Permit me to be autobiographical at some length, not to boast or elicit praise, but to make a point. I have a distinguished record as a high-school and college English teacher, and five decades ago aspired to be a college professor. I know that God cares for me because He did not grant my wish. Instead, I had a career as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy, and environment, one more gratifying than anything which I could have had as a teacher or professor. Still, when I retired, I returned to scholarship, became an independent scholar, and wrote well-regarded scholarly publications.
For 45 years, before, during, and after my career, I taught English intermittently in public and private secondary schools and colleges in ten states (OH, NY, MA, MI, KS, CO, VA, MD, OR, NM) and the District of Columbia. I began teaching in elementary school; my second grade teacher arranged with my fifth grade teacher for me to teach a lesson on birds. When I was a student teacher at Cornell, my supervisor stopped attending my classes after one week because she said that I was the best teacher in the high school. After my first 3 months at a boys preparatory school, the assistant headmaster told me of parents reporting that their sons regarded me as the best teacher whom they had ever had. When I was a teaching fellow at Michigan, the department asked me to design and direct a training program by and for graduate students; later, one of 10 out of 1500, I received an award for distinguished teaching. I skip the many episodes of student praise along the way, including that of a Rhodes Scholar, now a professor at Duke University.
But I have also had a few experiences which have persuaded me that some, perhaps many, schools and colleges do not want good teachers. In my first and and only term at a girls preparatory school, I soon became the teacher whom the admissions staff showed off to inquiring parents, whom Black students sought out for counsel, and whom the best students chose for my course on feminist literature through the ages. Jealous teachers prompted the headmistress, who had observed and admired one of my classes, to engineer my replacement for the second term. Anyone who thinks that mediocre teachers want good teachers on staff needs to think again.
When my wife and I were considering relocating to Las Cruces—she to enroll in the NMSU nursing program—we met with the English Department chair about my teaching writing or literature courses. Before we left, she said that we would talk again if and when we had moved to town; after we left, she emailed to advise us not to relocate here. We relocated, she declined to meet with me, and I was hired only in desperation to staff all writing classes. I surprised the director of writing classes when I asked her not to announce her visits to evaluate my teaching; she said that did not know that such visits were part of her job. The department did not care to help inexperienced graduate students in their first teaching assignment. After encountering the least capable and least committed students of my career, I declined reappointment.
New Mexico’s Public Education Department was no more encouraging. Despite four degrees, including a Master’s in secondary education, permanent teaching certification in New York, and years of diverse teaching, PED answered my inquiry about teaching by telling me that I would start at the lowest rung in the career ladder, like a recent graduate of a school of education. Anyone who thinks that the education establishment wants good teachers needs to think again; New Mexico prefers national guard troops.
• • •
My experiences are not typical. But if a former high-school and college English teacher with my record is not welcomed to teach in New Mexico schools or colleges, the message must be that the quality of teachers matters less than the quantity. Despite my love of teaching and my success, I would not return to teaching today. Indeed, I would warn teachers about entering the profession. In fact, circumstances and conditions are warning them before I can get a word in edgewise.
For Governors, legislators, state education departments, schools of education, school boards, and voters have made a mockery of public education. Most politicians know little or nothing about education and value it only for the political value of saying that they value education; you know, they say, “it’s all about the kids.” So I am not surprised that many are fleeing and others are avoiding education (like the plague against which the powers-that-be who respect them so little will not even allow them to self-protect).
Most current problems began with the success of the women’s liberation movement (which success I endorse). In pre-lib days, with few career opportunities in other fields, the best and the brightest had careers in education and nursing or work as librarians and paralegals. They set the standards in teaching. Principals—formerly, Principal Teachers—were former teachers and knew their schools and their staffs; they made evaluations based on daily knowledge and informed professional judgment. Meanwhile, school boards exploited teachers trapped by gender discrimination, by paying them on the cheap and relying on psychic benefits to make up the difference.
When women’s lib freed them to enter more attractive careers, the education establishment, school boards in particular, failed to make adjustments to maintain standards, ensure a professional environment, and increase salaries to be competitive with salaries in the fields which the best and the brightest entered. Two primary results of their failures were that mediocrities, who wanted steady jobs, steady paychecks, and union protection from administrative abuses and justified dismissal for incompetence, replaced them, and that student academic performance then began its steady decline.
The education establishment responded to vigorous complaints from business and industry by compounding these mistakes. It adopted approaches to teaching entirely inappropriate because they were modeled on business/industrial models. It imposed regimented curriculums, and prescribed and proscribed instructional methods, teacher evaluations based on student test scores, and performance-based or merit-pay schemes of pay or rewards. It terminated psychic benefits. Yet the decline in student academic performance continued. Yet no one admitted or addressed the underlying problems: the mediocrity of teachers, the failure of schools of education to graduate better ones, and measly, mixed-up curriculums to accommodate the deficiencies of the mediocrities.
