Panel Calls for Improving Teachers’ Professionalism

If America’s schools are going to fully educate the nation’s children to compete in a world economy, the teaching profession will have to be raised to a level comparable to medicine, law or accounting, a national panel of businessmen, educators and government officials has concluded.

The Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, in a report made public today, said it will support an ambitious 10-year effort to elevate teaching into a full-fledged profession that attracts and holds its share of top talent.

But instead of echoing past calls for higher salaries and smaller classes, the report suggests a radically transformed school system in which a few highly trained teachers would guide the work of many.

The foundation’s goal is not just to be kind to teachers. Rather, its members say that a highly competitive, technological economy requires changes in education that are as profound as the changes occurring in the workplace.

“In schools where students are expected to master routine skills and acquire routine knowledge, (these) can be packaged in texts and teachers can be trained to deliver the material . . . with reasonable efficiency,” the report says. But a fast-changing economy where fundamental technologies change each decade requires workers “with a much higher order of skills” who are “prepared for the unexpected, the non-routine world they will face in the future.”

The report will get a full-blown send-off this weekend at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego at a meeting of governors, state legislators, business leaders and scientists, all of whom say they endorse the call for upgrading the teaching profession.

Just beneath the surface, however, the group’s members disagree sharply on how to do that.

American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker, a task force member, favors a “radical restructuring” of schools so that highly trained and highly paid teachers, certified by a national accrediting board, would be in charge of teams of less-qualified instructors. Some children would work with computers, some would write or read on their own, while still others would work in small groups with the lower-paid instructors.

A New Vision

“What you have here is a vision for a totally new school system, for teachers and for children,” said Shanker, who praised the report for “avoiding the usual slogans of ‘raise the salaries, reduce class sizes and give teachers more free time.’ ” Simply raising everyone’s salary “is just impossible. It won’t happen,” he said.

As an alternative, education should be structured like the health-care industry, he said.

“If the medical profession had said everybody who deals with a patient must be an MD, with no nurses, technicians or clerks, we would have 8 million doctors--all earning nurses’ salaries,” Shanker said in a telephone interview.

However, the much larger National Education Assn. says the best way to upgrade teaching is to set higher salaries and higher entrance standards for all teachers.

‘Deep Reservations’

NEA President Mary Hatwood Futrell, also a task force member, said in an addendum to the report that she had “deep reservations” about some of its recommendations. In particular, she disagreed with the attempt to make “some teachers more equal than others.”

The Carnegie task force, chaired by Lewis Branscomb, IBM vice president and chief scientist, recommended the following:

- That a national board for professional teaching standards create an examination board--beginning as a voluntary arrangement--to certify the best teachers.

- That schools provide a more “professional environment for teachers,” freeing them from bureaucratic dictates but “holding them accountable for student progress.”

- That schools introduce a new category of “lead teachers”--with salaries as high as $72,000 a year--who would be in charge of “the redesign of the schools.”

- That states and colleges drop the bachelor’s degree in education and require teachers to have a degree in arts or sciences “as a prerequisite for the professional study of teaching.” In the early 1970s, California adopted this idea, requiring teachers to have a bachelor’s degree before starting teacher training programs.

- That schools make greater use of technology--both for teaching and record-keeping--to increase the productivity of teachers.

- That salaries for top teachers be made competitive with those of other professions.

The past three years have seen a proliferation of reports on the teaching profession. Many authors have pointed out that attempts to reform the schools will fall flat if teachers are ignored, or even embittered, by new state or local standards.

Last November, for example, a 17-member California commission, also composed of business and government leaders, urged that teachers be given more control over the schools. With the state facing a projected shortage of 110,000 teachers in the next decade, the panel also said teacher salaries should be raised--to as much as $57,000 a year--and the size of classes reduced.

Legislation Opposed

State Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara) tried to put many of the recommendations into law, but has run into unexpected opposition from the California Teachers Assn., the largest affiliate of the NEA. His bill called for gradually reducing high school academic classes to 20 students, doubling the number of higher-paid “mentor teachers” and setting up a voluntary “peer evaluation” system to give teachers a voice in hirings and dismissals.

CTA officials blasted the bill for its “piecemeal” attempt to make smaller classes and for its “ill-conceived and dangerous” plan to let some teachers judge others.

The Carnegie task force, whose members include New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, former North Carolina Gov. James Hunt and California school Supt. Bill Honig, believes that it will have the political clout and enough money to keep its proposals alive.

Historic Success

It also can point to past success in transforming another profession. In 1910, educator Abraham Flexner recommended, in a Carnegie-backed study, that doctors be required to go through a rigorous period of preparation, both academic and practical.

“That historic Carnegie contribution has paid incalculable benefits to America and its people,” said task force chairman Branscomb. “We are confident that improvements in the preparation of teachers and the conditions under which they labor will prove as significant to the country and its children.”