Most DU'ers had teachers born in the baby boom and educated with dollars that expanded higher education. That included the GI Bill, the Great Society, the "Sputnik" excitement, followed by expansion of community colleges and land grant universities. The United States now has to decide if the high quality education system that provided a free high school education to an entire country for 50 years is going to continue. There's no guarantee that we'll have teachers. Examine some of the facts:
Fact Number 1: The number of kids and hard to teach kids is here now!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090318/ap_on_he_me/med_baby_boomlet"ATLANTA – Remember the baby boom? No, not the one after World War II. More babies were born in the United States in 2007 than any other year in the nation's history — and a wedding band made increasingly little difference in the matter. The 4,317,119 births, reported by federal researchers Wednesday, topped a record first set in 1957 at the height of the baby boom. Behind the number is both good and bad news. While it shows the U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a healthy trend, the teen birth rate was up for a second year in a row.
The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend that started years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older."
Not only are there lots of children in the pipeline, but these kids are not born to stay-at-home moms and traditional two parent families. There's no question that the new boomlet consists in large part of a single working parent and/or unwed mother. The burden on the teacher is entirely different when you face 25 students and 15 or 20 of them don't have a second parent available for PTA or conferencing or helping with homework. Some of us have been there (and are still there). After 32 years teaching in various schools and colleges (and still going), my wife and I see the changing classroom first hand. There is simply no time or money for parents to volunteer, take their children to after school lessons, sport practice, or vacation at an historical site. Yes, the good school times you may remember still happen, but most school volunteers are now retired folks, kids are more transient as single parents change jobs, and teachers see more medical issues from lack of family doctor care than ever before. Frankly, almost every class now has an example of emotional behaviors that we used to see every two or three years. Schools have a police officer instead of a school nurse on staff. Even in college classrooms where there have always been crazy college pranks and Animal House parties; there are now serious mental problems and dangerous students. Many colleges have reacted in the last few years with new "disruption policies", but it is a sign of how much more pressure is put on the education system. The person in front of the classroom has to be much more than an expert in reading or math and that takes lots of preparation.
Fact Number 2: The need for well-trained teachers is increasing dramatically as statistical predictions come true!
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs99/1999026.pdf (10 year old report that has happened.)
Predicting the Need for Newly Hired Teachers in the United States to 2008–09
"Each year over 150,000 public school teachers are hired to meet the ongoing demands of replacing teachers who retire or who have left the profession and to fill new positions in growing school districts or to address special needs or meet new requirements. In addition to these extensive ongoing demands for additions to the teaching force, many schools and school districts have faced the prospect of a wave of retirements as the large numbers of teachers hired during the baby boom enrollment years approach retirement age. - snip -
The approaching wave of teacher retirements is documented not only by anecdotal information, but by statistical evidence as well. As a group, elementary and secondary teachers are significantly older than the general labor force. The median age of public school teachers in 1993–94 was 44 compared with a median age of 38 for all workers in October, 1993. The burden of replacing large numbers of retiring teachers comes at a particularly challenging time, as enrollments in elementary and secondary schools are projected to set records each year well into the next decade. Over the next ten years, an unusually large need for newly hired teachers is expected, both to replace teachers as they retire and to meet the needs of increasing enrollments. These newly hired teachers will include both people who are new to the profession and those who are returning to teaching after some time away from the profession."
Even though it's not well-known, most states report that about half the new teachers receiving a license stay on the job less than five years. In Florida, colleges produce less than half the teacher openings. Teachers recruited from other professions drop out at an even greater rate. What's the problem? Salary is an issue, but not usually the main concern. Most normal people don't want to work their butts off while being blamed daily for almost every problem in a system of little "real" support. Not all schools or school districts are failing, and in fact most do a pretty good job with shrinking resources and larger classes than ever. As the current crop of well-trained veteran teachers retire over the next 10 years, who will take their place. My wife and I were fortunate that there were loans and scholarships for college and even graduate degrees. Twenty-five years ago, we were working and had paid off all the school debt for eight degrees! Even President Obama still owed school loans when starting his run for state office after years of working and starting a family. That's two Ivy league lawyers! How much income could a local teacher expect would repay college loans?
