Reopening Our Schools

Irecently had a conversation with the human resources director of a large urban school district regarding the number of vacancies he was trying to fill. When I asked which positions, he replied, “Well, I’ve got about 20 open positions and, of course, a million special-ed openings, but Maddie, I have two open PE positions I can’t fill.” In my 40 years of being in the education profession, that was a first!

I’ve heard scenarios of this type are being repeated across the country, but we really don’t have a shortage of teachers. We have plenty of people who have the appropriate education and could be qualified for certification as teachers.

What we have is a shortage of educators who want to actually be teaching in classrooms every day. It’s not because of the kids. It’s due to the lack of systemic support, in their classrooms and their paychecks, that makes teaching untenable for them.

How did we get here?

First, we have de-professionalized teaching. When I chaired the NEA Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching, we studied what actually delineated the tenants of a profession. There were three key points to all professions:

• They each have a defined body of knowledge.
• They teach everyone in the profession that body of knowledge and improvements are shared.
• They control entry into and the quality of the profession.

None of this is true for teaching.

There is no defined body of knowledge for the teaching profession that every teacher learns. Every state sets what their teachers need to know to be allowed to teach. As positions become harder to fill, those standards are generally lowered to allow more people easier access to teaching.

What an educator learns about teaching is dependent on a school or program, such as Teach for America. Learning to teach isn’t based upon a researched and agreed upon body of knowledge conveyed across all programs and states. For example, every early childhood educator has not learned how to teach phonics even though the research says every reader needs this knowledge.

This also creates a portability problem. A 15-year National Board Certified accomplished teacher in one state with outstanding evaluations may not be able to teach in another state because they came through an alternative certification program.

Too many education programs aren’t rigorous enough. In many classrooms, we have teachers who don’t have any education degree. Those teachers, who are least prepared, are too often placed in classrooms with the students who have the greatest needs.

Teachers also have virtually no say in who comes into the profession or who stays. The use of Peer Assistance and Review, which would significantly increase the impact of teachers as the quality control guardians of their profession, is practiced in a very limited number of school districts.

Not only is it tough to obtain the appropriate learning needed to be a successful educator, one is probably going to go into quite a bit of debt to get there, have a salary comparatively low to other degrees, and then have to pay out of pocket to set up his/her classroom and meet his/her students’ needs.

How do we begin to make teaching a respected profession? Let’s start with some tools we already have:

• Every state should allow those who have obtained certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards immediate reciprocity in their state. The process is rigorous, researched, reflective and laser-focused on effective teaching practices.
• Build paid internship/residency programs into every education program, as they do at Chadron State College in the Nebraska Panhandle with their successful school-based partnership program. Students work in the school district as substitute teachers, co-teachers, paraprofessionals, mentors or tutors for pay, while also completing student teaching hours throughout a full academic year.
• Expand loan forgiveness programs for teachers, making them easier to access.

But real change requires tackling even bigger challenges:

• Establish a National Council for the Teaching Profession that will be responsible for defining and setting the standards for a national system of preparation, licensure and certification of all education professionals.
• Restructure how we pay teachers. The step and lane salary system is grounded in a tradition of equity and efficiency. We need a progressive compensation system grounded in the core values while recognizing that tomorrow’s equity challenges must call for new models that will ensure fair and adequate compensation for educators, as well as equity and effective learning for students.
• Build real evaluation systems that focus on evidencing professional growth and share the responsibility for quality teaching among practicing teachers and administrators. Effective teachers need to share in the responsibility for teacher selection, evaluation and dismissal.
• Fund schools based on the needs of the students, not the zip codes they live in. Real equity is making sure every student has what they need to be successful.

Teachers aren’t the first to tackle this problem. We can learn by studying how nurses and physicians raised standards and transformed training in their professions.

The real question is how do we develop the societal commitment that will be needed to create the seismic changes required to transform teaching into a true profession?

Despite the critical role education plays in our economy and the even more critical role it plays in making democracy possible, it continues to be stigmatized as a lesser career.

On the problem of pay, we’ve tied ourselves into knots arguing over how best to raise salaries, failing to recognize that the odd bonus here and there does little to attract otherwise unavailable talent to a profession where base pay remains too low. We’ve also failed to understand that a profession is ill-served when compensation dollars are not strategically deployed to attract and keep those teachers with the talent and skills that classrooms need most. Both are requisite.

The path to elevating either status or pay (though the two are entwined) is not a direct one. It requires emulating the gateways and signals that characterize other professions.

Consider the current landscape, the misleading signals sent to aspiring teachers, their parents and the public at large about what it takes to become a teacher:

• Teaching is one of the easiest majors to get into. Some alternate route programs attach the same gravitas to teaching as getting a job at McDonald’s.
• Low admissions standards mean less qualified students, which mean that professors’ hands are tied, gearing courses to a level where teaching seems like it will be a walk in the park instead of the incredibly demanding job that it is.
• Coursework is so easy that teacher candidates are far more likely to graduate with honors (50% more likely!) than other majors on the same campus. It’s no wonder that so many first-year teachers experience shock over the difficulty of their job, having been given little taste of just how difficult teaching is.
• Half of the candidates completing preparation programs still don’t take a teaching job the following year. It is conceivable that some of these candidates who don’t take a job the following year are unable to find a teaching job, but that theory does not comport with today’s teaching market.¹

It shouldn’t surprise us that high-achieving college students cite the low status of the teaching major as a real detractor. ²

We also shouldn’t be surprised that such a career — whose preparation and entry standards imply it’s easy — does not demand competitive pay, or that states have proven stingy with raising the revenue needed to achieve salaries comparable with other professions.

The profession cannot claim to strive for status, respect and comparable pay in one breath, and in the next, reject the need to uphold meaningful standards common to other professions.

Right now, states across the nation are debating the wisdom of licensing tests. These tests, installed by states to ensure teacher candidates meet their standards, are now being portrayed by some as “barriers” to teaching. By making this subtle switch in language from standards to barriers, removing them doesn’t sound as blatantly irresponsible as it is, in fact, making the U.S. the only developed country in the world to remove all objective milestones for entry into the profession.

Standards matter. People may grumble over the difficulty and relevance of bar exams, or the amount of studying it takes to get into a medical school, or the extra year of school to earn a degree in architecture, but these commonly understood signals go hand in hand with status.

Contrast this with the teaching field’s current system, where the low-rigor preparation and ease of entry into the field belies the daunting challenges that teachers face in the classroom every day. Then, as if wedded to the notion that teaching is child’s play, this system pays teachers far less than they could earn had they pursued another field.

The shift to the higher standards warranted by both the challenge and importance of this profession will not be painless and will require additional support, such as scholarships, higher compensation and preparation, aligned with research that fills in the gaps of inadequate K-12 education.

The upside of making these changes could be tremendous. Building the stature and respect of the teaching profession while attracting even more strong candidates to our nation’s classrooms would galvanize the movement for higher pay.

¹ Cowan, J., Goldhaber, D., Hayes, K., & Theobald, R. (2016). Missing elements in the discussion of teacher shortages. Educational Researcher, 45(8), 460-462. (Also see CALDER Shortage explainer.)
² Third Way. (2014). National online survey of college students — education attitudes.