At the high-school level, with greater emphasis on science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health (STEMH), teachers of the humanities have been most adversely affected. English teachers who might have enjoyed teaching novels and plays found themselves teaching snippets; Hamlet reduced to the “To be or not to be” soliloquy. This game of Trivial Pursuit is not any reasonable person’s idea of an education, but the education establishment no longer knows what an education is or what is it for, other than entry-level job training. No one should be surprised at teachers’ demoralization, their rate of resignation or retirement, and others’ avoidance of the profession.
• • •
The progressive deterioration not only of K-12 public education, but also K-12 private education—where do private schools think that they can get teachers better than those in public schools?—is irreversible without three radical—meaning “root”—reforms.
The first reform is to make teaching a profession in four ways. One, open teaching to all those interested and having subject-matter competence, whether acquired in school or on the job. The idea that certain people are not suited to teach, like intellectuals or former military personnel, reflects anti-intellectual and anti-military stereotyping. The idea that courses in methods are necessary to teach effectively is a lie demonstrated by declining academic performance, though a few courses can help some in presentation techniques and classroom management. Demonstrated competence on independently designed, administered, and scored subject-matter tests, not graduation from a school of education, should be the determining criterion for a professional license.
Two, delegate greater authority to principals in hiring, retaining, promoting, and firing teachers. They should have the authority and responsibility to develop competent staffs of teachers and to reward and punish their performance. Establish standards for judging the conduct and performance of principals because of their greater authority and responsibility, and hold them accountable. Appoint an inspector general dedicated to protecting teachers and directly accessible to them, with power to act.
Three, give teachers great latitude in teaching their classes. They should be free to use whatever effective, efficient, but respectful means works for them, not required to teach according to a prescribed process or template. Teacher evaluation should consider classroom performance, not pedagogical approach, and overall student performance, not test scores only or even mainly, with allowance for new, promising teachers to grow.
Four, raise salaries to be competitive with those in other professionals requiring comparable education. The higher salaries should be phased in by giving them to recruits meeting the higher standards of state tests and to current teachers who meet them (minimum score: 95; no more than one re-take by anyone).
The second reform is to restructure curriculums, most importantly English, to make them comprehensive and sequential. These curriculums should be designed by subject-matter experts experienced in teaching at each grade level. Personnel in departments of education and schools of education should have no leadership role in the development of these curriculums and be in a minority on all curriculum committees. They have demonstrated their incompetence by misunderstanding what a curriculum is, what it should include, and how it should be structured. Witness Common Core State Standards.
The third reform is to reorient all curriculums for training teachers in state schools of education. The reorientation should require schools of education to implement the state subject-matter curriculums and focus course and practicum work on subject-matter mastery according to those curriculums at the grade level at which prospective teachers expect to teach. Currently, schools of education make no effort to prepare elementary school teachers for teaching the fundamentals of English, social studies, mathematics, and science. Persistently atrocious proficiency scores in reading and mathematics in fourth and eighth grades are proof positive of their failure.
• • •
I end with an autobiographical story, again to make a point—in fact, more than one. At Michigan, I taught, among other courses, a first-year course in expository writing with assignments based, not on essays in a collection, but on a half dozen Shakespeare plays. I had asked my supervising professor to observe without giving notice, to see me teach as I taught, not teach like those who prepared to perform. The play was 1Henry IV. I came to class with the text and a few notes on main points. I had not planned to give a quiz—I always took attendance,—so I gave none. I led off with a question and for the next 45 minutes students responded to questions and follow-ups from me—I required defenses of all answers, right or wrong—and questions or challenges from classmates. Throughout, I managed the discussion to cover my main points so that they emerged from discussion. With 2 minutes to go, I summarized the discussion to make the main points explicit take-aways.
After the class ended and the students departed, my supervising professor gave me his response. He was stunned; he had never seen a class like mine. For the first 43 minutes, he had seen me manage the discussion, which involved everyone, voluntarily or, in a few cases, not, but he had no idea where I or it was going. My summation made it clear to him that I knew exactly where I and it was going from the start.
The point is that I knew my subject cold, I knew exactly what I wanted to cover in the discussion, yet I led it in a way which encouraged interest and participation because discussion seemed to unfold naturally. Moreover, the department not only gave great latitude to teaching fellows, but also provided supervision (unlike NMSU). It prescribed nothing about how or what to do to cover the subject matter; instead, it trusted the competence and dedication of those who aspired to teaching.
Not all of my classes were as successful as this one was (though few were much below the mark), and not all topics lent themselves to such discussions. But no teacher should enter a class without subject-matter competence, self-confidence, and a commitment to “stand and deliver.” No teacher at any grade level should be hampered by top-down diktats or harassed by local micro-managers to achieve desired educational results.
Until America trains professionals, trusts professionals, and treats and compensates professionals like professionals, teaching will remain a career for a diminishing number of teachers, disproportionately mediocre, with student performance no less mediocre.
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