Tim Slekar on the Exodus of Schoolteachers from Their Chosen Profession
Tim Slekar is the Dean of the College of Education at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. Early in September, Slekar was interviewed on Wisconsin Public Radio, an interview recommended to me by a public school teacher who said it is the best statement she has heard of the truth about public education today.
You can listen to Slekar explain what is described in many places as a growing shortage of public school teachers. Slekar believes we are not merely experiencing a shortage of teachers; what is happening instead is an exodus of public school teachers from their chosen profession. If it were a classic labor shortage, explains Slekar, pay would be raised, conditions would be made better, and enrollment in teacher training programs would grow. All of this would attract more people to teaching, according to how a labor market is supposed to work. But, argues Slekar, fewer and fewer people now want to be schoolteachers. He explains that in his office, he has listened as parents of his college students beg their children to choose another profession instead.
Slekar believes that teachers are being driven out of the profession by the impossibility of working under the conditions imposed by test based school accountability, a strategy designed to be punitive. The goal was to make teachers work harder and smarter for fear their schools would receive a low rating. Test based accountability was a bipartisan strategy designed in the 1990s and cast into law in 2002 in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which required schools to test students annually in grades 3-8 and once in high school. Schools were then judged by their aggregate test scores, and the lowest scoring schools were punished.
Slekar also has a blog, Busted Pencils, where he has covered this subject extensively. In a post last April, Slekar declares: “Accountability—loved by Democrats and Republicans—has almost become a religious movement. In fact the idea of even questioning the usefulness of test based accountability can cause enraged panic in accountability zealots. ‘How will we know what CONTINUE READING: Tim Slekar on the Exodus of Schoolteachers from Their Chosen Profession | janresseger