WE NEVER SEEM TO LEARN HOW TO VALUE SCHOOL TEACHERS
Miami Herald, The (FL) - Sunday, January 30, 2000
Author: ANA VECIANA-SUAREZ, Herald Staff Writer
Listen up, class. Our lesson today and tomorrow and the day after is about teachers. Teachers missing in action. Teachers who have left the classroom. Teachers who never made it past the opening bell.
Yes, class, the lesson is about this decade's severe teacher shortage. A national report finds a shortage worse than any time since after World War II, when millions of children from the ``baby boom'' overwhelmed public schools .
As a parent of several children still in the education pipeline, I'm suffering from emotional whiplash, a direct result of bad press, dire warnings and mixed feelings about the state of our public schools.
First I had to worry about gargantuan class sizes, then plummeting test scores, later random shootings on campus. Now this.
MORE KIDS
The projected shortage is due to several factors. For one, there are a lot more kids entering classrooms at a time when tens of thousands of teachers are nearing retirement. The nation must hire two million new teachers in less than a decade to meet demand, not an easy task when unemployment is so low and other professions so much more lucrative.
Of course, there are other reasons for a dearth of teachers. Once they realize life in the classroom is nothing like To Sir, With Love, our high-minded instructors leave the profession in droves - about 30 percent within five years, 50 percent in some urban areas. And as they exit one door, schools desperately try to entice newcomers through another in hopes of lowering the magical student-teacher ratio.
So where does this leave us? ``It's gotten so bad,'' Education Secretary Richard Riley once observed, ``that some schools have been forced to put any warm body in front of a classroom.''
Gee, that makes me feel good about where my children spend seven hours a day. Granted, I've been hearing about teacher shortages for years, but somehow this latest wave seems imbued with an added urgency. Maybe it's because we, as a nation, can now turn our collective attention from a humming, well-tuned economy to a croaking educational system. Maybe it's because the classroom has become the favorite stage for politicians.
MORE MONEY
Whatever the reason, our governments claim they're putting their money where their mouths are. In Florida, there is a budget request to offer $5,000 recruitment incentives for math and science teachers. In New York, lawmakers are being asked to subsidize tuition for college students who commit to teach in selected public schools. In California, the governor has proposed offering candidates who teach in low-performing schools $10,000 loans for buying a home, $30,000 for attaining advanced certification and $11,000 to repay college loans. Other states have come up with similar offers.
But money isn't everything, only a beginning. The real story behind the teacher shortage is not about recruitment but about retention - what we do and fail to do once we get our graduates next to a blackboard.
I know. I'm married to a middle-school teacher who has taught for almost 27 years. Oh, the stories I hear, stories of travesty and triumph, creativity and bureaucracy, passion and surrender.
This is what I've learned from those anecdotes: Bringing in the best and the brightest and throwing money at them won't cure the maladies so ingrained in the system itself. Along with the money, teachers want respect and leeway in the classroom. They want better training and more mentoring in the early years. They want to curtail cover-your-ass paperwork that has eaten up time they could best devote to pupils. They, like you and me, want their incompetent colleagues weeded out and their superstars amply rewarded.
Ultimately, they also want more parents to act like adults with their children. This means clothing them, feeding them, disciplining them, instilling values in them, saying no to them, teaching them respect for elders and property.
Offering teachers money may be the easy part. Treating them well seems to be the lesson we can't learn.
Yes, class, the lesson is about this decade's severe teacher shortage. A national report finds a shortage worse than any time since after World War II, when millions of children from the ``baby boom'' overwhelmed public schools .
As a parent of several children still in the education pipeline, I'm suffering from emotional whiplash, a direct result of bad press, dire warnings and mixed feelings about the state of our public schools.
First I had to worry about gargantuan class sizes, then plummeting test scores, later random shootings on campus. Now this.
MORE KIDS
The projected shortage is due to several factors. For one, there are a lot more kids entering classrooms at a time when tens of thousands of teachers are nearing retirement. The nation must hire two million new teachers in less than a decade to meet demand, not an easy task when unemployment is so low and other professions so much more lucrative.
Of course, there are other reasons for a dearth of teachers. Once they realize life in the classroom is nothing like To Sir, With Love, our high-minded instructors leave the profession in droves - about 30 percent within five years, 50 percent in some urban areas. And as they exit one door, schools desperately try to entice newcomers through another in hopes of lowering the magical student-teacher ratio.
So where does this leave us? ``It's gotten so bad,'' Education Secretary Richard Riley once observed, ``that some schools have been forced to put any warm body in front of a classroom.''
Gee, that makes me feel good about where my children spend seven hours a day. Granted, I've been hearing about teacher shortages for years, but somehow this latest wave seems imbued with an added urgency. Maybe it's because we, as a nation, can now turn our collective attention from a humming, well-tuned economy to a croaking educational system. Maybe it's because the classroom has become the favorite stage for politicians.
MORE MONEY
Whatever the reason, our governments claim they're putting their money where their mouths are. In Florida, there is a budget request to offer $5,000 recruitment incentives for math and science teachers. In New York, lawmakers are being asked to subsidize tuition for college students who commit to teach in selected public schools. In California, the governor has proposed offering candidates who teach in low-performing schools $10,000 loans for buying a home, $30,000 for attaining advanced certification and $11,000 to repay college loans. Other states have come up with similar offers.
But money isn't everything, only a beginning. The real story behind the teacher shortage is not about recruitment but about retention - what we do and fail to do once we get our graduates next to a blackboard.
I know. I'm married to a middle-school teacher who has taught for almost 27 years. Oh, the stories I hear, stories of travesty and triumph, creativity and bureaucracy, passion and surrender.
This is what I've learned from those anecdotes: Bringing in the best and the brightest and throwing money at them won't cure the maladies so ingrained in the system itself. Along with the money, teachers want respect and leeway in the classroom. They want better training and more mentoring in the early years. They want to curtail cover-your-ass paperwork that has eaten up time they could best devote to pupils. They, like you and me, want their incompetent colleagues weeded out and their superstars amply rewarded.
Ultimately, they also want more parents to act like adults with their children. This means clothing them, feeding them, disciplining them, instilling values in them, saying no to them, teaching them respect for elders and property.
Offering teachers money may be the easy part. Treating them well seems to be the lesson we can't learn.
Edition: Final
Section: Arts
Page: 2M
Record Number: 0002020539
Copyright (c) 2000 The Miami Herald
Section: Arts
Page: 2M
Record Number: 0002020539
Copyright (c) 2000 The Miami Herald
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