Teachers Want to Lead the Transformation of their Profession
“Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”Tuesday night President Barack Obama said what many teachers in America have been yearning to hear from their president: teachers matter, we change lives, and we do this hard work to make a difference in the lives of students.
– President Barack Obama, January 24, 2012, “State of the Union”
He also acknowledged what every good teacher knows: that an accountability system that puts too much emphasis on test scores undermines a well-rounded education. But implicit in his speech was a challenge to America and to teachers to rebuild and strengthen the profession – a challenge that teachers are more than eager to accept.
As 2011 U.S. Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellows, we have heard from many teachers that the field has lost its luster. In our role as Teaching Ambassadors, we have talked with teachers in many groups, and we have heard real despondency over the constraints of NCLB that have caused schools to focus on testing and teacher evaluation in ways that are oppressive and rob our profession of much of the joy of teaching and learning.
We’ve listened to countless stories about a law that has raised standards without providing support for schools to meet them. And we have cringed when some of our most effective colleagues acknowledged that they can no longer afford to stay in a difficult profession that asks so much of them but barely affords a middleclass lifestyle. “We didn’t get into teaching to be millionaires,” they say, “but we have to be able to feed our families.”
What we like about the President’s speech is not that he acknowledges our grievances though, admittedly, it feels good to be heard. What appeals to us is that the President understands that as a country we must do much more than simply tweak a structure that is not working. Educators want to lead the transformation and rebuilding of teaching so that our work improves students’ lives and restores pride in our profession.
Teachers welcome this transformation. Neither students nor teachers are served by a structure that treats some teachers like interchangeable cogs in a machine. We long to lead our own profession because when we drive our craft, we will see huge shifts in the responsibility, leadership, pay and respect. As NEA President Dennis Van Roekel describes in the NEA’s December 8, 2011 Action Agenda to Strengthen Teaching, “The true essence” of our work “is putting teachers in charge of the quality of their profession.”
What would teachers do if they ran the schools? We would raise the bar for membership in our profession, recruiting the best candidates and insisting that teacher preparation programs become more rigorous and relevant. About 62 percent of all new teachers—almost two-thirds—report they felt unprepared for the realities of their classroom. As Secretary Duncan has said, “Imagine what our country would do if 62 percent of our doctors felt unprepared to practice medicine—you would have a revolution in our medical schools.”
A transformed profession would give teachers much more responsibility and flexibility to make decisions that meet their students’ educational needs–allowing access to and training with technology, shifting class sizes, and restructuring the school day so that they have time to collaborate with colleagues and engage in professional learning and problem-solving.
We would offer teachers a professional salary and career pathways that acknowledge their skill and commitment in one of the most complex, demanding, and important jobs in the world. We would insist on great school leaders, with principals who have high expectations, develop all teachers as lifelong learners, and create positive school cultures where students and teachers succeed.
As the President acknowledged, teachers are creative and passionate. But like workers in many other professions, we expect to be held accountable for results. We yearn to help create fair and thorough teacher evaluation systems and have access to data to make informed decisions about what is working and what isn’t, to direct our professional learning, and to help decide who stays in our profession. President Obama was right when he said, “That is a bargain worth making.”
Now more than ever, teachers long to lead their profession so that we finally resolve the important educational challenges in this country. A quarter of our children fail to finish high school on time and barely four in ten earn any type of post-secondary degree. For children of color, outcomes are even worse. When we see the statistics–that 7,000 students drop out of school every day–we feel pain for those teens and shame and guilt that we were not able to prevent this tragedy.
On top of that, school districts are getting ready to slam into an awful reality, that before the end of the decade, more than a million Baby Boomer teachers—fully a third of America’s teachers–will retire or leave the teaching profession. To recruit and retain the best teachers, we need to offer rewarding jobs and competitive salaries.
We were especially pleased to read in the Blueprint for an America Built to Last, released yesterday with the speech transcript, that the President plans to ask Congress for funding that will “challenge states and districts to work with their teachers and unions to reform the entire teaching profession – from training and licensing to compensation, career ladders and tenure.”
