In my diary yesterday, entitled What was wrong with the debate education question I was asked, by Spoonfulofsugar "What’s a crummy teacher?". As I answered, about why we have as many teachers as we do who do not belong in the classroom, a parallel occurred to me with the military. In this diary I want to briefly explore both ideas. It the topic interests you, great, and if not, feel free to stop reading.
In my comment, I noted (and I have fixed one typo)
We have far too many teachers who either were never successful or who become burnt out cases merely going through the motions until retirement. We need warm bodies, and if they are fully certificated we are often reluctant to do any of the following
1. not hire them
2. refuse to grant them tenure
3. dismiss them once they are tenured
As I wrote this I immediately realized the parallel with our current military. There are two clear aspects to this. First, in order to meet recruiting goals the military has been lowering its standards. We have read about the number of moral waivers being granted so that possible recruits who otherwise might be disqualified for prior bad behavior are now being accepted. That enables the recruiter to meet his or her quota, and I suppose the military keeps its fingers crossed that any real problems will be discovered in training. In that case, the paperwork will show the recruitment quota met even if the recruit is washed out in training. we have also lowered educational standards, and raised the maximum age at which recruits can be taken. All of this has been necessary in order to have sufficient warm bodies - note that term, "warm bodies." Of course, far too many may become either broken or dead bodies, or their lower qualifications might endanger their compatriots to place them in jeopardy. And I have not even mentioned that a lower quality individual military person is far more likely to do things that exacerbate conditions in Iraq.
And that is far more likely to occur if the quality of leadership is lowered. We expect our highest quality leadership to come from those officers trained - at great government expense - at our national service institutions, such as West Point. And yet if we examine the rate at which graduates of West Point are leaving the service upon completion of their minimum commitment, the loss is staggering. There have been multiple diaries that have addressed this, and notable leaders like Wes Clark have pointed out that this shrinks the pool of those who might become the top leaders of the military. It is a crisis.
Both of these situations - lowering standards for recruits and losing the best of future leadership - represent a real threat to the ability of the military to properly do its mission.
And there are parallels to both in our public schools.
We know that smaller classes are often more effective, especially at the elementary level, for students who need more attention, and in teaching proper writing at the secondary level. Further, for secondary teachers to properly do their job their total load of students should be less than the 150 to 200 some of us have. If a teacher has 180 students it becomes impossible to give proper attention to individual student work when one corrects it - it simply takes too long. Do the math. If I have 180 papers to correct, and I spend 3 minutes per paper, that is 540 minutes, or 9 hours - for one assignment.
Schools have little choice but to hire anyone who is fully certified. This is especially true in schools that are in inner cities or rural areas - simply finding people to apply can be difficult. It can be true in subjects for which there is a shortage of people.
I remember some statistics from when I was in my teacher training program at Johns Hopkins. Maryland certified less than half the number of total teachers it needed each year, and one year Maryland programs only certified a total of 3 to teach physics. It is one reason that some districts ad to heavily rely upon those with provisional certificates: there simply were not enough people with full certification to fill the openings.
I have described what has long been the school parallel to the military’s current lowering of recruiting standards. I have on occasion noted that what happens in and to schools should serve as a canary in the coal mine for the rest of our nation and our society, and this is no exception.
And the parallel to the loss of company grade and field grade graduates of West Point who are leaving? That can be seen in two slices of school reality. We get a number of very good teachers who leave by the end of their fifth year. There are various figures offered, but we know that at least 1/3 of all who enter teaching are gone by the end of their 5th year, and the numbers may be higher. While a teacher with 5 years of experience does not have authority over her junior compatriots the way an Army captain does, s/he still serves as an important role model, and her continuation in a school provides a stability of school culture without which school-wide success is difficult to achieve. Most teachers do not reach fully competent functioning in less than 4-5 years, and it is extremely rare for anyone in less than three years. And yet absent retaining good teachers it becomes increasingly harder to provide the mentoring, collaboration and guidance that new teachers need in order to succeed. And absent that mentoring and collaboration and guidance, some newer teachers who might be capable of more than competence struggle and are ineffective, and others simply burn out and walk away.
These are not the only losses. Increasingly we are seeing teachers who in the past would have stayed well past minimum retirement now walking away. This would be the equivalent of a field grade officer with 20 years deciding it is not worth it to say for a promotion to full colonel or possible selection for flag rank. It further decreases the pool from which the senior leadership can be drawn. Here the parallel is not exact, because most who have spent 30 years in the classroom are not about to transition to administration. But these are the teachers who should provide the role models, who are the accumulated insight into the school and its culture, who are the basic skeleton of school culture. Lose too many of them and the school risks being amorphous, unable to maintain direction, regardless of how strong the leadership of the top administration.
I do not deny that there are real issues with teachers who should not be in classrooms. I have seen my share in the schools in which I have taught or where I had occasion to observe. It is totally wrong to place the entire blame, or even most of the blame, for this upon teachers unions. Yes, teachers unions insist upon due process, and since as Justice Frankfurter once noted hard cases make bad law we do not want to use the existence of some such bad actors as an excuse to dismantle the basic protections to which most teachers are rightly entitled. That is the equivalent of the American officer in Vietnam who said that in order to save the village we had to destroy it. Or in more contemporary terms, in order to protect us from those who would destroy our liberties and freedoms our government has to violate and trample upon those very liberties and freedoms. Remember - what happens in schools is the canary in the coal mine.
If we do not rethink seriously what we are doing with teachers and schools, all the problems we hope to address will merely be exacerbated by the actions we take. For example, No Child Left Behind has a requirement that every student be taught by a "highly qualified teacher." This could not be met before NCLB because there simply were not sufficient teachers meeting those requirements willing to work in all the schools and departments that needed them. There are more than enough people in the US who hold the proper credentials, but many of them are no longer willing to work in schools. And some who hold the credentials are not effective teachers, yet we must use them if they are willing because we need warm bodies merely to staff classrooms. If we dismiss those who are not "highly qualified" or whom we determine to be ineffective, with whom do we staff those classes, substitutes who have no formal educational training, and who therefore by definition are not "highly qualified?"
The military can reach out and grab those still in the Individual Ready Reserve. There is no IRR of teachers. If we are truly going to address the educational needs of our students and schools, we must change how we train, recruit, induct and maintain our teaching staff. We need to rethink the demands we put upon our schools and our teachers. Otherwise the question in my title has an obvious answer.
Why do we have crummy teachers? Because our policies about schools and teachers gives us no other choice. That is unfair - to our students, to the good teachers who are trying to make a difference in the lives of our students. And if, as has been the recent pattern, it leads to policies that merely make things worse, we will have only ourselves to blame.
Peace.