Better pay, more time to plan and one other thing teachers want from you
Amid a shortage of teachers in California, a new report calls for attracting more people to the profession by making teaching more prestigious.
(Anthony Russo / For The Times)
en Arielle Bourguignon started teaching at 24th Street Elementary in Jefferson Park about two years ago, she felt UCLA's education school had prepared her well.
But if it were up to her, she would change the perception of her profession. “Some people see us as glorified babysitters,” she said.
Jane Fung, a veteran, award-winning kindergarten teacher at Belvedere Elementary in East L.A., would change something else. “I would make sure that elementary and middle school teachers have a period off where they could either prep or collaborate,” she said. “It should be embedded into our profession."
Changing the teaching profession by making it more prestigious and giving teachers more planning time are just two proposals that are part of a new report from the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington. The report, which was provided to The Times and is being released Tuesday, calls for a comprehensive overhaul of the pipeline for becoming a teacher and staying in the classroom.
The report, written by former Obama administration official and current CAP Executive Vice President Carmel Martin, CAP's teacher policy director Lisette Partelow and CAP's vice president of education policy Catherine Brown, points out different ways to make teaching a more desirable profession. It calls for making teacher preparation programs more selective, requiring licensing exams to be more relevant, increasing teacher salaries, paying better teachers more, making tenure more meaningful, and reorganizing the school day so that teachers have more time to plan.
The individual proposals have been suggested previously by various groups, but the report ties these ideas together. “We think there is this almost perfect storm that is about to hit the education sector in that there’s this broad consensus that we dramatically raise the bar,” Martin said in an interview. “We need to make some radical changes in how the profession is organized.”
The report comes amid a teacher shortage in California, though not in L.A. Last year, the California Department of Education estimated that the state would be short 21,482 Better pay, more time to plan and one other thing teachers want from you - LA Times:
