This time, emphasize teachers - Daily Press:
This time, emphasize teachers
Last week, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was reauthorized and gives us an opportunity to discuss education reform now in a positive, forward-thinking manner. Many of the concerns heavy on our minds these days — unrest in parts of the world and global economic disparities — are challenges we will not resolve completely and will pass on to our children. Therefore, we must strive to create the best education system possible so they may address these problems as well as others that will inevitably arise.
Let us envision what that system should be. Of course we want our children to develop knowledge and skills useful to the workplace and to their roles as members of society. Students need the ability to read for comprehension, analysis, and synthesis, and the ability to write for explanation, comparison, and persuasion. But we also want students to develop mindsets that we value: tolerance of differences, openness to multiple perspectives, curiosity about the world, and creativity.
Fourteen years ago we had similar high hopes with the No Child Left Behind Act. But we have seen stagnated or diminished performance on state, national, and international assessments. Achievement gaps have been sustained with white and Asian students outperforming black and Hispanic students. The population of subgroups that are at risk of underachievement, such as English language learners and students living in poverty, has grown. Even the latest news that U.S. high school graduation rates have improved nonetheless reveals that rates for most minorities, English language learners and special education students are below the national average.
What can we do differently this time around? We know that teacher quality makes a difference for students. ESEA has eliminated the "highly qualified teacher" requirement from its language, but that does not mean we need to eliminate quality teaching from our schools.
Stories abound about the effect one teacher had on one famous person. But imagine a broader universe in which all students have effective teachers, not just one for one year, but multiple effective teachers, each year, for each subject area.
How do we accomplish this? It won't be easy. The teaching profession is not attractive these days. Low pay and losing 25 days per year to test prep and administration is disheartening to creative young people who want to make a difference in schools. ESEA may relieve some of these practices but we still have a long way to go. The fact that teacher salaries in the U.S. are only 60 percent of those of others with college degrees is an even stronger disincentive. The average starting salary for a teacher is $36,000 while that of a business major is $50,000 and of an engineer, $65,000.
For those who show in interest in becoming teachers, we do not prepare them well. The traditional model of three and a half years of coursework and a semester of student teaching does not do justice to the variety of instructional programs and classroom compositions that teacher graduates will find.
