Popularity Low : Teaching--Poor Marks as a Career

Teaching is not a popular profession today. Not nearly enough college graduates go into it, and those who do usually are not the best the universities have to offer.

That is the unhappy conclusion of a number of recent reports on the status of public education in America.

One report comes from the College Entrance Examination Board. According to its latest comparisons of student test data, those planning to major in education ranked fourth from the bottom on a list of about two dozen intended college majors. Only those students going into three other disciplines did worse on college entrance exams: technical-vocational fields, home economics and public affairs.

Likewise, a survey released in January by the American Council on Education and the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that this year’s college freshmen who said they want to go into teaching were the least likely of all college students to have been A or A- students during their high school years.

Profound Significance

The significance of these findings is potentially profound, wrote USC Profs. James Ferris and Donald Winkler in a recent study of the profession.

What education researchers have found time and again is that students’ achievement in school may well be closely tied to the academic abilities of their teachers.

If true, then should teachers accept much of blame for the failures of public education in America?

Middle-class parents in particular have been quick to criticize their children’s teachers, saying that classroom instructors are ultimately responsible for the education their children receive--or don’t receive--and that, by and large, schoolchildren in the United States have not received the quality of education they deserve.

Are such concerns justified? Are the bulk of teachers today as bad as so many parents seem to think?

Public policy makers, having dissected and analyzed virtually every other aspect of public schooling over the last decade, are now beginning to focus their attention on such questions. Over the last two years, they have convened conferences, undertaken surveys and commissioned reports on the conditions of teaching and the education of teachers.

Perhaps the reason that there has been so much recent attention focused on teacher preparation is that there are “so many problems,” said Patrick M. Callan, executive director of the Education Commission on the States.

“The only thing odd about this (recent attention),” Callan said, “is that, with all the talk of education reform, it has only been in the past year or two that we have gotten around to looking at who goes into teaching and how they may or may not be prepared for assuming those roles.”

What the researchers and analysts are finding, he said, is fairly obvious and not at all heartening: The profession is one that overworks, underpays and mismanages its workers to a point that the most talented are the ones who are most likely to leave.

True, experts say, there has been a recent surge of interest from some unexpected quarters, namely from older people leaving other professions to take up teaching. Nonetheless, there are so many serious problems associated with attracting talented people to meet the future needs of the public schools that the situation is bound to get worse before it gets better--if it ever does.

There is a certain sameness to the recent laments about the problems of teaching, said Alexander W. Astin, a professor of education at UCLA who directs the American Council on Education’s annual survey of student aspirations and academic preparation.

Not Top Attraction

Time was, many people say, when teaching attracted truly dedicated, well-educated people. In fact, Astin argued, “teaching has never attracted the best and the brightest.”

In the public schools, the exceptional teacher has always been “the exception and not the rule,” said Geraldine Jonchich Clifford, former chairman of Berkeley’s department of education and now a historian of education.

“Teaching in its history has never been an elite profession,” Clifford said. “And that’s true all the way back to ancient Greece. Of course, there have always been some stars. Socrates, of course, comes to mind. But, by and large, teachers have been seen as ne’er-do-wells. They have always been part of declasse groups.”

Which is, of course, why so many women have become teachers, Clifford said.

Women, after all, have never been high on the occupational totem pole; they have often done jobs men did not want to do, she explained. Since teaching has not been a sought-after profession, it was probably inevitable that women would become teachers.

Don’t Stay Long

That is not to say there have not been some very smart, very talented women who have gone into teaching over the years. But, in many cases, they have not stayed in it long enough to make much of an impact, said Judith E. Lanier, dean of education at Michigan State University.

“From the turn of the century, teaching has been a piecemeal, haphazard enterprise, largely because women did it before getting on to the more important business of raising families and men did it while waiting to pursue higher aspirations,” she said.

Helen LeMaire, a 51-year-old elementary school teacher in Cypress Park, a small community in northeast Los Angeles, is typical of what might be considered the older generation of women teachers.

She began teaching in the 1960s largely because, at the time, she said, there were few other options open to her.

Unlike many of her generation, however, LeMaire stuck with her decision.

Gets a ‘Promotion’

She stayed, she said, despite the crime-ridden ghettos where she was sent as an inexperienced teacher and the barrio schools where she was later “promoted” but had to learn (on her own time and with her own money) another language just to conduct parent-teacher conferences.

For 16 years, LeMaire stayed despite the salaries and the bureaucratic hassles. She stayed, she said, simply because she “loved teaching.”

Today, however, faced with the behavioral problems that come from broken families, the learning disabilities that result from drug abuse and the indifference and hostility of many parents, even this dedicated and successful teacher is tired and talks of doing something else.

Having been retrained in what she thinks is an effective new system of teaching phonetics (again, on her own time and with her own money), she dreams of leaving the public school classroom to become a private tutor for students with learning difficulties.

