Back to School Blues
The collective groan heard across America this morning came from America’s most disgruntled group of workers: public school teachers. I’ve never been to jail, but trust me when I tell you that Day 1 of a 180-day school year can feel like the first day of a life sentence.
Fortunately, my post-Labor Day blues are gone forever. I’m officially an ex-teacher now, and statistics reveal than I’m far from alone. A recently published article in the New York Times cites the most recent findings of the Department of Education. In the 2003-4 school year, 269,000 of the country’s 3.2 million public school teachers, or 8.4 percent, called it quits. A desire to pursue another career and dissatisfaction were the reasons 56 percent of these teachers put down the red pen (or purple for those who worked in school districts where red ink is deemed to be too demoralizing) forever. The Times also notes that new teachers often leave because they feel overwhelmed by classroom stress–a result of chaotic, last-minute hiring practices.
This is exactly how my teaching career got started. After graduating from the University of California system with a degree in economics and no clue what I wanted to do with my life, I figured I’d give teaching a try. So I went down to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s main office to fill out the necessary paperwork to become an elementary school teacher. After being sent from one department to the next on multiple visits (if you aren’t familiar with the inefficiency of government bureaucracy, just rent Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru“), I was finally ready to mold the minds of the next generation.
I’ll never forget the gentleman from Human Resources who set up the first and only interview I’d have at a school in one of the rougher parts of Los Angeles. I overheard him tell his colleague that I would “definitely get the position” because of where the school was located. In retrospect, I can translate what he meant: Nobody wanted to teach at this inner city school; thus, the principal was starving for teachers.
But since I was starving for a job, I missed all the clues that suggested this one probably wasn’t right for me. A ten-minute lesson delivered to the gifted 5th grade class was enough to convince the principal that I could take over the lowest level and worst-behaved 5th grade class a couple of weeks into the school year.
To make a long story short, I got eaten alive that year. My classroom management skills were horrible, and I received very little support from the administration. My students thought I was the nicest teacher in the world, when my goal on most days was to be the most intimidating. As a result, much of my teaching hours were spent dealing with behavior problems: In between phonics lessons, I would break up fistfights and have doors slammed in my face. The afternoon bell, alas, could never come soon enough.
While the challenges I had with discipline that year undoubtedly led me down the road to becoming a substitute teacher and eventually quitting, there are many more serious problems with public education that made me (and so many others) eager to exit the world of teaching.
Any discussion of educational reform must begin with the absurdity of teacher credentialing. Is there any reason, for example, why a college graduate with a degree in mathematics and a passion for teaching shouldn’t be able to teach 8th grade geometry without a credential? Or, in my case, why I needed to learn about educational theory in order to teach American history to 5th graders? I was hired with an emergency credential, which required me to enroll in a credentialing program if I wanted to renew my contract.
I never enrolled. Taking classes at night or during the weekends (and paying for them) was the last thing in the world I wanted to do after a draining day or week in the classroom. And even if I had enrolled, I probably wouldn’t have come away with much useful information anyway. Jay P. Green, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, has revealed how education degrees are not linked to classroom success. He notes a study conducted by the Abell Foundation, which found that out of 171 available studies on the impact of teaching credentials on job performance, “only nine uncovered any significant positive relationship…[and] five found a significant negative relationship.”
The negative relationship shouldn’t be surprising. Most credentialing programs are far more interested in teaching teachers how to become multiculturally sensitive than providing them with the tools necessary to make sure students learn how to read. Mike Piscal, founder of some of the most successful charter schools in Los Angeles, has commented on the fact that “training is almost always detached from the reality of the classroom.” Writing on the Huffington Post a while back, he explained that at his schools “a teacher needs only a scholar’s zeal for the subject s/he studied in college, and a burning desire to lead the next generation.” Interestingly, I contacted Piscal, my 8th grade basketball coach, by email during my first year of teaching. He told me I should come down to his school to interview one day. Although I never made it in, I often wonder if things might have turned out differently for me had I been hired at one of his schools, where everything from “lesson planning to classroom management, from discipline to communicating with parents” is taught by master teachers.
My paycheck being too small was not one of reasons I quit teaching. Contrary to the laments of so many teachers, the pay really isn’t all that bad. Indeed, this is another misconception that Jay Greene has thoroughly dispelled. The average teacher makes about $45,000 a year, or rather, three-quarters of a year. The fact is that teachers only have to work about nine months per year because they get summers off. After taking into account that teachers average 7.3 working hours per day, and that they work 180 days per year, Greene found that “the average teacher gets paid a base salary equivalent to a fulltime salary of $65.440.”
Yes, I know all about the amount of work teachers have to do at home. But guess what? All professionals have work to take home. Moreover, because job security for teachers is so strong (it’s almost impossible to fire a teacher), they have less incentive to work extra hours.
I actually believe it’s this lack of incentive to work harder that really depresses so many teachers, even if they don’t want to admit it. It is human nature to want to be rewarded for a job well done. But because teachers are paid on a seniority-based schedule, the worst teachers are often paid better than the best ones.
Merit pay is the obvious answer to such a problem. Daniel Henninger wrote a must-read account in the Wall Street Journal of the performance pay program at the Meadowcliff Elementary School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the first year of the program, the Stanford achievement scores of the school’s students (80 % of whom are black) rose 17 percent. Writes Henninger: “Little Rock has to find a way to hold its best teachers. The teachers I saw at Meadowcliff Elementary seemed pretty happy to be there.”