Educators want to take on this work. As highly skilled specialists, we are not afraid of owning our profession. We are not afraid of being held accountable for results when we are given the responsibility and flexibility to craft our profession. We are confident that the President understands what it will take to transform teaching to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, and we are eager to join with our colleagues across the country in moving the profession forward.
2011 U.S. Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellows Geneviève DeBose, Claire Jellinek, Greg Mullenholz, Shakera Walker, and Maryann Woods-Murphy.
What was not happening at home was a mountain of homework. I never brought home work in elementary school except for an occasional essay or book report. I never took books home. I was a good student and received high grades. I never thought to ask my parents to help me with homework – it was MY work.
Teachers taught AT SCHOOL. I remember in first grade being involved with, what I now realize was the teacher’s assessment of our reading skills. She would take a small group of no more than 5 of us at a time (in a classroom with 25-30 kids) and while the rest of the class would be doing some form of written work or art projects – I can’t remember – we would read out loud in these small groups and she’d determine our skill levels. She would then create reading groups from these assessments and we’d still be in small groups of no more than 5, but at comparable levels of skill so she could really concentrate on helping based on her little groups of good, fair and poor reading levels.
We also would have student teachers who stayed in one room with one teacher for at least a year. This same student teacher would sometimes be hired at the school where she “practiced” her skills. Made sense – she already worked with the faculty and knew the kids.
My parents helped with annual fairs and attended PTA meetings. Fund raising was never at the frantic and desperate level we see it now. It was always supplementary. It was to provide “extras”.
Now, both parents (if families are set up that way) work or children live with a grandparent who is on a pension and retired, or is homeless or in foster care. Parents nowadays don’t have time to do what they used to in the past. Schools demand more from them than they did of my parents.
Students have too much busy work disguised as “homework” that takes time away from what little supposed “quality” family time is available. Children should not be carrying heavy backpacks full of books and notebooks when they should be doing this work at school. The only item I would bring back and forth from home to school as an elementary student was my lunchbox. My parents would be stunned at what is expected of parents today. It’s the school’s job to teach. Teaching should be done at school. Kids need to decompress and just noodle around sometimes. This doesn’t happen anymore. We live in fear. We don’t let our children explore. Their lives are so structured they don’t know how to really relax.
Life is different now. Parents have so much more stress and many more obligations to their time than ever. We all need a break. Teachers aren’t bad. Parents aren’t bad. We’re just allowing business interests determine how and what schools should be teaching children so they can sell their products. Our children aren’t learning – they’re being “processed” through an overabundance of testing (to help support the testing industry).
Children need to sing, dance, laugh and learn how to play well with others. All of my K, 1st, 2nd & 3rd grade teachers had a piano in our classroom (and knew how to play it). Every week all the grade levels would take turns in the auditorium (all first graders together, etc) and learn folk songs which also taught us history. We learned square dancing and other types of dancing and had festivals to show off our skills for parents. Learning was fun. It’s not fun anymore because those things are gone or will be soon.
I don’t know why, but we’ve squeezed the life out of public education. It’s not the fault of parents nor teachers. Our leadership has been tearing it down, year by year, until our educational system is now a pale shadow of what it once was. Shame on all of them for strangling the joy out of education. Shame on them for blaming everyone but themselves. Fully fund IDEA. Dismantle NCLB. Allow real academics and educators to create programs that don’t turn our children into widgets for test-taking industrialists. We can still salvage it. But it took years to get into this mess – it will take as long or longer to get it back into a system that works for all children.
I am not a parent. I see some parents who are uninvolved to be sure. I also see too many parents who are TOO INVOLVED – that is, they micromanage their kids, they regularly intervene on their behalf, they sometimes do the work for the children – yes, that happens and it is not that hard to spot.
I am in my 17th year of teaching. It may be my last, given my age (turning 66 in May). Every year I have taught I call all my parents at the start of the year. I try to be in regular contact at least via email. It is close to impossible when you have over 170 students, as I do in my 6 classes.
The education of a child is a collaborative effort. It includes school personnel and parents, to be sure. But at least at the high school level part of the responsibility has to be that of the students. Is it not far better to let the child experience what happens when s.he does not take responsibility in the safer environment of a school so s.he can learn how to take responsibility than to allow the child to go forward believing that someone – parent, administrator, even teacher – is going to provide a rescue?
