the same material as other teachers. Working with a more experienced teacher will provide novice teachers with mentoring that is focused on the real tasks of effective teaching, and the mentoring will be more applicable if the teachers can discuss particular aspects of a shared curriculum.

There are several additional elements in our proposed Millennium School, corresponding with the range of levels of teaching experience. All teachers will teach in teams with a range of teaching expertise present in each team. This range will provide the opportunity for the expert teacher to share her knowledge with novice teachers more effectively, and it will give the novice teachers the opportunity to learn from veteran teachers. The role of chief instructor will represent an appropriate career goal for the most effective, experienced teachers who have demonstrated their knowledge of effective instruction and their ability to work with novice teachers. Chief instructors will be responsible for managing the teams of teachers.

Finally, the Millennium School principal can become a genuine leader of leaders, responsible for providing instructional guidance and coherence to the enterprise as a whole, rather than for maintaining the building, dealing with the union, and making sure the buses run on time. The majority of these duties will be passed to a facilities manager.

In our Millennium School, prospective teachers can begin to see teaching as a career with opportunities for change and growth.

"New teachers have their hands full with implementing a curriculum. It is foolish to expect every new teacher to invent every best method from scratch. "

Q: What other practices and/or beliefs need to change in order for the teaching profession to improve?

A: There is a destructive, egalitarian notion that all teachers must always be equal. If any teacher ds something deemed to be special, other teachers feel resentful because their sense of equality is disrupted.

But all parents and most children know that some teachers are better than others. Teachers don't usually acknowledge that, at least not publicly. They often pretend that there are no differences in teaching quality, that no professional knowledge has been acquired by more experienced teachers. This egalitarian culture of the elementary school is such that veteran teachers do not feel that they can or should offer advice to new teachers. There is no structure for the development, articulation, or expansion of effective professional practice. But teachers can and should learn from each other. We all must realize that teaching has a knowledge base, and that teaching constitutes a professional practice that can be improved.

Q: What are your goals for Who's Teaching Your Children? Who can learn the most from this book?

A: The book is designed to address a wide audience of people who want to learn more about what teaching in elementary schools is really like. Parents should know more about what happens in their children's schools. Policymakers need to realize and take seriously the truth that the most important resource in education is a high-quality teacher. Schools need advice on how to provide useful support for new teachers and how to structure teamwork in order to better recognize, and utilize, the expertise of individual teachers. Teacher education students should read our book so that they can prepare themselves for becoming change agents in their schools.

We hope that many, many teachers will read our book. Teachers are often isolated in the classroom, left without a way of discovering that many other teachers are having experiences that are identical to their own. We want to expose this sort of isolation as something that has been going on for two hundred years. We, as teachers, need to know the history of our profession, or we are destined to repeat it. We need to know our history in order to effectively address the changes that need to be made. The strength of this book is its capacity to offer an unvarnished truth of how the culture of schools and the culture of teaching defeat education reforms. In order to improve our schools, we need to change the culture of teaching.

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