Little Training, Poor Oversight

When Heidi Brooks decided to try teaching, she was a burned-out Hollywood agent looking for a temporary job--as a substitute--to tide her over.

She quickly found that becoming a teacher in California is nearly as easy as getting a job at McDonald’s. No experience? No problem. An hour on the phone snagged the 28-year-old three interviews--and three offers of permanent jobs.

She wound up at Main Street Elementary in South-Central Los Angeles in charge of a class of Spanish-speaking first-graders--thanks to having minored in Spanish at USC.

“They didn’t even ask me if I was fluent,” said Brooks, who isn’t. “I think it hurts children severely . . . because they’re being taught by someone like me.”

Brooks’ frankness may be rare, but her situation is not.

More than 31,000 California classrooms are presided over by men and women who do not have teaching certificate--instructors who are still learning their craft even as they teach children to read and write and add.

Californians love their teachers.

A Times poll found that even among those who offer a low rating of public schools, only 4% blame teachers. And among those who rate schools highly, the largest number, 38%, credit the teachers.

But even teachers say that the public schools struggle with too many instructors who are unlicensed and untrained; too many classrooms with no permanent teacher, just a parade of substitutes; and too many teachers who see the job as a temporary stopover on the way to a real career.

There is such a need for warm bodies in front of the blackboard that, on any given day, 2,000 classes are headed by “long-term” substitutes who work a maximum of a month and move on. Several thousand other teachers are hired under waivers allowing them to remain in the classroom although some lack even a college degree or have been unable to pass a test of arithmetic, reading and writing that is pitched at about the 10th-grade level.

In the Compton school district--the first in history to be taken over by the state--nearly one in five teachers has not passed that test.

All this has not escaped the notice of state leaders. Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed spending $145 million extra this year on efforts to attract more good teachers, improve their skills and ensure that they stick around.

Manifest Problems

All around California, a visitor to schools can see why that effort is needed.

In suburban Glendale, a fifth-grade instructor, diagraming the sentence “There was a smear of blood,” tells the students--wrongly--that “smear” is an adjective. Later, he tells them--wrongly--that “his” is a noun, because it describes a person.

His students, in putting together booklets illustrating grammar concepts, spell it “gramer” and “grammer.”

In South-Central Los Angeles, Debra Crawford, a veteran teacher, went on maternity leave. Three substitutes filled in during her absence.

When Crawford returned to her first-grade class in February, she found her students far behind. They struggled to add two numbers, as simple as 7 plus 1, using plastic bears for help.

By that point in the year, the children would normally have read five small books and half the stories in a thick anthology, and used a computer to make three books of their own. None had done any of that.

At least three were still at a pre-primer level, meaning they had yet to learn the alphabet, didn’t know the sounds of letters and couldn’t write their names.

“Their behavior had deteriorated to the point,” Crawford said, “they’re having a hard time sitting down for 15 minutes.”

The need for bodies should have come as no surprise. The state has had repeated warnings that the student population would grow rapidly and that schools would need more teachers. In the early 1980s, the state was handing out 3,200 new “emergency” permits annually amid dire predictions that if the trend continued, a third of the state’s teachers would lack the required training.

Instead of solving the problem, however, the state and its school districts have created a front-door, back-door arrangement.

The “front door” is the noble way teachers are supposed to enter the classroom: Start with an undergraduate degree, add an array of specialized courses in teaching--about two semesters’ worth--then cap it off with tests and a supervised stint as a student teacher.

The “back door,” meanwhile, has allowed virtually anyone with a college degree into the classroom--especially if they are willing to teach in an urban area, or work with students who don’t speak English, or work with those with learning handicaps.

The last time figures were calculated nationally, in the 1992-93 school year, California trailed all the states except New York and Hawaii in the percentage of teachers with full credentials.

Today, 11% of the state’s teachers lack full credentials. The Los Angeles Unified School District--where needy students cry out for the best, most experienced instructors--has 6,000 holding emergency permits. In a dozen other districts in Los Angeles County, more than 20% of the teachers are in the same boat. In Compton’s elementary schools, it’s 60%.

