The Pay Is Lousy. You Get No Respect. And You’re Second-Guessed Every Step of the Way. : Why Teach?

ON THE FIRST DAY of each semester, as many as 45 former teachers from Hawthorne High School get together for lunch and a few drinks to celebrate the fact that they’re not in school anymore. They call themselves the Freedom Club.

Mary Dykton is one of them. “I’m very happy to be out,” says Dykton, 59, who taught and counseled for almost 30 years before leaving Hawthorne in 1985. She offers a stinging indictment of the profession: “Nothing is rewarded. You are always going upstream.”

Every year, about 6 % of the country’s teachers drop out to do something else, according to the National Education Assn. New teachers are those most likely to leave the profession: State to state, from 25 % to 50 % quit within the first five years.

In a Metropolitan Life survey published in 1985, 60 % of the 500 former teachers polled said poor salary was the major reason they left. More than a third said working conditions caused them to quit. Thirty percent cited administration-related problems (those surveyed were able to give more than one major reason for dropping out). And 30 % also cited student-related problems.

Teachers and people who study them say such discontent is caused by a system that often prevents teachers from doing what they think is best for their students. Susan Rosenholtz, a professor of education at the University of Illinois and the author of a recent study of teachers’ attitudes, says teachers want to feel that they are in control.

They also want to feel that they have a future. Rosenholtz says the dearth of opportunity for professional growth and development is especially painful for experienced teachers. “Teachers have different needs at different times in their careers,” she says. “For example, beginning teachers need help with managing their students. Experienced teachers need more opportunities for learning.”

Yet despite low status, low pay and high frustration, 200,000 Californians are classroom teachers. The finest of them share a set of strategies for overcoming the hurdles and making the cost-benefit analysis come out on the side of the job they love. From moonlighting to finding a principal who will protect them from the system to negotiating the hazards of the first years of teaching, this is how three excellent veterans and one talented newcomer cope with the major stresses of teaching.

Teaching in the Red

IN HIS AUSTERE, tiered classroom at James A. Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, Ben Jimenez is all business. A long computer-generated paper banner hangs on the wall above his students as they hunch silently over a trigonometry quiz: “If you have tried to do something and failed, you are vastly better off than if you had tried to do nothing and succeeded.”

After the quizzes have been collected and Jimenez has gone over the correct answers, he reminds the class that there will be a test on Monday. “I’ll be here at 7 if you have any questions.”

The mood is lighter in Jimenez’s small classroom office. There are cartoons by Gary Larson on the walls, goofy pictures of animals and a certificate from his students that describes the 38-year-old as “the hunk of the math department.” A passing student spots her teacher’s new olive-green, cable-knit sweater. “Where did you get the sweater?” she asks. “The Gap? I bought one for my boyfriend--$19.99, right?”

“Right,” Jimenez answers. “Never pay full price.”

“Did you get the matching socks?”

“I couldn’t afford the socks,” he laughs.

Jimenez may be laughing, but he isn’t necessarily kidding. A Mexican-American born and raised in East L.A.--like most of his students--Jimenez shares credit with Jaime Escalante for the stereotype-smashing calculus program at Garfield. For 15 years, the two men have had spectacular success teaching advanced math to mostly underprivileged, mostly Latino youngsters. Although Escalante is better-known, because of the film “Stand and Deliver,” both teachers are among the best in the country by any measure, from student performance on the standardized Advanced Placement Test to peer evaluations. After 15 years of outstanding work, Jimenez makes about $47,000 a year, which is close to the maximum for Los Angeles teachers. The top salary in the Los Angeles Unified School District for a teacher--with at least 15 years of experience and a doctorate--is $49,970. In other local school districts, experienced teachers with graduate degrees make as much as $47,982 (Pomona) and as little as $39,991 (Compton). The national average for such a teacher is about $30,000 a year.

“What kind of message is society giving to our young people when a lawyer starts at $62,000 a year? A teacher doesn’t make that after 30 years,” says one teacher angrily.

But most teachers don’t start out angry about money. When Ben Jimenez started out, he didn’t think about it at all. His father, who didn’t finish high school, wanted Jimenez, the first member of his family to go to college, to become a dentist. Jimenez wanted only to teach math. Jimenez’s role model was Robert Drake, his geometry teacher at Theodore Roosevelt High School. “He was an easygoing fellow,” Jimenez says. “He got along with students very well, and I admired his classroom techniques.” (Jimenez has never told Drake that he inspired Jimenez to become a teacher. “I’m too embarrassed to tell him,” Jimenez says.)

