Yesterdays downtown breakfast forum sponsored by the Public Education Business Coalition on the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher was an interesting event with informative and useful contributions from the four panelists. But the best part of the morning featured two stellar questions from the audience.
The first question hit a theme also addressed in a recent post here: the need to reformulate teacher pension systems. At the forum and elsewhere, statistics have been thrown around to try to highlight the extent of the teacher retention and turnover crisis. (The NEA has a real problem with this issue, but not how you might think.) The audience member posed the question of what structural changes we should pursue vis a vis our educational system to reflect the fact that many teachers dont enter the profession for a 30-year stint but work 5 to 8 years and reach their peak classroom capabilities.
The question seemed to elicit some agreement from the panel that salaries, pensions, and other incentives need to be restructured, though caution should be observed in tipping the balance too far toward expecting most or all teachers to pursue the profession on a shorter-term basis.
The second question really busted down the walls, such that no one on the panel really seemed ready, willing, or able to engage with an answer. But if were going to think outside the box a bit, theres no reason to fear asking whether teachers unions ought to be dissolved and reconstituted as professional guilds to defend the profession rather than the practitioner.
Probably most unsettling to union officials in the audience was the source of the question, a man whose preface identified himself as someone who neither disrespects the teaching profession nor has any affection for Republican partisanship. But the question needs to be asked again and again. Perhaps a seminar devoted to the role of the teacher organization in Colorado would be worthwhile. Invite representatives of the various organizations (CEA, AFT, PACE, CEAI), other education practitioners, scholars, parents and outside observers to participate. Could we all begin to be honest in such a setting? You may say Im a dreamer .
A lot more could be written about the burdens teachers face and how to alleviate them effectively, as well. But time and space constraints forbid me to do more than present the questions which seem to represent the macro-options facing education policy: Should we hire more teachers at low salaries? Should we reduce the number of teachers but offer higher pay and performance incentives? Should we narrow the focus of what we expect public education to accomplish? Should we let the market decide?
Yes, I must fill my provocative quotient for the week. But Im just following the lead of two terrific questions raised yesterday.
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Regarding “busting down walls,” I’d like us to reconsider what schools are supposed to look like. In the current system, teachers are expected to do only one thing: stand in front of a bunch of students and do a brain-dump. There’s more to it than that, of course, especially among better teachers. But it’s hard for teachers to get away from this model because we have somehow gotten the idea that this is the only way kids learn.
I’d like to see teachers more as facilitators of learning — teaching in the traditional way sometimes, but also being allowed to spend time collaborating with other teachers, consulting with experts on one topic or another and researching and contacting potential partners in the community who have knowledge to share and hands-on experiences for the students. This would make teaching a lot more interesting, which might attract more people to the profession and help with teacher retention. Community-based learning also makes school more engaging for students, and it makes schools more connected to their communities. (There’s lots of evidence of this in the service-learning literature.)
Teachers could collaborate with one another and with their students to research community needs. Younger students could help meet those needs through direct service, while older kids could conduct research and present possible solutions to those needs in the form of reports or public presentations. (Again, there is precedent for this.)
Not only does all this make schools more interesting places, which benefits students and teachers, but it also might help mollify conservative critics who are always yammering about their tax dollars and about how teacher education programs are a crock because anyone with subject knowledge can teach. Schools would be contributing to their communities, so they wouldn’t just be “sucking up tax dollars,” and they would be using non-educators in the community as resources.
So to get back to your question about teacher pay, the number & quality of teachers, etc., I think this kind of restructuring of education would open up lots of different ways to be a professional educator, which would give us the opportunity to devise lots of different pay and performance incentives. I think until we can rethink what it means to be an educator and force the unions to try to represent a more occupationally diverse membership, they are not going to change dramatically.