Some elite schools still have their pick of teachers, receiving 10 applications for every opening. But the shortages are beginning to hit suburban districts too, places such as Garden Grove and Simi Valley.

Through the 1950s and ‘60s, teaching drew some of the most academically able Americans, in part because it was one of the few professions that welcomed women and minorities.

As opportunities for those groups bloomed in other fields, however, the popularity of teaching “nose-dived, fell off the charts,” said UCLA professor Alexander Astin, who has tracked such trends for three decades as part of a survey of college freshmen.

Today, the SAT scores of high school students interested in teaching are relatively low, averaging 964 nationally--higher only than those of students planning to major in home economics, public affairs and technical and vocational fields. In California, would-be teachers score 40 to 60 points below the state average in math on the college entrance exam.

Most--enough to produce 60% of the state’s teachers--come through the 22-campus Cal State University system. The early stages of the problems that plague the state’s teachers are on display there.

Barely Getting By

It’s dark on a chilly winter’s evening and Dan O’Connor, a Cal State Long Beach political science professor, is questioning the 20 men and women in his class--each about to complete the prescribed undergraduate program to become an elementary school teacher.

Do you feel you’re ready to teach arithmetic?

Not a single hand.

Then, the follow-up.

Why didn’t you take more math?

“I barely get by in math classes,” said 24-year-old Sue Orloff. “If I get a bad grade, my grade point average will go down and I won’t get into grad school to become a teacher.”

Instead, she focused on learning to use art and dance to reach children.

Another student “loves history,” so she signed up for more of those courses. The problem was, she said, “all of the history classes I’ve taken are worthless because that history is not taught in elementary schools.”

Dana Miller, another of O’Connor’s students, concentrated on courses exploring the “cultural and social diversity” of students in Southern California.

“I learned so much,” she says.

Like most aspiring teachers at Cal State campuses, these students are majoring in “liberal studies.”

The students often arrive only marginally prepared for college work. At many campuses, half the entering class fails to satisfy writing requirements. An even greater percentage have to take remedial math.

The liberal studies major was designed to take those students and expose them to the breadth of subjects that youngsters are taught in elementary school. But over time, it has become something of a symbol for what ails teacher preparation in California: superficial, unfocused and not aligned with the most pressing needs of the state’s schools.

Out of 371 liberal studies students at Cal State Long Beach, only six this year chose to take the courses for a concentration in science, and four focused on math. Far more popular was physical education.

O’Connor analyzes his students’ abilities this way: The top 20% of them, he says, would do well in any college. Those in the middle 60% would be able to “survive” at more demanding colleges. And the bottom 20% would bomb out if asked to meet higher standards.

But O’Connor knows that even those on the bottom rung would probably have no problem getting hired as teachers.

One encouraging note, as O’Connor sees it, is that the best of his students are not done with their educations. Following the “front door” approach--the way training is supposed to work--they stick around to take a fifth year of courses focusing on teaching “methods.”

Without that graduate training, said senior Kris Clemens, “You could know the subject, but what good is that if you can’t teach.”

The problem is that many of the students will not stick around to finish their training. They feel the lure of a job--the opportunity to go straight to work under an emergency permit. Start out at, say, $30,000 a year. For nine months’ work. Pay off those college loans. Move out of mom and dad’s house.

And they can pick up what they have skipped--like the essentials of running a classroom--at night school. Of course, that means studying after spending a draining day on the job, reducing their ability to teach and to learn, but many try to earn their credential that way.

Rae Ann Montoya, sitting off to the side in O’Connor’s class, was worried that she hadn’t yet learned how to discipline students. She found that out while working in an after-school child-care program and trying to get the children to do homework. “I totally lost control of my group,” she said.

Still, Montoya was undeterred.

“I’m filling out applications now,” she said. “Most of the districts, they’ll take me. . . . Only the more affluent districts said ‘No.’ ”

As O’Connor put it, “If you have a degree and a pulse you get snapped up.”

A Question of Standards

Does all this matter?

Kristi Jones, who heads the liberal studies program at Cal State Long Beach, would actually like to see current standards lowered.

Right now, a student must have a B- average to get into the school’s teacher education program. Jones believes that perhaps a C should be good enough.