The first thing that made Jimenez, like most young teachers, think twice about staying in the profession was his inexperience in managing a classroom. Jimenez says his study of educational theory at California State University at Los Angeles did little to prepare him for a real inner-city classroom. “What chance do you have to deal with the theories of Piaget and Montessori when you’ve got a kid who is kicking the trash can across the room?” he asks. During his first year, Jimenez had his only brush with classroom violence. A very large student, an ex-football player, stood up and challenged him to a fight. “I almost fainted,” Jimenez says. But the student didn’t know that. “Take your best shot,” Jimenez said. The student backed down.

After that year, Jimenez had grave doubts. “I thought it wasn’t for me,” he says. “You want to save the world. You want to help. But the kids are a bunch of little sharks. They’ll take advantage of you if they can.” Then he decided to go back and “kick some butt.” He returned on the first day with a list of rules: No chewing gum, no sharpening pencils during class, no speaking when he was speaking. He also borrowed a class-quieting technique from Drake. He started each class with a quiz. “I was real strict,” he says. “You have to set the tone.”

It wasn’t until recently that the financial constraints of teaching became an issue. Jimenez and his wife, Sara, decided that she would stay home with their 5-year-old son and newborn daughter at least until both children are in school. As a result, money is so tight that Jimenez has to moonlight.

No one knows for sure how common moonlighting is among teachers. Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, which represents 27,000 L.A. Unified teachers, estimates that 40 % of the district’s teachers have other jobs. “I went into a restaurant the other night, and my waiter was a teacher from Manchester Avenue Elementary School,” Johnson says. “He’s been teaching in the district six years, and he said, ‘This is the only way I can make ends meet.’ ”

Jimenez teaches a special math program for Garfield students during the summer at East Los Angeles College. During the school year, he teaches two nights a week at the college. Once, he considered taking a third job, in sales, but decided it would be unfair to his family to be absent so much. As it is, Jimenez spends about 30 hours a week in the classroom and about 20 additional hours on preparing lessons and grading papers.

The extra jobs allow him to do the teaching he loves, but at a price. The summer job means he has only four weeks of vacation--too little time, he says, to really relax before the new school year begins. The evening job means he has little or no time during the week with his family. “I leave the house at 6 o’clock in the morning, and I don’t get home until 10 o’clock at night. I can’t even see my kids grow up.”

In addition to moonlighting, Jimenez continues to take college courses to accumulate the 98 units he needs to reach the top of his pay category. A participant in the most recent L.A. Unified teachers’ strike, he thinks teachers’ salaries are still too low, especially when compared with those of administrators. (He was appalled to learn that the superintendent’s bodyguard/driver earned $90,000 in 1987, twice what the highest-paid teachers earned.) Jimenez would hate to stop teaching high school, where a good teacher can have an impact on young lives. But he sometimes contemplates getting his master’s degree and finding a more lucrative job at the community-college level.

For all his financial concerns, Jimenez has been better rewarded than many good teachers. Earlier this year, he laughs, he was at home, “just lying around and thinking about committing suicide” because of unpaid bills, when he got a call from someone claiming to be California Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig.

“This has got to be a joke,” Jimenez said when the caller, who was in fact Honig, told Jimenez that he had been named one of California’s six top teachers. The award, which Escalante received in 1988, included a prize of $25,000.

Jimenez’s students proposed he spend it on them at Shakey’s. Instead, he used it to pay off credit-card debt and to remodel a bathroom in his Glendora house. Of his windfall, Jimenez says: “It was like a cool shower on a warm day.”

The Support Factor

“I ABSOLUTELY love this job,” says Betty DeWolf, a high-school science teacher in Cerritos. DeWolf has no regrets about teaching. But then, her specialty is problem solving. And perhaps the best proof of her skill is that, for now at least, she has solved a perennial problem facing teachers: lack of administrative support, or worse, an administration that creates obstacles to teaching. DeWolf works for an effective, sympathetic principal who, she says, does whatever he can to help her succeed.

Recognized by the National Science Foundation in 1988 as one of California’s three best science teachers, DeWolf, 42, got into the profession almost by accident. A marine biology major, she was waiting for a state job as a food and drug inspector when she accepted a temporary teaching job at a Roman Catholic school. “I found I was successful in getting students to enjoy education,” she recalls. That was 1970, and she has been teaching ever since.

DeWolf teaches her students ways of solving science problems that are applicable to the life problems they encounter--how to finance a college education, choose a line of work, deal with a difficult parent, cope with an untimely pregnancy or an earthquake.

