Teachers: Glamour Everlasting
Describing Our Miss Brooks, the popular 1950s TV
program starring Eve Arden as a witty, sarcastic English teacher beloved by her
students, The Kansas City Star
recently noted that Arden portrayed “an intelligent woman in an unglamorous
profession.” I suppose glamour, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What
could be more glamorous than passing on the wonders of nature and civilization
to the next generation while helping them learn to think rigorously and
live well, thereby strengthening our country and helping ensure a better future?
I mention this because
of the importance of improving our schools. Recent studies of successful school
systems around the world confirm what we’ve known all along but haven’t acted
on: that teaching in those places is
viewed as a glamorous profession or, if not glamorous, certainly prestigious. In
the high-achieving countries of East Asia and Europe, teachers enjoy a status
similar to that of physicians and judges here. The contrast with the American
tradition is sharp, and the negative impact on our children clear.
In How the World’s Best-Performing School
Systems Come Out on Top, a two-year study of twenty-five systems including
ten of the best, McKinsey & Company, the gold standard of global management consultants, concluded that most attempts to improve
low-performing systems—restructuring, reducing class sizes, charter schools,
and the like—make little or no difference. What makes a difference is teachers: “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its
teachers.”
All the
best-performing systems select teachers from the top third or higher of college
students: the top 5 percent in South Korea, 10 percent in Finland, 30 percent
in Singapore and others. Most do this by limiting the number of
teacher-training slots and admitting only those who score well on tests of
literacy, numeracy, and problem solving, and who demonstrate outstanding
communications and interpersonal skills. (In Finland, only one in ten
applicants is admitted.) Once selected, students receive intensive training
under master teachers, often at public expense including paid internships.
Such careful selection
and early rewards elevates respect for teaching and helps attract the best applicants.
Top countries also sweeten the pot by paying beginning teachers roughly equal
to the average of other demanding fields. In addition, top-performing systems
typically have strong teacher unions with a major voice in school standards and
operations.
In America,
prospective teachers tend to come from the lowest third of college students.
Admission standards to teacher-training programs are generally low, tuition is
high, internships are short and unpaid, and beginning salaries below average.
The inevitable result is the Star’s
“unglamorous profession” where thousands who train to teach never do and nearly
half of those who do teach leave within five years. Aside from the waste of
public resources and of these graduates’ investments, the public perception—and
children’s perception—is that teaching—and, therefore, learning—isn’t
important; it’s seen as a job for those with few other options.
Compounding the error,
politicians in some states have been cutting school resources, attacking
teacher unions, and insisting that teachers be accountable for better results
while paying no attention to the compelling evidence for how to get those
results. We need good teachers, and we need good politicians to create a system
to attract more of them.
February 3, 2012