“It isn’t that they’re dumb, it’s the amount of time they can devote to their studies,” she says, noting that many students are working even while going to school and haven’t the time to study.

“Many of them can make good teachers,” she insists.

Many Americans believe that being a good teacher is something innate and “that therefore all you need is to . . . love kids and have a sincere desire to do what’s right,” said Terry Dozier, an ex-classroom teacher who advises Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley on instructional issues.

“The general attitude of the American people is that teachers are . . . asked to do the impossible--with limited resources,” she says. “We say, ‘If they want to be there and care about kids, what damage can they do?’ ”

There is no doubt that a dedicated teacher is a wonder to behold.

Spend a day following Susan Kim, 24, who is in her first year at Granada Hills High in the San Fernando Valley.

Because of overcrowding, Kim’s “classroom,” as she calls it, is a two-wheel suitcase rack holding a black bag with the necessities--lesson book, tests, student assignments, pens and pencils. She drags it through the halls to teach in five different rooms each day.

“The stairs kill me,” she says as the two-wheeler clunk-clunk-clunks to the classroom that will be her home for the next period.

Or watch Ady Sukkar, a newcomer at Manual Arts High, who calls out, “Bye! I love you!” after leading her students--most of whom speak English as a second language--through Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”

But as the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future observed last fall, it’s dangerous to think that dedication is enough. Unlicensed doctors or lawyers would not be tolerated. But teachers are.

Repeatedly, California has seen that shortfalls in teacher training can jeopardize even the most well-meaning educational reforms.

Fifteen years ago, for example, California decided to toughen the requirements for graduation from high school. Students would have to take more English, history and math.

But because of the shortage of trained teachers, 46% of the state’s math classes are now taught by someone who did not even minor in math in college. That figure places California third from the bottom among states in the math expertise of its teachers.

Not surprisingly, the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that California’s eighth-graders ranked 28th among the 39 states and jurisdictions where math tests were given. The picture was even worse for the state’s lowest achieving youngsters. And it is the children at the bottom of the heap who are most likely to have unlicensed teachers.

Last year, the Long Beach Unified School District gained national attention for its plan to set up a special eighth-grade “academy” as a way station for middle-schoolers who were failing.

The academy was supposed to tailor its approach to students who were among the neediest in the school system. Instead, when it opened, 13 of the 18 teachers were new to the classroom, and seven of them were uncredentialed.

Out of 415 students who started in the academy, only 300 are left and only 225 are ready to start the ninth grade.

“We should have made a greater effort to recruit more outstanding teachers,” said Supt. Carl Cohn.

Or consider Gov. Pete Wilson’s effort to reduce class sizes in kindergarten through third grade--which has cost $2.5 billion so far.

For every two classes trimmed from 30 to 20 students, a new class had to be created. And a new teacher found.

The result?

In the past year, California schools hired three times as many teachers on an “emergency” basis as were hired two years ago, according to a report presented this month to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

“If the teachers are learning on the job . . . aren’t we getting the results that we should expect?” asks Allen A. Mori, dean of the School of Education at Cal State L.A.

A Demanding Job

Heidi Brooks, the talent agent turned teacher, had a typical fate for a novice without a license: a difficult assignment.

When she started more than a year ago at Main Street School, she was given a group of first-graders who had already had two other temporary teachers. After a month, she was sent to another class.

Finally, in September, she started with a class of her own:

Half the 20 students were supposed to be taught in Spanish. Only two could recite the alphabet.

Three had fathers in jail. Brooks had to fill out child abuse referral forms for one boy, whom she suspected was being beaten. His speech was slurred and hard to understand.

The mother of another child, who comes to class impeccably dressed in color-coordinated outfits, confided that her daughter was born on the street while she was homeless, having spent all of her money on drugs.

One day, not long ago, Brooks led her students haltingly through the alphabet. Then they moved on to spelling, although several could not read the words. Rather than let the children struggle to come up with a sentence using the words, Brooks did it for them.

“The queen is on the swing and she is swinging,” she wrote.

One student begged to read it, only to stumble over the word “and.” Growing nervous, he sat on his hands and rocked. Brooks told the others to draw a picture of the queen and the swing and write their own sentences, then turned to give the boy individual attention.