One of the first problem-solving skills she teaches is observation. She asks her students to study the following sentence: “Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of many years.” Then she asks how many F’s are in the sentence. Many of the students answer three. Learn to observe closely, she warns them. “In science, it’s critical that you are accurate. The more accurate your observations, the more likely you’ll come up with solutions you can live with to real problems.”

“It gives me a good feeling,” DeWolf says of seeing students display the confidence that arises from competence.

In 1987, DeWolf moved from Killingsworth Junior High School in Hawaiian Gardens to Tracy High School, part of the Artesia-Bellflower-Cerritos Unified School District. Tracy is a continuation school, a facility for students who have fallen behind in other settings. DeWolf transferred, she recalls, because she was ready for a change and was eager to apply her methods to older students. But she was also attracted by the prospect of working with George Hershey, who had been an assistant principal at Killingsworth.

Bad principals drive out good teachers. Good principals protect and encourage them. DeWolf knew that Hershey shared her belief that a school’s resources should be focused on students. “If I’m working for a principal who doesn’t have student welfare as his No. 1 concern, I leave,” DeWolf says. “I don’t want to work for somebody who does things to look good that aren’t good for the kids.”

Lack of administrative support can demoralize the most enthusiastic teacher. When David Tokofsky, 29, a social studies teacher at John Marshall High School, was asked to coach the school’s soccer team, he asked the administrator where the goal posts were. “There aren’t any,” he was told. (Tokofsky says he was also told that there is a difference between soccer and sucker. “The sucker’s the person who coaches soccer,” the administrator joked.)

Tokofsky, who coached Marshall’s academic decathlon team to a national victory in 1987, recalls that there was little support for scholars as well. He asked for a $300 set of the World Book encyclopedia, the primary source of decathlon questions. The request was turned down, so Tokofsky bought the books himself. According to Tokofsky, it was only after the team took the Los Angeles title that the principal asked, “What do you need to win?” Currently teaching half-time while on a fellowship at USC, Tokofsky says he is undecided about staying in the profession.

In contrast, Tracy principal George Hershey tries to be part of the solution, not the problem. He has arranged for DeWolf to have an account at a biology supply store so that she doesn’t have to fill out a purchase order every time she buys a live earthworm to dissect; he has volunteered his own van to transport students to an off-campus conference and even taught the class of one of the conference-bound teachers when a regular substitute couldn’t be found.

Hershey also remembers to thank his staff for doing a good job. He routinely sends notes to Tracy teachers (on stationery decorated with foil-covered chocolate Kisses and inscribed “Kisses from Hershey”) praising them as “the best staff in the world--bar none.”

This fall, when DeWolf wanted to take the students on the Tracy Science Olympiad team to Yosemite for a week of field study, Hershey made sure it happened. He helped raise much of the $250 per student they needed. He also dealt with the subtler aspects of the trip, such as reassuring several fearful parents that their children would be properly supervised and would benefit from the experience.

Having a good principal doesn’t make DeWolf and the other teachers at Tracy immune from all the frustrations of teaching. When her husband was in law school, money almost became a critical issue for DeWolf, but his attorney’s income means that it is not a problem now, she says. And she acknowledges that keeping the job fresh is challenging. “I like working at figuring out how to do things differently all the time,” she says. “I can’t teach the same program every year. I’d be bored stiff.” DeWolf thinks boredom is a major cause of teacher burnout. “There are people who can’t find enough changes to make the job worth doing.”

When DeWolf weighs the pros and cons of teaching, the pros wins. She once talked about the trade-offs with a friend. “She reminded me,” DeWolf says, “there’s a difference between a job and a calling.”

The Next Step

PANSY RANKIN’S sixth-graders at Balboa Gifted / High Ability Magnet School in Northridge are analyzing word problems: “Twice John’s salary is $280. What is his salary?” Rankin, who knows the lesson is as much about reading comprehension and logic as math, reminds the class to read the problem carefully. Her tone warns that the sentence may conceal a trick. “What might someone’s first answer be?” Rankin asks. A dozen hands shoot up, and a triumphant child answers, “$560!”

The children watch Rankin as intently as if she were a video game. Although they are unaware of it, Rankin’s ability to compel them is one of her outstanding achievements as a teacher. Rankin deftly shapes the activity taking place in the room. Having led her students away from the pitfall of reading carelessly and jumping to the wrong conclusion, she urges them to identify data and give it mathematical expression.