Just a few thoughts from a classroom teacher.
Blaming the poor and abused for not conforming to the standards of the dominant society is a way of avoiding the racist and oppressive impulses of the larger society. From slavery to industrialism the schools have been the instrument of indoctrination and conditioning used to control those marginalized by persistent poverty and racism.
The miracle is that in spite of the malfunction of the schools so many of these children not only survive but thrive. Mr Friedman is not simply naive about the lives of the poor and the pressures that industrial society imposes on their lives, he is indifferent to the hurdles that a racist society places in the lives of the poor. A more equitable society might solve many of the problems he cavalierly attributes to the marginalized human discards of the modern industrial society.
Well said!! It’s what I call ‘regurgitation education,” and it’s killing us…
Too much of what is occurring is passive learning, with children becoming turned off to school at ever younger ages.
Today, children show up at school without their homework complete and think nothing of it. Parents don’t support the teacher, they argue with them about every little thing. (I know, I am a teacher and have been one for the last 25 years) It seems to me, at least in the area that I teach in, that parents want the teacher to do it all, except they don’t want their children to have any negative consequences, for anything.
And the teacher can’t do it all in school. There are just not enough hours in the day. Yes, we continue to fall behind the other developed nations, but that is because no one wants to give up this archaic schedule we follow. Children need to be in school more hours and more days. We do not live in an agricultural society anymore so entire summers do not need to be scheduled off.
If everyone would leave their agendas and egos at the door and really open up for an intelligent discussion of what is best for the children, maybe education would change. Until then, I don’t see much positive change occuring.
Another problem you bring up that has been mentioned, but not nearly enough done about it is a huge factor: lack of proper after school programs. As the parent of a student with special needs and a parent advocate for others in LAUSD we fought against our mayor’s attempt to take over LAUSD in 2005. Our Special Education Community Advisory Community wrote to him (he never replied) & I spoke out at a town hall we forces on him through then state rep Jackie Goldberg (he dodged real dialogue going to the state in attempts to end-run the city charter).
I asked in the letter & at the town hall (where he walked out before thee public comments) why he didn’t do more in his capacity as mayor to help schools and families. Provide jobs for families so children can come to school well fed & ready to learn. Provide more (& high quality) after school programs so children can have a safe haven until families come home from work. Provide affordable health clinics in or near schools. Police presence in difficult neighborhoods so children can walk to and from school without fear. There is so
much our government has failed to provide that used to be there. LAUSD must now spend a huge chunk of their budget on thier own police force because the city fails to provide cursory patrol. That money could & should go back into education.
I agree that the school day should be longer to provide that safe haven, with educational supports, after school. Parents work 7:30 am to 5,6 pm & later. We need to support them outside school so their children can succeed. Many problems blamed on teachers or parents are due to lack of community supports for families. There is no safety net. A child who sees drug deals and witnesses abuse or even murder will not be an attentive student. Many of our children (& their families) need access to counseling services to help them cope with the daily challenges in their lives.
As a member of our CAC over 10 years now (8 in leadership positions) I work with families who are 200 to 400% below the poverty level. They are well-intentioned or they would not come to meetings looking for help and training. They cannot solve all the problems they face without a little help from outside…and there is very little for these children. Of the almost 80,000+ students with IEPs in LAUSD, 90% are Title I students.
I have seen such an overwhelming need in these last ten years. To their credit, LAUSD’s Division of Education does support families of students with disabilities as best they can with an unfunded mandate (CACs require oversight & parent training, but unlike Title I, provide no funding for it). We’re lean &mean. Creative with minimal funding support, but it’s never enough. Our legislators do need to step up their game and help fami,ies in the community if they want to see thaws children succeed in school. It really does take a village. Politicians have forgotten to homor their side of the social compact.
She was just here, talking and working with almost 500 people, many in teams that included parents, students, educators and community members.
Epstein is one of the most practical, optimistic and useful people I’ve ever met about improving learning, not just schooling. Strongly recommended.
http://www.csos.jhu.edu/p2000/center.htm
Head Start is a systemic policy intervention aimed at addressing this issue, empowering parents to be advocates for their children. It is a critical part of Head Start that is seldom discussed or quantified. Yes parents need to be involved, as do teachers, administrators, and businesses not only through supporting schools but supporting parents’ relationships with schools. It needs to be the job of the grocery store, the church down the street, and the media. It falls on the shoulders of higher education, government agencies, and the corner store.