Slowly, though, things began to fall apart.

Antoine balanced a plastic nickel, to be used in a math lesson, on his eye.

“How many pennies in a nickel?” Brooks asked the students, sitting in a circle on the rug. Blank stares.

She sent them to their desks to practice a series of money problems. She did not have enough plastic money, however, so she began cutting more out of paper. Some pupils began wandering around the classroom. A special education student wrote random numbers. Others wrote nothing.

Soon, Luis was on the floor, pretending to be a charging bull. Juanito was in a martial arts stance, chopping the air with his hands and feet. Shakeeshia carried Khadija on her back.

“Now I’ve lost them,” Brooks sighed, throwing up her hands.

The principal of Main Street is Javier Centeno. He praises Brooks’ enthusiasm for her job.

“Techniques, classroom management, I can teach her that,” he said. “You can’t teach enthusiasm.”

But in Brooks’ case, the enthusiasm in running out: Her tour of duty will end in June.

“I love children and I really wanted to give back to society for a while,” she said. “But this is not what I want to do for my life.”

So if she continues working in a classroom, she explained, it will be as she originally envisioned--as a substitute. And then only at schools close to her home, on the Westside.

High Turnover Rate

Like Brooks, many teachers in Los Angeles, and other urban areas are merely passing through.

In Los Angeles, for example, a third of the teachers hired in 1994 quit within three years. Other districts report attrition rates as high as 50%. Among unlicensed teachers, attrition is estimated to be as high as 70%.

That causes a constant churning--costly both to the system and to students.

Attracting the best people to teaching, helping them out once they’re in the classroom, and keeping the good ones from quitting is already a high priority with state leaders.

The most earnest among those leaders envision teaching as a “profession,” similar to medicine or law, in which candidates would work under the wings of veteran coaches for one or two years before gaining their independence.

Already, school districts, backed with state money, are bringing on “interns” and giving them lots of help in the classroom; rounding up assistants and transforming them into bona fide teachers and even trying to push high school students to pursue a career in education.

Some schools, with the support of grants and nonprofit groups, are trying to make professional development seminars--long disdained by most teachers as irrelevant--more useful.

Math teacher Salima Husain, a veteran of 16 years in the classroom, was a participant in one such seminar last fall at Van Nuys Middle School, and she gained a painful insight.

Each teacher was to demonstrate a math lesson and be critiqued by colleagues. Husain’s students had failed miserably with an assignment that required them to calculate the area of a living room. When she presented the lesson, her colleagues wound up similarly confused.

Husain was stunned. “What is going on here?” she wondered. That night, she went home and cried to her husband. She thought about her students in a different light and was crushed by guilt. It hadn’t been their fault--it had been hers.

With her colleagues’ help, Husain analyzed what she had been doing wrong. When she got back to her regular classroom, she taught the lesson over. This time, 90% of her 150 students aced it.

But the sheer number of teachers makes such scattershot efforts to upgrade teaching daunting. As foreseen years ago, school enrollment is surging across the country, just as a generation of veteran instructors is retiring. School districts from Texas to New York to Florida are gearing up to add or replace about 2 million teachers.

In California, schools may need to hire as many as 300,000 new teachers in the next decade, more than currently work in all the state’s classrooms.

At the Cal State system, the new chancellor, Charles Reed, has already said that whatever else he does, what will define his tenure is how he responds to California’s urgent need to recruit and train almost an entirely new teaching force.

Reed has set a goal of rapidly increasing the number of teachers the system turns out each year from the current 10,000 to 15,000 by the year 2001.

Cal State has embarked on a variety of other projects to improve teacher training: establishing closer relationships with school districts, for example, and making education classes more accessible by offering them at night and on weekends.

But it will be hard to fill the need through the front door.

State Sen. Betty Karnette (D-Long Beach), a former junior high math teacher, recently offered a small proposal to upgrade standards for California’s classrooms: requiring that all teachers have a college degree and pass the state’s basic skills test.

The proposal drew immediate opposition and was killed in a legislative committee.

Who was opposed?

The California School Boards Assn. and a group of suburban school districts.

