Randi Weingarten on the Freedom to Teach
Randi Weingarten delivered this speech this morning at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
The Freedom to Teach
Consider what teachers have recently said about why they teach:
“I teach because I want to change the world, one child at a time, and to show them to have passion and wonder in their learning.”
“I teach so the next generation will question—everything. The classroom should be a place where we set children’s minds free.”
“I teach because our democracy cannot survive without citizens capable of critical analysis.”
Why I felt called to teach is best summed up by this poster I have moved from office to office since I taught in the 1990s: “Teachers inspire, encourage, empower, nurture, activate, motivate and change the world.”
Teaching is unlike any other profession in terms of mission, importance, complexity, impact and fulfillment. Teachers getthe importance of their work. So do parents and the public. But teachers know that some people don’tget it—whether it’s the empty platitudes, or the just plain dissing. And this has taken a huge toll.
Teachers and others who work in public schools are leaving the profession at the highest rate on record. There were 110,000 fewer teachers than were needed in the last school year, almost doubling the shortage of 2015. All 50 states started the last school year with teacher shortages.
This is a crisis, yet policymakers have largely ignored it.
And it’s getting worse. Enrollment in teacher preparation programs is plummeting—dropping 38 percent nationally between 2008 and 2015.
More than 100,000 classrooms across the country have an instructor who is not credentialed. How many operating rooms do you think are staffed by people without the necessary qualifications? Or airplane cockpits? We should be strengthening teacher preparation programs, not weakening teacher licensure requirements, leaving new teachers less and less prepared. Why are we doing this to our kids?
Teaching has become so devalued that, for the first time in 50 years, a majority of parents say they don’t want their children to become teachers.
The challenge is not just attracting people to teaching. The United States must do a much better job of keeping teachers in the profession. Every year, nearly 300,000 leave the profession; two-thirds before retirement age. Attrition in teaching is higher than in nursing, law, engineering or architecture. Schools serving majorities of students of color and students living in poverty experience the highest teacher turnover rates. Losing so much expertise has an enormous negative impact on students’ education. The financial consequences are also steep—more than $2 billion annually, and that’s a conservative estimate.
It is a failure of leadership to discard so much experience and so much potential—and to lose so much money—to this endless churn.
We are losing the teacher diversity battle as well. A new analysis by the Brookings Institution found America’s teaching workforce, which is overwhelmingly white, is CONTINUE READING: Randi Weingarten on the Freedom to Teach | Diane Ravitch's blog
