The Teacher’s Lot

American schools need more and better teachers. They aren’t getting them--and aren’t likely to--because they still overwork, underpay and mismanage the ones whom they have. As a result, the brightest college students say “Forget it” when urged to major in education. How to turn this situation around is the fundamental question facing U.S. education today. There are some answers, but they’re going to cost money, take time and require greater cooperation between public schools and American universities.

How many teachers are needed? Estimates are that California alone must train 85,000 new teachers by the end of the decade. Times staff writer Anne C. Roark found that, for the national goal to be reached, 23% of all college graduates will have to go into teaching each year instead of the 5% who now do.

The salaries of teachers have been improving as a result of recent reform efforts, but college graduates can still make more money in many other fields. Women are less likely to become teachers than they were a generation ago because they have many more opportunities. College graduates can also get more respect and less hassle in many other jobs. Teachers today must often deal with students who are on drugs, process piles of reports and work for administrators who treat them “not as adults but like big kids,” said one woman who quit after two years of teaching. The dedicated teacher who survives does so because of deep satisfaction when a child lights up at a poem or a painting, when a child is intrigued by mathematics or music.

There are efforts on various campuses and in the California Legislature to try to improve the picture. For example, California State University, which trains about 70% of the state’s new teachers, is working on recruiting more potential teachers, especially members of minorities, and retaining them once they are trained. Professors from Cal State Los Angeles work with students at Crenshaw High School to encourage them to go into teaching. Two other Cal State campuses--Hayward and San Diego--are cooperating with their local school districts to help rookie teachers through their early years in the classroom because statistics show that most teachers who quit do so in their first three years.

There is also a major project under way at Stanford University to try to draw up national standards for teaching. The project, sponsored by the Carnegie Corp., also seeks to develop ways to test whether teachers know the subject that they are teaching and how to teach it.

The Legislature has before it now a program that could make a big difference. Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) has proposed a statewide program that would include guidance and evaluation for newcomers by more experienced teachers. Preparing tests for these new teachers and providing the evaluators would cost about $20 million a year.

Bergeson had planned to require that local school districts also lighten new teachers’ class schedules so that they would have more time to prepare their lessons, with the state paying the districts to hire extra people to cover the lost time. That could run $40 million a year, but the requirement has been removed from the bill. There is talk of trying pilot projects to study whether this approach works, although every report in recent years--including one by California’s own Commission on the Teaching Profession--has agreed that new teachers need extra help. The time for study is past; the time for doing is here.

California faces one giant problem in dealing with its shortage of top-notch teachers: Not even the most modest programs can be undertaken because of Gann spending limits. The June ballot will contain a proposal to loosen those limits. One lesson of any look at teacher training is that, for any wholesale changes to start, the first step must be the passage of that ballot initiative.