Why? They were worried about finding enough warm bodies.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Times Poll: Teachers And Tests

Standardized tests are broadly embraced by California parents, although a large majority of teachers agree that the tests present a disadvantage to minority students. Teachers also feel that those instructors who lack full credentials--a growing group in California schools--give students a lower quality of education.

STANDARDIZED TESTS

* Should the state require students to pass a standardized test as one of the criteria for advancing to the next grade level or graduating from high school?

PARENTS*

*--*

All White Black Latino Asian Yes 78% 75% 71% 86% 81% No 18 21 25 11 15 Don’t know 4 4 4 3 4

*--*

TEACHERS

Yes: 65%

No: 30

Don’t know: 5

*

* Which is a better indicator of a child’s progress in school: standardized tests given to students at the same grade level, or their grades and teacher evaluations?

PARENTS*

*--*

All White Black Latino Asian Tests 37% 32% 36% 37% 54% Equal 9 12 6 6 5 Grades 49 52 52 52 33 Don’t know 5 4 6 5 8

*--*

*

TEACHER QUALITY

* Do you think your child receives (asked of parents) /you receive (asked of students) enough personal attention from teachers?

PARENTS*

*--*

All White Black Latino Asian Students** Enough 63% 67% 46% 64% 57% 71% Not enough 34 31 53 33 34 27 Don’t know 3 2 1 3 9 2

*--*

*

* California issues emergency teaching permits to people who have completed a bachelor’s degree and can pass a basic exam but have not taken the required year of teacher training. Is the education students get from emergency-permit teachers worse, equal to or better than the education they get from fully credentialed teachers?

TEACHERS

*--*

Credentialed All Full Emergency Worse 72% 79% 44% Equal 19 13 44 Better 2 1 4 Don’t know 7 7 8

*--*

*

* How would you rate the overall quality of teacher training you have received?

TEACHERS

*--*

Credentialed All Full Emergency Excellent/ above average 65% 69% 51% Average 26 23 36 Below average/ poor 9 8 13

*--*

*

* What one change would you make to attract the best qualified people to teach in California’s public school system?

(Top 3 responses are shown)

Teachers

Higher salaries: 60%

Smaller classes: 6

More respect: 6

*

STANDARDIZED TESTS

* When you take standardized tests, do you take them:

Asked of students**

Don’t know: 1%

Never taken one (volunteered): 1%

Not seriously: 8%

Very seriously: 40%

Somewhat seriously: 50%

*

* Do you think you would work harder in school if you had to pass a standardized test to advance to the next grade or to graduate from high school?

Asked of students**

No: 12%

Yes, much harder: 49%

Yes, somewhat harder: 35%

Don’t know: 4%

*

* “Minority students and students from different cultures are at a disadvantage when taking standardized tests.” Agree or disagree?

Asked of teachers

Agree: 69%

Disagree: 27%

Don’t know: 4%

QUALIFICATIONS

* Are people entering the teaching profession today better qualified than teachers were 10 years ago, less qualified or just as qualified?

Asked of teachers

Better qualified: 30%

Less qualified: 28%

Don’t know: 4%

Just as qualified: 38%

* Why do you say that people going into the teaching profession today are less qualified?

(Asked of those who said ‘Less qualified”; accepted up to 2 replies; top 3 responses are shown)

Asked of teachers

Too many with emergency credentials: 40%

Poor quality college students becoming teachers: 27%

Inadequate credentialing programs: 24%

*Parents of children between the ages of 5 and 17 attending school in California.

**Children ages 12 to 17. Totals may be less than 100% where not all answer categories are shown.

Source: L.A. Times polls

Times Poll results are also available on the World Wide Web at:

https://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/POLLS/

Smaller Classes Mean More Uncredentialed Teachers

Sometimes one reform, however promising, can have an unintended impact on another aspect of education. Consider Gov. Pete Wilson’s initiative to cut the size of classes in lower grades. Everyone agrees that smaller classes are good. But in order to cut the number of pupils from 30 to no more than 20, schools had to create more classes. And hire more teachers. The result? Sharp rises in the number of uncredentialed teachers--sometimes more than a 10% increase. And though urban districts found it hardest to fill new slots with credentialed instructors, even wealthy communities--such as Beverly Hills and San Marino--were affected.