The truth is blame gets more notice than praise and partnerships. In constantly focusing on the blame we are never looking at the possibility of improvement.
The blame game is unnecessary. Yes, the breakdown of the black family (which we had to deny had happened) took hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. But the same occurred, across racial lines, with the rapid deindustrialization that happened overnight. It was triggered by the Energy Crisis of 1973, but accelerated by union-busting, incentives to move jobs from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, where they stayed for awhile until fleeing to the Third World.
Deindustrialization may have been inevitable, but if it had happened at a natural pace, families could have adjusted better. Then, Reagan accelerated it further by voodoo economics which incentivized the closing of factories that were still profitable. When economic futures disappeared overnight, too many fathers also disappeared.
Look at the percentage of black and white high school dropouts before 1970 that were incarcerated, and then look at the way it exploded after deindustrialization took off. We needed them in the game to teach kids inner directedness so that they would be helpless in the face of rampant consumerism.
The history that “reformers” don’t know is repeating itself. They don’t know how the story of how children’s first teachers, their parents, were undermined by the forces that they see as liberators. Back then it was called, “creative destruction.” It was great for the elite’s creativity, but the destruction wasn’t so much fun for children. “Reformers” have borrowed the union-busting techniques of the early 70s without knowing that union reformers, like Walter Ruether then and Randi today, had the better plans.
The “answer” is realizing that education is a team sport. We need community schools that bring the full diversity of adults into schools and bring isolated kids out into the full diversity of society. Kids learn from people who love them. The key to being effective in secondary neighborhood schools is being a parent first. That’s what the kids really want (social media is just the weak sunbstitute for their “father-yearning”)
The “answer” is not designing a few superstar teachers. We need to invite all types of adults (but especially twenty-somethings and Baby Boomers) into schools. But we won’t social engineer solutions. We need trust that these adults and kids will form loving and trusting relationships, and somehow we’ll create better schools.
Finally, and this is truly non-spiteful, since when do we only learn from great teachers? One of my most successful learning experiences in school, now 50 years ago, was an abysmal teacher who would regularly assign a paper “on anything” for a weekend. I would give her papers on “how to teach Junior English” and on elaborate methodologies. We hated each other, and I certainly learned plenty. The next year in English, I had the department head who asked, after a few weeks, how I’d gotten a “c” the year before. I smiled and said I earned it from one of the worst teachers he’d ever hired. He smiled, agreed, and said “that’s why I fired her.”
I hope you are writing a book….
2 days of classroom
1 day of community service
1 day working on a project he really cared about
1 day hanging out with their parents/guardian/mentor/volunteer (somebody who cares) learning about stuff
So simple and profound.
No one likes this analogy and I have no data to support it. Just have my observations. And for as many as dislike this perspective, fewer still practice it because by the time kids get to be this age, teachers are often frustrated with the system, the gaming that takes place. Parents are tired of the smart mouths and defiance (never mind the other issues of adult-teen conflict). Instead of empowering young people to take increasing responsibility, we put more rules and restrictions that seemingly have no meaning or validity on kids and call it disrespect when they dare ask why.
It does take a village, though as I increasingly like to view it through my dad’s experience growing up in Parker, Idaho. He was born in 1942 and the town never has been more than a few hundred souls, mostly in potatoes or ranching or in services that support those areas. If he and his buddies stepped out of line at school or just in playing or at the little market, they got called on it. And it wasn’t a phone call to Grandma Beck, the neighbor or community member would call the boys by name and ask if their parents would approve of their actions–usually borderline or potentially harmful or destructive. When kids were being kids, people were okay with that. All adults took responsibility for how their community felt. Now, forget it. We hardly dare breathe much less speak out to hold kids of any age accountable. And in that, I’d say we need better adults overall in the lives of our children.
