A Revolving Door for Teachers

Matthew Yglesias asks, “Is an Education Revolving Door Such a Bad Thing?”  Yglesias’ premise is that if alternative certification processes for teachers were more prevalent, we would undoubtedly see a large upswing in turnover among teachers, as individuals put in a couple of years and then move on to other professions. Yglesias says this isn’t such a bad thing and I agree with him 100%.

Teaching is such a sensitive career to discuss because these people carry so much responsibility for our children. Through high school our kids spend more of their waking moments in the care of teachers than us.  After we parents, teachers are arguably the most influential people in our children’s lives, at least for the early years. Many parents can probably sympathize with me that you occasionally want to strangle your child when they disagree with you by saying, “Well, Mrs. Smith says…” So many of us have a lot of respect for teachers and the work they do. Hearing horrible stories about problem students or problem schools just makes us all the more sympathetic. We want teachers to be well-paid for the work they do and as parents we want them to be good at their jobs.

That last part is the hardest one to talk about. Thanks to tenure and the active role of teachers’ unions, it’s often hard to know just who the really bad teachers are. In other professions we know who the bad ones are because they never get promoted or because they get canned. In teaching though, poor educators can stick around for decades, often making it hard to determine who the among them are so we can reward them. And even then, the notion of ‘rewards’ is criticized as unfair to the other teachers. I’ve always liked this quote from fictional character Sam Seaborn on the West Wing:

“Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. ”

Think about that. “Competition for the best teachers should be fierce.” What if we could successfully create a system where teachers could function the way the best people do in other professions, like free agents who could trumpet their successes and command high salaries while delivering fantastic results? I wonder if, as part of that equation, we could begin to allow college-educated individuals who do not hold teaching certificates to compete for these jobs as well? Would that make the competition all the more ‘fierce’?

The way that teaching programs are structured today, someone can major in Interpretive Dance and so long as they take a couple required courses they can teach math or history or chemistry to our kids. I have a lot of trouble with that scenario. As an archaeologist I used to help run workshops for teachers where we tried to demonstrate to them that kids benefited greatly from educational opportunities outside of the classroom. We looked at our role as academics engaged in an academic pursuit and possible partners with these teachers. I once had a skeptical principal suggest that we were not trained well enough to pass our knowledge on to their students. I asked her, “Would you rather have your students taught by a teaching program graduate with 6 hours of history classes under their belt, or by an archaeologist with 60 hours of history classes and several years of practical experience in the field?”

To get back to Yglesias’ original point, yes, I think that providing more opportunities for alternative certification is a good thing, even if it means higher turnover. Imagine a teaching candidate who puts in 4 years of undergrad work, then 12 months of teacher training. We would have to assume at that point they are pretty invested in the process and their career. Only then do we actually put them into classrooms and give them an opportunity to be certain they have the right skills, temperament and drive to be a good teacher. Many may have doubts after that experience but stick with it anyway because they are already invested. 5 years later they are facing burnout in a job they hate and our children suffer. I certainly don’t want my kids to be in their class that year.

An alternative scenario is one where we take biology majors or history majors or English majors, fresh out of college, still passionate about their fields and give them an intense crash course of 12 weeks of classroom experience (maybe teaching summer school) accompanied with instruction on teaching techniques. Then we put them in a classroom and let them got to it, with sufficient oversight and maybe providing a veteran teacher as a mentor. Let this candidate teach for a couple of years and if they leave the classroom for another career in a lab, or as an editor or as a chemist. What have we lost? Some training time and a teaching candidate. What we would have gained though is two years of passionate teaching from someone that would have gone straight to corporate America under the old system. We might also have 100 kids who this teacher impacted with their enthusiasm for the subject matter. Those are the kind of teachers that successful adults thank when they accept awards. I would much rather have one of my kids taught by that guy for a year, even if he is a bit unorganized or unpolished and makes a few mistakes…rather than the teaching program graduate who is 5 years in and running on autopilot.

Under a system like this, we could also have some of the brightest minds in their fields take time off to teach for a year or two. I could even envision a scenario where their employers gave them a paid sabbatical as a sort of ‘charitable donation’ to the community. Even if these brightest minds are a little rough around the edges in the teaching methods, kids are going to benefit through osmosis if nothing else. We don’t even have to call them teachers. Call them mentors. There was a day when that word meant a lot.

There are a more than a few people out there…myself included…that would love to teach, even if just for a few years, and feel that we are being denied that option because of established bureaucracy. Meanwhile our schools suffer and our kids’ educations suffer as well. I think that system could use some repairs. By opening the doors to more people, we have the opportunity to bring an elite class of intellectuals into the classroom, if only for a short time. That is going to create an exciting environment and one our children can benefit from.