“It’s not that I stopped loving teaching,” LeMaire commented recently. “I don’t think that will ever happen to me. But it’s just a matter of what everyone talks about in the schools--burnout.

“This is a tough job and no one can do it forever.”

Leave if They Can

If they can leave, they will. That is the consensus of many people who enter the teaching profession today.

“If conditions aren’t good but there is nothing else to do, chances are workers will stay in their jobs, no matter what those jobs are,” said Lew Solomon, an economist who is dean of the School of Education at UCLA. “Today, conditions in teaching are bad and there are plenty of other options--at least for young people coming along with any talent.

“Because I am an economist,” Solomon said, “I see things from an economist’s point of view. And, basically, I think teaching has fallen on hard times for several economic reasons:

“First, sex discrimination subsidized teaching for a long time,” he said. In other words, women, who wanted to enter the work force but could not get jobs elsewhere were forced to accept low wages in the handful of professions that were open to them.

“That is no longer true today. We have opened doors other than teaching and nursing for women. The result is,” he said, “that most women who want to work or need to work don’t have to teach. They can do something else, for better pay and more prestige. So, we are now left with a group that is not necessarily the brightest, the most ambitious or the most energetic.”

Civil Rights Impact

The civil rights movement has also had an impact on teaching in a number of surprising ways, Solomon said.

Efforts to get minority groups and other underprivileged individuals into the mainstream of American life meant first getting them into and through the nation’s education system. For teachers, that meant no longer instructing just privileged, upper- and middle-class white students who were well prepared for school and well motivated to learn. It meant that “teachers had to do more”--and sometimes a great deal more--”than just teach,” Solomon said.

“We have expanded our view of what schools are and should do,” he said. “Schools have become instruments of social and health policy.”

In other words, teachers do not just teach poetry and the multiplication tables. They must cope with many of society’s most serious problems, from divorce to racial integration, from drug abuse to immigration. They must teach students to adapt to a world that is, for some, quite foreign and, for many, quite hostile.

Faced with such difficulties, many teachers are not only leaving the profession long before retirement age, they are dissuading their own students from following in their footsteps even for a short time.

“Time was when you urged your better students to go into teaching at least for a few years until they figured out what they wanted to do with their lives. Now you don’t even do that,” said a black teacher from the Los Angeles Unified School District who was participating in a conference last year at UCLA organized by Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica).

Put in a Real Bind

“What’s so sad about the situation,” she said, “is that it puts minority folks in a real bind because we’ve got such a shortage of black teachers. Same is true for Hispanic teachers. And yet we’ve got black and Hispanic kids coming out our ears. Those kids need role models. I mean, they need them in the worst way. But, considering the conditions under which I work--under which we all work--I can’t stand up and tell even one of my black kids to go into teaching if there is anything else they can do with their lives.”

And there is an abundance of other jobs open to black and Hispanic students. As a result, those entering the teaching profession today are, as were their predecessors, overwhelmingly white (90%). They are also predominantly female (two-thirds of the teaching force now and three-quarters of the prospective students). And they are, by and large, products of blue-collar families.

There are, however, anecdotal reports from schools of education that there may be a shift in the teaching population, away from the young females who have recently graduated from college and toward older men and women who have worked in other professions.

“Increasingly, we are seeing students we’ve never seen before,” said F. Louise Grindstaff, professor education at Cal State Northridge. “Lawyers, accountants. People who have done other things are now returning to school to become teachers.”

No one in the field can say with any certainty how many of these people there are or why they are leaving their professions for public school classrooms.

Reasons and Reasons

Some educators in university teacher-training programs have speculated privately that many of the transfers may be people who simply could not make it in other fields. “There are reasons and there are reasons,” one university professor said.

Some, however, seem to have come out of a genuine sense of commitment--they have, in a sense, “returned” to teaching because it was what they grew up with; their parents were teachers.

Daniel Freeman is one example.

Freeman, 32, entered teaching after having worked as a restaurant manager and in newspaper advertising. It was his father who was his role model for teaching.

“I don’t know why I did it,” Freeman said recently. “I just wanted to be a teacher.”

After three years at a public high school in the San Fernando Valley, Freeman, who has a master’s in education as well as a regular teaching credential, is already having second thoughts about his decision.

Can He Afford to Do It?

“It’s not that I don’t love teaching,” he said. “I do. It’s that I wonder if I can afford to do it.”

Taking into account all the prerequisites and the myriad requirements, it takes most people just about as long to get a master’s degree in teaching “as it does to become a lawyer, and yet a new teacher makes only a fraction of the starting salary of a new lawyer and their prospects for raises are, needless to say, comparatively dismal,” said Grindstaff, who was one of Freeman’s instructors at Cal State Northridge.