Dysfunction seems to breed more of the same and even worse. Blaming teachers is just too easy. Only in America. Having lived in southern Chile for 2 years at the height of Pinochet’s military rule, I saw teachers honored and respected. And that was literally a Latin American dictatorship. They valued the effort a person put forth to seek out their own learning and the desire to help others do the same. Not in America. We scapegoat them, think it is clever to say if you can’t do anything else, you teach and so on. And then have the audacity to wonder why there is the lack of solid professionals in our classroom and that roughly half quit somewhere in the their first 3-5 years?
Won’t make me popular, but I see it and feel it daily. We are a spoiled and lost nation. We have demanded perfection from our elected officials, from our educators, from our children, while we neglect to give ourselves a good long look in the mirror. Everything that is wrong with education can be fixed by everything that is right with it. We simply need to put up or shut up. By association, everything that is wrong with America can be fixed by everything that is right with her. To borrow and alter a rodeo phrase, we need to nation up and get ‘er done!
Why? Perhaps in part because people are more driven to comment about what’s wrong than what’s right. Perhaps in part because there are some educators who are deeply unhappy with their jobs, the concerns raised by others about education, denial of what schools can accomplish, etc. Perhaps because some of us think the Friedman piece was too much about blaming the victim.
Thanks to John for making the effort to encourage others to think about what we’re grateful for, as well as what’s wrong.
In our work with educators, families and policy-makers, our Center is trying in every way we can to identify things that are going well, honoring those people and places, and trying to help expand those ideas. The finger pointing does not seem to help young people very much, or the people who care about and work with young people. Helping young people is, after all, what I think all this is about. Happy Thanksgiving, and please consider commenting on the things you are grateful for.
I am grateful for the parents who trust me with the lives of their children.
I am grateful for the administrators who recognize that I don’t easily fit into most molds and allow me the freedom to be totally out of the box if I think it will benefit my students
I am grateful for the likes of people who are willing to challenge conventional wisdom and explore alternatives – I have a long list here, and that includes Deb Meier, George Wood, Linda Darling-Hammond, Gerald Bracey, and Joe Nathan – yes, you.
I am grateful for having discovered my purpose in life as I approached 50
I am grateful for a woman named Linda Poole, who when the dean at Johns Hopkins did not want to admit me to the MAT program argued on my behalf
I am grateful to those who cover education who even when they disagree with me allow me to offer my point of view. That includes Jay Mathews and it certainly includes John Merrow.
I am grateful for the fact that we have not YET lost meaningful public schools, which is why I keep engaging in venues like this.
Is that enough?
I have been advovating that local Education Communities (my terminology) be organized to address local issues that are serving as hurdles to improved and effective education for all. All parties are encouraged to engage, bringing with them the particular solutions they champion. BUT here’s the key: rather than pushing their solutions (leading at best to non-sustainable compromise and at worse no action as every party stonewalls any attempt other than their own – THINK CONGRESS …), they work to clearly identify the local issues. But all parties agree to work to find the BETTER ALTERNATIVE. The better alternative is defined as a plan of action that is accepted by all parties as being better than the particular solution championed at the start.
OK, I can hear your reactions (in too many instances): This will never happen. What kind of happy pills are you on? My solution IS the better alternative. … Well, Steven Covey championed the third alternative (I use better alternative to acknowledge the possibility or actually likelihood that more than two solutions will be championed at the start) in is best seller, “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.” Even more fortunately for us, his new book out recently is titled “The Third Alternative: Solving Life’s Most Difficult Problems.” One chapter is “The 3rd Alternative at School.” I of course accepted the concept from the time of the first book and have tried it when appropriate – with some success but also failures, usually due to parties that wouldn’t buy into the effort. If you find this simplistic or unbelievable, please read AND CONSIDER the messages from the book!
I wish Tom Friedman had talked with Joyce Epstein of Johns Hopkins, who knows so much about how to increase constructive school/family/community partnerships.
One of the things I’ve struggled with over 41 years, since entering teaching, is how we can more skillfully share and implement what is working well. We sure have a lot of successful teachers and schools. John alluded to this issue earlier in the fall. I hope he will return to it.
Happy Thanksgiving break.
Here is the link to the NYT article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?ref=edlife
Although not wanting to be a Thanksgiving scrooge, I am thankful for living in an Open Society. That allows us to engage in a tough-minded debate into how to best fill the gaps at home, and elsewhere, of our most vulnerable children.