Which brings to mind the question: What, god forbid, would become of teachers’ unions if they were made up of happy teachers?
Aaron Hanscom is a Los Angeles-based editor for PJ Media; his own blog is Scribblings.
Your article states many valid points. I do have to point out in your salary comparisons that you are assuming that a teacher would be able to find employment for the 2 1/2 months of summer that would equal the difference between $45,000 and $65,000. Having taught yourself I am sure you realize this is unrealistic.
I disagree with a lot of what you said, I don’t think any of the teachers I’ve come across recently deserve any type of merit pay. They make their “curriculum” once and reuse it year after year. Last year my son came home with several typewritten coloring sheets. Is it safe to assume that these people educating my children don’t have access to a computer?
I have some experience teaching, in Japan and teacher’s assistant in Miami and I’m proud to say I helped develop new materials for the kids. The teacher’s I worked with were thinking outside the box and developing things that would stimulate the children. As you said, there was little to no direction from school admin so we were free to develop what we wanted.
I also disagree about the credentials, I think it is VERY important for teachers to have practical experience in the class environments they will be teaching in. If a prospective teacher is thinking they’re going to walk in like Mr. Kotter or Michelle Pfeiffer (Dangerous Minds) and everything will work out that is totally unrealistic – things may not turn out so rewarding.
As far as the discipline, it’s true, my lousiest teachers were ill prepared to deal with the lack of respect they encountered. Earning and demanding respect are a big part teaching, parenting and life in general.
May I suggest two more factors for the high attrition rate amongst teachers? One might have something to do with your last article at PJM – the specter of perpetual emotional adolescence in the current generation. The psychologically-adolescent adult will be utterly incapacitated to lead, inspire, or direct a class of other adolescents, even of elementary age children. Young people quickly detect immaturity in the teacher and will proceed to make mayhem of their efforts. These types of teachers will usually opt for two reations – either letting the class go to pot and claiming that they have an “open style” of teaching, or they will consistently blame the students, making an “example” out of one or two of leader-type of student.
The other factor has to do with another general pox on our “progressive” society -the post-modern worldview foisted upon prospective teachers in most universities, especially in the humanities area, not to speak of in the general media. The teacher who buys into this Nietzschean philosophy which says there is no truth, nor right or wrong, no real authority, will find himself completely hamstrung, mentally and emotionally, as to leading a group of young people already affected by the same weakness.
Sounds to me like the teaching world has lost one of it’s best members. I think merit pay is absolutey the way forward and it’s a shame that the current status of things is sending so many wonderful teachers into disillusionment.
There are so many things that contribute to making education in America a failure that it is hard to place the blame. Lack of parental support is big, teacher laziness upon tenure is another, a total lack of common sense (zero tolerance)in administration another. But probably most critical is the fallacious concept of teacher accreditation and the idiocy taught in schools of education at American universities, followed closely by the disgusting self service of the teacher unions. Elimination of these last two would begin the required total reconstruction needed to make any impact on what has truly become one sorry institution.
Count me as another ex-public school teacher. I substituted for two years (which taught me how to manage a classroom–sink or swim) then I taught full time for two years on an emergency credential. I hated my credential classes. Too much money for nothing practically useful. As junior member of the English department at my middle school, I consistently took the worst behaved students and did well with most of them. I took the language learners and the troublemakers. (Not coincidentally my classes were usually two-thirds to three-quarters male.) As a 24-year-old woman, this was challenging but not unsatisfactory. I loved my students, but became disillusioned with the district and the system. When I was laid off in budget cuts when older, but far more useless, teachers in the school had tenure, I decided that the public schools were not for me and I would never send my children to them.
At thirty, I am a homemaker who is looking forward to homeschooling my own son and any other children I have. I know I will do a great job and my son will never have to suffer the educational consequences of union politics and government beaurocracy.
A teacher’s compensation on a relative basis is low. A teacher’s compensation relative to what a typical teacher contributes to society is low. Until this changes, which it wont, the ability of that niche of society to retain talented people will be nil. Of course, teaching is not the only profession that is underpaid and has high turnover.
There is certainly a disconnect between the idealized version of a teacher and what a student usually ends up with in the public school system. I remember high school being filled with mediocre to lousy teachers who very obviously couldn’t wait for the dismissal bell. I’ve always wondered why that was; why would a teacher, who’s supposed to be caring and helpful, seem so fed up? Well, for all of the reasons mentioned in the article. I used to be a prison guard and I feel like some of the same things were happening to me. You get hired and they tell you how you’re going to be helping people and doing great things, but when you get there you find that you don’t have the support or resources to make a difference. The support I got were from senior officers, who’d been there so long they couldn’t get fired and therefore didn’t offer much in the way of help. I’m not surprised new teachers get the same result.
Taking a few credentialing programs doesn’t make you a teacher. A freelance personal tutor doesn’t have to take classes in ‘diversity’ and whatnot, but they provide some of the best opportunities for learning. Often times they’re enthusiastic kids right out of college.
And I’ve always thought the constant complaint over pay was phony, thanks for the heads up on that!
I substituted for two years as well. I had one long term stint in an 11th grade U.S. History class. HELL ON EARTH! My credentialing in no way prepared me for this. Think I’ll give it another shot though. A little older a little wiser, no?
Now quit whinning this instant!