At $20,000 a year, he was making about 40% less last year, on the average, than other college graduates and considerably less than those with advanced training in other professional areas, Grindstaff said.

Recent salary increases in California and other states have boosted teacher morale but, in fact, have done little to close that gap.

The one bright spot in the picture for Freeman and others would seem to be that their salaries are for the equivalent of just nine months’ employment. As far as Freeman is concerned, however, having the summers off is simply a form of “forced unemployment.”

Anything for the Money

“You know what I did last summer just to make ends meet?” Freeman asked. “I did typing.

“If someone came up to me tomorrow and offered me good money--not outrageous money--I’d do it. Almost anything. If the salaries were equal--or even close--there’s no question, I’d stay in teaching. But we (he and his new wife, who is also a schoolteacher) would like to buy a house someday. Between us, we have three children to support. Besides that, you know what I’d really like right now? I would like just to get the muffler on my car fixed. And right now I can’t even do that.”

Despite such stories, enrollments in schools of education are on the rise. Many experts believe that the increase is the result of word getting out that, for the first time in years, there are now openings in many school districts.

The California State University, with its 19 campuses, is the largest training ground in the world for teachers, providing about 70% of all new teachers in California. In the last two years, the system as a whole reports that its applications have risen 30%. And the rise has come despite stiffer admission standards, which require those who enter teacher-training programs to be in the upper half of their college classes and have passed basic tests in reading, writing and mathematics.

All that would seem to be good news for the teaching profession. But, in fact, many experts predict that the supply of new teachers will fall far short of the demand over the next few years.

Need 204,000 More

If current work force estimates hold true, according to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, by 1991 the United States will need an additional 204,000 teachers on top of the 2.4 million men and women now in the classroom. According to a 1985 report titled “Who Will Teach Our Children,” about 85,000 new teachers will have to be trained in California alone by the end of the decade just to meet the needs of this state.

Translated, those figures suggest some sobering realities. Instead of 5% of the nation’s college graduates going into teaching each year, a staggering 23% will have to begin doing so before the 1980s come to an end.

In a recent article on teacher preparation, Michigan State’s Lanier and Judith W. Little, formerly of the Far West Laboratory and now an education professor at UC Berkeley, conclude that teaching may have become a victim of its own success. As more and more people are educated, they argue, there is an ever-rising demand for new teachers. But as the demand for teachers grows, so does the difficulty in finding enough high-quality people to fill those positions.

RANKING EDUCATION STUDENTS BY SAT SCORES

College-bound students taking the Scholastic Achievement Test are asked to indicate intended college majors. Here is how those indicating interest in education compare in combined verbal and math scores with some other intended majors.

Percentage Combined of Students SAT Score Intended Major Taking SAT (of possible 1600) Mathematics 1% 1077 Language and Literature 1% 1055 Philosophy and Religion 0% 998 Biological Sciences 3% 993 Arts: Visual and Performing 6% 883 Business and Commerce 23% 867 Education 6% 845 Public Affairs and Services 2% 804 Home Economics 0% 785 Technical and Vocational 2% 764

Source: College Entrance Examination Board THE TEACHING CORPS CALIFORNIA

Gender Men 34.0% Women 66.0% Age Average Age 43.3 Length of Service Average Years 15.6

Source: PACE analysis NATION

Gender Men 31.2% Women 68.8% Age Average Age 41.0 Length of Service Average Years 15.0

Source: National Education Assn. AVERAGE TEACHER SALARIES--SELECTED STATES *

1969-70 79-80 82-83 86-87 California $10,324 $18,020 $24,035 $31,170 Texas 7,277 14,132 19,550 25,308 New York 10,390 19,800 25,000 32,620 Illinois 9,569 17,601 22,315 28,430 Pennsylvania 8,858 16,520 21,178 27,429 Michigan 9,823 19,285 26,556 31,500 US Avg. 8,635 15,966 20,715 26,704

* These are large states with diversified economics and similar costs of living, according to National Education Assn. PROJECTED TEACHER NEEDS As enrollment in K-12 grades grows, the demand for additional teachers will grow. Officials suggest that the demand will surpass the available supply. CALIFORNIA’S PROJECTED TEACHER SHORTAGE

Demand Supply Shortfall Best Case 5 years 77,342 56,049 21,293 10 years 159,743 119,472 40,271 Worst Case 5 years 85,052 50,500 34,552 10 years 183,360 101,000 82,360

FACTORS THAT COULD WORSEN THE SHORTFALL AMONG TEACHERS Estimates of student enrollment growth could be low.

Estimated attrition rates among teachers may not reflect the number of teachers leaving the profession.

Proposals to reduce class size and toughen teacher-credentialing standards would result in increased needs for teachers and fewer certified teachers.

Source: PACE analysis