The Teacher Wars (41 page)

In 2012 the
median income of an American teacher was $54,000 per year, similar to the salary of a police officer or librarian, but
significantly less than that of an accountant ($64,000), a registered nurse ($65,000), or a dental hygienist ($70,000), not to mention a lawyer ($114,000), a computer programmer ($74,000), or a college professor ($69,000).

While the incomes of American teachers do not look all that bad compared to teacher incomes in Europe or Asia, economists know people choose careers based less on the raw salary than on the perceived gap between what they could make in one job versus another. In that sense the growing inequality in the American labor market has undoubtedly hurt the prestige of teaching.
In the 1940s, male teachers earned more than half of male college graduates, while female teachers earned more than 70 percent of female college graduates. Today teacher salaries are in the thirtieth percentile for male college grads and the fortieth percentile for female grads. These big pay gaps between teachers and other professionals are unique to the United States.
In South Korea, teacher salaries of $55,000 to $155,000 over the course of a career provide 250 percent of the local buying power of an American teacher. This puts South Korean teachers between engineers and doctors in terms of pay.

Another problem is the way teacher pay is structured. Typical pay ladders, known as the single salary schedule, reward teachers for time on the job and further education, forcing a teacher to wait decades to achieve peak pay. High-profile districts like Baltimore and Newark have moved away from the single salary schedule through negotiations with their teachers unions. These cities now reward performance and extra responsibility, like mentoring peers, alongside seniority. This should happen across the board.

Consider this: My first full-time job in magazine journalism paid $21,000. I thought my friends who were public school teachers were rich! Five years later, at twenty-seven years old, I was earning three times my starting salary. Meanwhile,
a New York City public school teacher with my same level of education, a bachelor's degree, got a raise of less than $5,000 over the first five years of her career, from $45,530 to $50,153. In North Carolina, a teacher must work fifteen years to move her salary from $30,000 to $40,000. The worst part is that teachers' incomes stagnate in comparison to their college-educated peers just as people begin to think about starting a
family or buying a home. This is undoubtedly one reason why some ambitious people leave or never enter the profession, and why teaching is less culturally respected than it should be.

CREATE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

Teaching is not just one profession but several. To understand what I mean, consider medicine. All prospective doctors take the same test, the MCAT, to apply to medical schools. Those schools are certified by a single body, and they move students through a familiar sequence of courses, licensing exams, and clinical rotations. All doctors serve as interns and residents and go through medical rounds at hospitals. Ethically, doctors agree to uphold the Hippocratic Oath.

Education is so very different. Some prospective teachers major in education at teachers colleges; others major in subject areas and earn master's degrees in teaching; still others become teachers through alternative routes like Teach for America or teacher residencies. Some prospective teachers serve as student teachers for a year, others for a semester or not at all. Many teachers believe the goal of their profession should be to close achievement gaps between rich and poor children; others would dispute this, saying that doing so means neglecting gifted kids or is irrelevant in homogeneous, affluent schools. Still other educators would emphasize social-emotional development, critical thinking, or citizenship over measurable academic gains. All these views have relevance and legitimacy and are rooted in American culture and history.

Considering that teaching is more decentralized in training methods and aims than other formal professions, like medicine or law, the Harvard sociologist Jal Mehta and Johns Hopkins political scientist Steven Teles have put forth the idea, still speculative, of “
plural professionalism” for teachers, in which communities of practice form around specific pedagogical schools of thought, such as project-based learning or “no excuses.” In this mode, teacher prep programs and K—12 schools would work in alliance. They would select a school of thought to emphasize and develop evidence-based best practices that can be shared among researchers, working teachers, and trainee teachers. “Plural professionalism” would give
teaching intellectual heft, by inaugurating prospective teachers into communities of practice that use a single vocabulary, share an ethical alignment, and agree on questions like how to assess students.

Today's “no excuses” charter schools have come closest to implementing the plural professionalism model. In New York City and Chicago, a coalition of charter networks launched the Relay Graduate School of Education, which teaches “no excuses” techniques to first-year teachers seeking an alternative certification. There are other legitimate pedagogical practices for teaching low-income children, but they get much less attention. The High Tech High network in San Diego emphasizes connections between school and the world of adult careers, and it now operates its own teacher training program. The Bank Street College of Education in New York City teaches a Deweyite, progressive, learner-centered pedagogy, and it operates a K–12 school where student teachers hone their craft. Other teacher prep programs have a lot to learn from these institutions, which imbue prospective teachers with specific strategies for running a classroom and specific ways of thinking about their work. Since there is no one effective ideology of teaching—but there are many research-backed effective teacher behaviors, like high-level questioning—teacher education should be much more concrete and skills-based than the status quo. Yet it should remain intellectually diverse, since different communities have different expectations of schools, ranging from strict discipline to Montessori. Communities of practice should be able to demonstrate to states that they are rigorous and evidence based. Once they are, they could earn the freedom to choose their own curricula, assessments, and teacher evaluation practices.

KEEP TEACHING INTERESTING

A set of job responsibilities that remains stagnant over the course of five, ten, or twenty years can leave teachers feeling burned out and bored and drives some high performers uninterested in becoming administrators out of the profession. If we expect ambitious, intellectually engaged people to become teachers and remain in our public schools, we must offer them a career path that is exciting and
varied over the long term, and which includes opportunities to lead among adults, not just children.
In Singapore, after three years on the job a teacher selects one of three leadership paths to pursue, in curriculum writing, school administration, or instructional mentoring. Here in the States, cities like Baltimore are offering teachers promotion opportunities that allow them to remain in the classroom for part of the day, while spending more time leading their colleagues in lesson planning and instructional coaching. Opportunities like these should be available to all good teachers who want them, not just to a handful of administrators' favorites.

