Honig Goes to College Hoping to Bag Teachers

“Seven math teachers!” proclaimed state School Supt. Bill Honig exuberantly as he walked away from a meeting on Thursday with about 150 students at California State University, Northridge.

“If I can bag seven math teachers, this is really a successful day,” said Honig, who had just spoken to a small contingent of math majors who said they were thinking of classroom careers.

In recent months, Honig has been visiting college campuses around the state trying to persuade Northridge students and others like them that they should become teachers.

Over the next decade, California’s public schools will need an estimated 160,000 new teachers, because of a rising enrollment and a graying in the ranks. Many who flocked into the profession to teach the children of the post-World War II baby boom now are nearing retirement age.

Finding those new instructors won’t be easy. Teaching is perceived by many college students as a low-status, low-paying job that, among other things, requires being cooped up all day with a roomful of children. In surveys taken several years ago, only 4% of college freshmen expressed an interest in teaching, down from 22% in the mid-1960s.

‘People Who Can Communicate’

Honig also made clear he isn’t seeking just warm bodies to stand in front of a blackboard.

“We need people who have a contagious enthusiasm for their subject, people who have that ability to make a connection with students, people who can communicate what they know. And we need that all in one package,” he said.

Upon taking office in 1983, Honig insisted on a high cutoff score on the new statewide test for teachers, and on Thursday, he told the potential recruits that he would keep pushing to have incompetent teachers removed from the schools.

This year, for the first time, the Cal State universities will require that students in the education schools have grade-point averages that are above the campus norm.

But the higher standards don’t appear to be driving away new students. In fact, college and state officials are no longer talking about a disastrous shortage of new teachers by the end of this decade.

“Things have turned around, and our enrollments are heading upward. Everyone wants to join a more exclusive club,” said Carolyn Ellner, dean of education at Cal State Northridge.

About 2,500 students on the San Fernando Valley campus--nearly a tenth of the total enrollment--are preparing for education careers.

Among the 19 Cal State campuses, enrollment in education schools this year jumped 18% over a year ago, said Linda Bunnell Jones, dean of academic studies for the Cal State system.

College officials say the higher starting salaries for teachers--now about $20,000 per year--have helped, as has an increased public focus on the importance of education.

Bucking the stereotype that today’s students are seeking only prestigious, big-money careers, those at the Northridge meeting said they were attracted to teaching by the prospect of helping others. Ramona Wallace, a junior, said her parents wanted her to become a lawyer. But through a special program at Northridge, she got a chance to work as an aide in a Los Angeles public school classroom and is now hooked on teaching.

Likes Working with Children

“I found I liked working with children, and I was good at it,” she said.

Joyanne Glassmire, a senior heading into a year of student teaching, said she worked with children at a YMCA camp and developed a liking for teaching.

“My parents are against it. My mother taught and hated the conditions in the high schools. And you tell your friends you are going to become a teacher and they say, ‘Oh.’ ”

But she, like Wallace, said it was working with children that convinced her to pursue a teaching career.

The United Teachers of Los Angeles, in cooperation with UCLA, wants to give a lot more students such an opportunity in the next two months. The teachers union has been signing up college students to spend one day working with a teacher in a city classroom.

“There are a lot of bad aspects to teaching, but there are personal things you get out of it that you can’t put a price on,” said union President Wayne Johnson, formerly a Hamilton High School social studies teacher. Several hundred area college students have already signed up to spend a day with a teacher in April or May, he said.

The Los Angeles Unified School District could use all of them. District officials say they need to hire 2,675 new instructors for the coming year. Because of the burgeoning school population, they also expect the demand to continue at that rate for at least the next five years.

Math, Science, Language

School officials throughout Los Angeles County say the need is especially acute for teachers in mathematics, science, English and bilingual education.

But what about those bad aspects of teaching, one student asked Thursday. Honig and the other instructors at the meeting took turns describing the unpleasant side of the job.

“You are on stage all day, and it is incredibly tiring. You wouldn’t realize that unless you’ve tried it once,” said Honig, a lawyer-turned-teacher from San Francisco.

The others, who included several “mentor teachers” from the Los Angeles schools, noted that most kids are “apathetic” and some are downright unruly. The classes are too large, they said. And the salaries, though better than a few years ago, are still not good.

That should have been enough to dissuade many, but several students who were undecided on a career said after Thursday’s session that they were leaning toward teaching.