Soon Rankin is pulling good thinking out of one student after another.

“Is he correct?” she asks when one student writes “S + S = $280” on the board. Yes, he is. “Can anyone think of another way to express it?” Yes, half a dozen can. One student takes an independent tack and proposes $280 divided by 2 equals S. The class frowns. Rankin beams. Here is her opportunity to drive home a crucial lesson.

“Is there only one way to get to a solution?” she asks.

“No!” the children answer.

Nominated by her district superintendent for the California Teacher of the Year award, Rankin, 43, is one of the state’s classroom whizzes, the kind of teacher who always finds ways to do more--she teaches her sixth-graders art appreciation as well as geology, French and Latin. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara, tall and elegant as a model, smart and organized, Rankin could do just about anything she wants. But for 17 years, she has chosen to teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Rankin started teaching when her oldest son entered kindergarten. Hers is a two-income family, and money is not a major worry except as a symbolic issue. “Unfortunately, in this society, prestige and success are equal to salary,” she says.

As for Balboa’s principal, Rankin says Phyllis Marquardt creates a climate in which the teachers are supported in dealing with high parental expectations and the other special pressures of the school. When Rankin proposes four field trips instead of the one the district will pay for or asks for a French dictionary, Marquardt finds a way. “She persists,” Rankin says. “She will get on the phone and bug until she gets.”

Although she loves teaching, Rankin is increasingly restless. Like many experienced teachers, she wonders if it is time to do something else. The most common way to advance in teaching is to become an administrator. As Rankin says: “In other jobs, you feel there is a place to move up. In teaching, you’re either a teacher or an administrator. There’s nothing in between.

“I’m at a crossroads right now,” says Rankin. She is well-poised for a move into administration. She is widely respected, a woman, a member of a minority (she is Asian). But at this point, she doesn’t want to become an assistant principal or district bureaucrat. What she would most like to do is share her classroom expertise with other teachers. But, as she points out, there is now no formal track for that. The district does have mentor teachers, but they counsel other teachers in their spare time. Rankin would like to see the district create whole new paths for professional growth by, say, giving outstanding teachers a semester off so that they can assist or serve as mentors for other teachers full time.

The desire to grow was one of the reasons Mary Brackenhoff quit teaching last year, after 17 years. Brackenhoff, who has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska, had what many would consider an ideal job--teaching English at the prestigious Marlborough School, a private school for girls in Hancock Park.

Brackenhoff, 39, had no public-school bureaucracy to deal with. She was making relatively good money by teaching standards, about $45,000 a year. But then Brackenhoff was asked to do free-lance work for a Long Beach computer company that makes “an electronic book”--a hand-held computer on which text can be displayed and manipulated. The firm began paying her to go to New York to meet with writers and publishers. “It was glamorous,” she says, something rarely said of teaching. It also paid well and challenged her. When the company offered her a full-time position as director of publishing and public relations, she took it.

“After 17 years, I knew I was a good teacher. I don’t know if I’m good at what I do now,” she says. “That’s the reason I hesitated to leave, and that’s why I had to leave.” Not that she doesn’t miss teaching. “Nobody asks me about ‘Moby Dick’ anymore, and nobody gives a damn about Chaucer,” she says.

Rankin has high hopes for “teacher empowerment”--a buzzword of post-L.A. Unified strike reform that may mean teachers will play a greater role in how schools and school districts are run. Until then, she patches together her own path to professional growth. She attends conferences and takes advanced-education courses. She also serves on the Comprehensive Teacher Institute Policy Committee, a group of Cal State Northridge faculty and L.A. Unified teachers who are trying to find better ways to recruit, train and provide support for new teachers.

Teaching is fine for now, Rankin says, “but who knows in five years?”

Getting Started

THE EIGHTH-GRADERS in Mark Takano’s English class are restless. They yawn, wiggle, grimace and slouch. The air conditioning isn’t working in the cavernous classroom at Rialto Junior High School in Rialto, so the back door is open, letting in distracting sounds.

“Far too many people are talking,” Takano chides. “I’m going to start writing names on the board.”

Takano’s lesson plan this morning calls for his students to write a second draft of an essay they began a few days earlier. Rialto’s students are an eclectic ethnic and socioeconomic mix and a hodgepodge of abilities as well. Teaching every student how to write clearly is one of Takano’s highest priorities. He has been studying ways of teaching writing effectively, and today he wants to emphasize the importance of writing that shows rather than tells. To pique their interest, he has asked them to write on the subject “the teacher is strange.”