Teachers with emergency credentials in 10 L.A. County districts before and after class-size reduction

*--*

District ‘95-96 ‘96-97 Compton Unified 18.1% 33.5% Paramount Unified 15.4% 32.0% Pasadena Unified 16.5% 30.7% Bassett Unified 13.2% 29.9% Pomona Unified 17.4% 25.3% Long Beach Unified 8.1% 20.8% Los Angeles Unified 11.3% 17.1% Monrovia Unified 1.8% 15.5% East Whittier City Elementary 0.4% 12.7% Westside Union Elementary 10.1% 10.2 Beverly Hills Unified 0.6% 6.6% San Marino Unified 0.0% 6.3%

*--*

****

Number of emergency permits given statewide

1995-96: 15,753

1996-97: 24,503

****

Percentage of staff on emergency permits and waivers 1996-97

URBAN SCHOOL DISTRICTS

District: Lacking credentials

San Diego Unified: 4%

Long Beach Unified: 19%

Fresno Unified: 5%

San Francisco Unified: 11%

Santa Ana Unified: 14%

Sacramento City Unified: 8%

San Bernardino City Unified: 13%

SUBURBAN SCHOOL DISTRICTS

District: Lacking credentials

San Juan Unified: 4%

Garden Grove Unified: 6%

Capistrano Unified: 2%

Glendale Unified: 13%

Redlands Unified: 6%

RURAL SCHOOL DISTRICTS

District: Lacking credentials

Coachella Valley Unified: 30%

Barstow Unified: 22%

Los Banos Unified: 11%

Cutler-Orosi Joint Unified: 12%

Mendota Unified: 22%

****

Profile of teachers grades K-12 in the Los Angeles Unified School District 1997-98

ALL TEACHERS

Permanent: 66.0%

Probationary: 12.0%

District intern: 3.3%

University intern: 0.4%

Emergency Permit: 18.3%

NEW HIRES

Emergency Permit: 62.0%

Permanent: 4.3%

Probationary: 22.0%

District intern: 11.0%

University intern: 0.7%

Simple Proposals

What Can Be Done?

No. 1: Focus Teacher Training

As with doctors and lawyers, California requires teachers to pursue “continuing education” to keep their licenses. The theory is that if they know more, students benefit. In return, teachers who complete such courses earn raises, which cost the state roughly $1 billion a year. But is the state getting its money’s worth?

* In Los Angeles, it’s possible to take the proverbial “basketweaving.” True, it’s Cahuilla Indian basketweaving but . . . Or you can hike in the Sierras. Take a jaunt to Oregon to see Shakespeare plays. Such courses represent a small part of teachers’ continuing education. But classes in crucial subjects such as math teachers in the state did not even minor in the subject.

* Some districts have reached agreements with their teachers to better align training with the district’s instructional needs. Every teacher in the Elk Grove Unified district outside Sacramento, for example, must take training in reading to make progress on the salary schedule. After that, they can choose from math, computer technology, a foreign language or teaching English to non-native speakers.

*

No. 2: Insist on ‘Accountability Reports’

Every public school in the state is supposed to do it now: give itself a report card: An annual “School Accountability Report” is supposed to contain data on the budget, teachers, test scores, etc., and be made available to anyone who asks. Too often, however, that is not done. Even if the reports are assembled, parents never see them. But education researchers believe such data is essential to understand whether schools are working--and how to improve them. So UCLA has prepared a model School Report Card. The ones for an entire district might be assembled--in a telephone-book-like volume--and widely distributed. Among the data:

* Student information: Ethnic distribution; absenteeism; turnover; test scores; the rate students become fluent in English.

* Instructional resources: Number of library books per student; how old the books are; how many computers per student.

* Safety and security: Expulsions; suspensions; policies for getting on campus and, for elementary schools, who can pick up a child.

* Teachers: Percentage possessing full state credentials; how many have training in the subject they teach.

* Budget: Expenditure per pupil; special programs or grants; amount spent on specific services, such as counseling, nursing or textbooks.