The most powerful form of performance pay would reward proven teachers for taking on useful new responsibilities that help other teachers improve student learning. And in a reform climate in which teachers are more and more expected to work together toward school improvement—whether through group lesson planning, peer coaching, or team teaching within the classroom—it makes less and less sense for incentives and pay to focus narrowly on measuring an individual teacher's impact on individual students' test scores.

DEAL WITH THE LEGACY OF THE NORMAL SCHOOL

Susan B. Anthony and W. E. B. Du Bois knew back in the nineteenth century that it was a bad idea for teachers to be educated separately from other college-educated professionals, both for the prestige of teaching and for the good of students. This remains true. During the mid-twentieth century, the old normal schools began evolving into state colleges that granted bachelor's degrees, but their admissions and scholarship standards typically remained low. Since these schools are now producing
a huge oversupply of prospective elementary school teachers—in some states, as many as nine times more prospective teachers than there are jobs—states ought to require these institutions to raise their standards for admission or to shut down their teacher prep programs.

That said, high SAT scores or grades should not be the only qualifications teacher-ed programs seek.
Preliminary data from New York City linking student achievement back to the universities
teachers attended found that graduates of some less elite schools, like Hofstra University and Hunter College, outperformed, on average, the graduates of prestigious institutions like NYU and Columbia. We should not forget Martin Haberman's research showing that long-serving “star” teachers are often from low-income backgrounds, have graduated from non-elite colleges, or are people of faith. Others, like Alex Caputo-Pearl, have somewhat radical politics. What makes these nontraditional teachers special is that they are mission-driven to help struggling students succeed, and they are enthusiastic about holding all children to high intellectual standards. Those are the attributes teacher preparation programs should seek.

FOCUS ON THE PRINCIPAL AS MUCH AS THE TEACHER

There should be a principal quality movement that is as aggressive as our teacher accountability movement has been. Almost every expert agrees that the one ingredient all successful schools have in common is a dedicated, highly respected leader who articulates a clear mission teachers believe in and strive to carry out.
A McKinsey study shows that in choosing where to work, reporting to a better principal is just as motivating for top-third teachers as securing more pay. There is also evidence that teachers are more likely to respect and work productively with principals who have been teachers, especially in the same school or neighborhood. It has recently been popular to recruit principals from fields outside education, but this could be a misstep. Instead, effective teachers with exceptional leadership and organizational skills should be identified through the evaluation process and encouraged, after a number of years, to consider transitioning into administration—while acknowledging that becoming a principal should not be the only way for a teacher to expand his or her responsibilities or pay.

And we shouldn't overburden principals with reams of teacher accountability paperwork. As banal as it sounds, paperwork is the major reason that historical attempts to improve teacher evaluation failed. Teacher rating rubrics must get “
put on a diet,” The New
Teacher Project recommended in 2013. How about focusing on ten effective instructional behaviors each school year instead of sixty?

RETURN TESTS TO THEIR RIGHTFUL ROLE AS DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS

Americans have always been fascinated by tests, from the phrenology craze to IQ testing to achievement testing today. While we once used tests to draw conclusions mostly about the capacities of individual students, today we believe they tell us much less about the student than about his or her teacher. Value-added research has added immeasurably to our knowledge about what works in education, by measuring teachers' impact on students' test scores in low-stakes settings, in which those scores are used neither to reward nor to punish adults. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that value-added retains its legitimacy in high-stakes settings, when test scores are used to evaluate, pay, and fire teachers and administrators. Leading education researchers like Harvard's Daniel Koretz, a psychometrician, and John Hattie of the University of Auckland, who conducts meta-analyses of education studies, have demonstrated that the most authentic use of achievement tests is to diagnose what students know and can do so teachers can better target instruction toward them. When testing practices are set up to select teachers to fire, educators are incented to raise test scores at any cost, not to use tests to help children learn.

This does not mean that there is no use for value-added measurement within K–12 schools. Given what we know about value-added—that it is more stable at the high and low ends of the teacher quality spectrum than in the mushy middle—principals could target teachers with especially low value-added scores for a more intensive set of classroom observations or other investigations into their practice. Similarly, unusually high value-added scores could be used to identify teachers who are potentially able to serve as peer mentors or evaluators; but again, those rewards would not be distributed without classroom observations, consideration of student work other than tests, and interviews with the teacher in question.

TEACHERS BENEFIT FROM WATCHING EACH OTHER WORK

The classroom should not be a black box closed to outside scrutiny, especially for novice teachers. Low-stakes value-added research has made it clear that first-year teachers, regardless of how they enter the profession, are learning on the job—and the curve is steep. Ideally, school districts that serve at-risk children would limit their supply of first-year teachers when adequate veterans are available. Another idea would be to change the structure of teachers' workdays so all effective veterans spend some time watching novice teachers work and coaching them. Beginner teachers, in turn, should have time to observe veterans' classrooms and to work with colleagues to plan effective, engaging lessons.

RECRUIT MORE MEN AND PEOPLE OF COLOR

It is important for children to see some of themselves reflected in their teachers. A half century of research and 150 years of practical experience show teachers of color are more likely to hold high expectations for students of color.
Yet only 17 percent of public school teachers are nonwhite, compared to 40 percent of public school students. In terms of gender, the feminization of the American teacher corps, begun by the common school reformers in the 1820s, has proven stubbornly consistent. Today only 24 percent of teachers are male.