In his bow tie and tasseled loafers, Takano looks like a young Ivy Leaguer, which he is. Takano, 28, graduated from Harvard in 1983 with a degree in government. Many people are surprised to find one of America’s best and brightest teaching in a public junior high--including, Takano says, his students.

“If you’re so smart, what are you doing teaching here?” students ask him. Last year, one youngster opined, “Dang, Mr. Takano, if I was as smart as you, I would be selling drugs.”

Takano admits that he didn’t set out to be a teacher. “My original plan was to go to Harvard and go to law school and take one of the traditional routes to power,” he says with a laugh. But when he graduated, he joined a group of Harvard students and others who bicycled from Seattle to Boston to raise money for Oxfam America, an international relief and development agency. “We predated Live Aid,” he recalls proudly.

Afterward, he says, “I decided I needed to make some money somehow, so I substitute-taught in Brookline, Belmont and the Boston public schools.” Teaching English and social studies in Brookline, Takano saw how a well-run school district could meet the needs of different kinds of students. And he got a firsthand look at the crisis in the American classroom. Takano felt that by becoming a teacher, if only for a time, he could make a positive difference in young people’s lives. “I felt I could have an incredible impact on shaping human beings.”

Takano considered the advantages and drawbacks of teaching. He found himself confronting the question “What does a Harvard graduate do with his life?” and trying to come to terms with the fact that teaching, at least at the elementary and secondary levels, is not a profession that is respected in this country. He also wondered how long it would take him to pay back his college loans on a beginning teacher’s salary.

Takano decided he would teach for two years and then reconsider. He found unexpected support from his Harvard peers when he told classmates at his fifth college reunion what he was doing. “I felt a tremendous amount of admiration,” he says, “although I didn’t get the feeling that any of them were going to run out and change professions.”

Takano, who has a continuing interest in public policy, believes what he reads and observes about the importance of a well-educated populace to the vigor of the United States. The classroom, he says, is one of the places “where very talented people ought to be.” Echoing Harvard President Derek Bok’s speech at the reunion, Takano also believes that the tide is turning in terms of the value placed on teachers. “The top opinion-makers have already come around about the importance of teachers.”

Having resolved for himself the question “Why teach?” Takano still had to navigate the bureaucratic process of getting a California teaching credential. “There are a lot of hoops you have to jump through,” he recalls. The credentialing process requires a person with an out-of-state diploma, even one from Harvard, to show evidence that his or her course of study was up to California standards. A political scientist at UC Riverside told Takano that he simply didn’t have time to vet Takano’s degree. Takano ultimately took an alternate route to getting his teaching credential by passing the National Teachers Examination in social studies and English.

So far, Takano has been helped informally by more-experienced staff at his school, especially his department head and principal. Their advice has ranged from the wisdom of reading texts aloud in class to ensure comprehension to a judgment on how much more professional he looks when he wears a tie to school.

Takano says that only now, in his third year, is he beginning to feel comfortable in the classroom. He has revised his timetable and decided to give the profession a five-year shot. He hates the paper work, and he wishes Rialto would do something about the air-conditioning and heating system. But he likes and respects his colleagues, and he finds the job complex and challenging. “I feel this is a place where I can grow,” he says. And the task itself is still rewarding. “You are nurturing human beings, and that can be very satisfying.”

Takano hasn’t ruled out law school. He may yet pursue a career in politics. “But if I do move on to something that’s more lucrative,” he says, “this is something I’d like to retire to.”

VIRTUALLY EVERY teacher interviewed for this story, even the ones who had left school far behind, had a simple answer for the question “Why teach?”: the kids.

This fall, a Garfield graduate stopped in to talk to Ben Jimenez, his old advanced-math teacher. He and his twin brother, at USC on scholarship, are both getting A’s in college calculus. Full of pride and confidence, he told his former teacher that he has set out to “kill the curve” in the university’s math department. Jimenez beamed.

Sometimes the students even understand a teacher’s agenda. During the Tracy High School field trip to Yosemite, Gina LaBier, who aspires to a career as a romance writer, was asked to describe “Ms. DeWolf.” “She teaches us more than science,” said LaBier. “She teaches us about living life in the real world. I think before I do now--not always; sometimes I mess up.”

Carol Underwood, a 39-year-old student teacher from Canoga Park who has yet to start her career officially, may have said it best: “There’s a kind of magic in working with children. Part of their lives are in your hands. I can’t imagine what’s more important than shaping young people’s lives and minds.”