Fact Number 3: Obama's Education Plan shows some awareness of the problem, but is it enough to really going to put a teacher in front of your child's class! I think the plan is a little naive for the real school classroom, even though it is much better than the last eight years of hell.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/education/"Recruit Teachers: Obama and Biden will create new Teacher Service Scholarships that will cover four years of undergraduate or two years of graduate teacher education, including high-quality alternative programs for mid-career recruits in exchange for teaching for at least four years in a high-need field or location.
Prepare Teachers: Obama and Biden will require all schools of education to be accredited. Obama and Biden will also create a voluntary national performance assessment so we can be sure that every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively. Obama and Biden will also create Teacher Residency Programs that will supply 30,000 exceptionally well-prepared recruits to high-need schools.
Retain Teachers: To support our teachers, the Obama-Biden plan will expand mentoring programs that pair experienced teachers with new recruits. They will also provide incentives to give teachers paid common planning time so they can collaborate to share best practices.
Reward Teachers: Obama and Biden will promote new and innovative ways to increase teacher pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them. Districts will be able to design programs that reward with a salary increase accomplished educators who serve as a mentors to new teachers. Districts can reward teachers who work in underserved places like rural areas and inner cities. And if teachers consistently excel in the classroom, that work can be valued and rewarded as well."
The Teacher Service Scholarships is a great idea that is past due. The problem is that every state legislature has to commit dollars to potential teachers. Is there real money? We don't know yet, since lots of money goes to a state budget and it disappears in the state capital before making it to the college student's bank account.
The mentoring idea is not new, and it helps - but often it is not going to work in real life. School districts don't have time and opportunity available for effective mentoring or planning time. In practice this rarely has much effect because it is difficult to implement. The good teachers who stay in the career already collaborate or they don't survive. There are very, very few real examples of common planning times during the day, so schools "make time" before or after school hours. It's not a horrible idea, but in my experience going to yet another off-hour meeting can be tough. Yesterday (Saturday), my wife was at a voluntary all day meeting of teachers in her subject. They got re-certification credit which most didn't really need, but no money for volunteering to participate and the workshop was "sold-out" anyway. Unfortunately, that's the career group that are retiring over the next 10 years! They are already committed to whatever it takes. Will the new younger group have the time, opportunity, or dispositions to be the next set of collaborative teachers? I hope so, but right now the numbers are depressing.
All teacher education programs should be nationally accredited. This is the best and most powerful item on Obama's agenda. Nationally accredited and approved teacher education programs have much higher standards than about half the colleges follow now. It costs money to prepare teachers and make sure that they all have the student teaching and coursework to face the current classrooms. Many of our teacher dropouts were simply unprepared to deal with the job! The problem with Obama's plan is a "voluntary" performance assessment. You don't want medical schools that produce doctors that may or may not be able to perform surgery or airline pilots that might be able to land the plane! Certified teachers should have proven that they have knowledge and skills to be responsible for children, and we need to have more than "voluntary" standards. I suspect that many of the teacher horror stories that we've read about recently are teachers who should never have been hired in the classroom to start with, but they slipped through the cracks of weak, underfunded college programs. Many of those college programs met some regional accreditation standards, but not national teacher program standards.
As far as a "reward program", if there are really rewards that are driven by teachers, that would be great. In reality, we'll likely see more nutty test score formulas like No Child Left Behind. My wife's school was an "A" school last year by the state grading system even though it is not a high income area. When the reward money (about $800 per teacher) was sent to the school, the district asked the teachers how to divide the dough. It does not surprise me at all, but the teachers voted to split the money with all the teachers and staff in the school (including the janitor); except they asked to put some money into improvements that they all knew the school needed (the district would not do it). Not exactly the behavior that AIG bonus-getters would express! Good teachers simply have different values than Wall Street executives, and that seems to constantly be a mystery to politicians. The reason that school was an "A" school was never an offer of incentives! Most teachers never even considered a bonus the reason they showed up everyday. The school's success is embedded in every professional teacher and their commitment to each child. That can't be bought with a bonus.
Who will teach the baby boomlet? Where are we going to get good teachers for the new generation of kids? The largest generation in US history starts school in five years!
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
