A Witness to the Decline in Teaching

My brother and I were raised believing we could do or be anything we desired. In second grade, I wanted to be an engineer, and my parents bought me drafting paper. In middle school, under the spell of James Herriot, I wanted to be a veterinarian, and for my 13th birthday, I got a chemistry set. As college loomed, they pledged their support for any course of study but one. If I decided I wanted to be a teacher, they would lock me in my room until I came to my senses.

My parents were teachers, public high school teachers in Baltimore County, Md. They entered the profession in the 1950s--my mother because it was one of the few occupations with any hope for advancement open to women, my father because he is a born educator. He believed he could make a difference in his students’ lives and thus the world. But they were both extraordinary teachers--always ranked highly in their annual reviews, inevitably asked to sponsor classes and clubs, chaperon dances. The kind of teachers who can’t walk down the street without being stopped by a former student who would invariably turn to my brother and me and tell us how lucky we were because our father or mother was the best teacher they ever had.

Yet my mother quit teaching as soon as she turned 60 and my father took early retirement just after I graduated college. “Never take a job for which there is a national appreciation day,” he told his students at the end. “Teaching is a sucker’s job,” he told me.

Even at the time, I recognized what a loss it was--to them and to their students. But I had watched life as public schoolteachers grind them both down. In 1973, after taking off almost a decade to raise my brother and me, my mother returned to the classroom to find the world changed--classes were so large many students had neither desks nor books. Keeping order took precedence over instruction, and questioning authority was now the mantra of the students and their parents, many of whom used parent-teacher conferences to demand their child’s grade be raised.

For my father, the process was more subtle, but by the time I was in high school, he was losing heart. The low pay, the long hours, the weekends consumed by sponsorship, the increasing unruliness of the students exacerbated by the dwindling resources, the swelling class size. The kids didn’t listen, the parents didn’t care, the ditto machine was never working, the textbooks were 20 years old.

“There is no commitment to education in this country,” my father would say. “No one takes the profession of teaching seriously. They just look at us as adult bodies in the classroom.”

My father chose to teach over a wide variety of professions because he thought it was important. And, in the end, it was the lack of respect that drove him out. Not from his students, but from society. I felt it as a child whenever I told anyone what my parents did. “They teach,” I would say. “Oh,” came the inevitable response. “College?” “No,” I answered, fighting my rising shame. “High school.” The implication was clear time and again--if they were ambitious, if they were talented, if they were any damn good at all, they would not be stuck teaching high school.

During this past election year, many people pledged a commitment to education, vowed to take it seriously. President Bush claimed it as a cornerstone of his campaign. Yet his proposed presidential initiative, announced last week, is not about education at all.

A tiny, vague portion of the proposal is about funding, but most of it is about testing. Teachers are mentioned only in terms of accountability, as if they were larcenous clerks. It is ironic that a Republican president would advocate a national standard of testing since the Republican Party has consistently and vociferously denounced national education standards of any kind. But the larger irony is that testing is not part of any definition of education. Testing is, in fact, what we do to ascertain if education has taken place, to survey the results.

And we all know the results. Public education in America is in terrible shape--if we do not see this firsthand in our child’s inability to spell “accommodate” or to name the Axis powers, we are reminded of it by daily reports on the shocking results of one survey, study and test after another. Schools are bursting at the seams and falling to bits, teachers overworked or under-qualified, books and supplies are scarce and electives such as chorus, band, art and wood shop are practically nonexistent. Students are beset by dangers--weapon-toting peers, drugs and alcohol, spine-wrenching backpacks and boredom.

More testing is not going to solve any of these problems. It will not build more schools or repair the ones we have; it will not conjure textbooks and computers and crayons and glue from the air; it will not channel the bottomless energy of adolescence off the streets and onto the stage or soccer field. It may prompt teachers to teach toward the test, and we all know from the existing pressures and scams to do well on tests that this is not education either.

There are those who say schools should be open year-round, or for longer days. Others who argue that core curriculum--math, science, history, literature--is not being hammered home enough. And some rail against under-qualified teachers, citing a 1996 Department of Education survey showing that the majority of American math and science teachers do not have academic degrees in math or science.

Aside from the teachers’ unions, which are often regarded with suspicion by the public, very few people are talking about the teachers--about helping the teachers, about keeping the good teachers and getting more and better ones. Or rather, people, including the president, are talking about it but they’re not taking any action.

Because the first thing they’d have to do is recognize that teaching, at any level, is a valuable profession and should be recompensed as such. No longer can we rely on women, like my mother, who once saw no other career possibility.

My father, who is a yellow-dog Democrat and increasingly cynical about the values of the younger generations, believes that the Greed Is Good mentality of the ‘80s still prevails. And a greedy person, or even one who strives to live in the upper-middle class, is not going to make a career decision based on what service he or she can best provide the community. Of course, there are plenty of wonderful teachers who thought it was more important to work with children and teenagers than start another dot-com or get a law degree. But if we want more good minds and hearts in the classrooms, if we want people who have degrees in the subjects that they teach, if we want people who are ambitious and talented and dedicated, then we can no longer afford to rely on the kindness of strangers. We are going to have to pay teachers more. Especially if we expect them to work longer hours and more days.

According to the American Federation of Teachers, the average teacher’s salary is $40,574. The average salary for beginning teachers is $26,639, while the average salary of engineering graduates is $44,362. Graduates of computer science programs earn $42,500, and liberal arts graduates, $34,776.

All my life, I have heard how great the perks are for teachers--all that vacation time, good health insurance and a pension. And it’s true, my parents had weeks off at Christmas and Easter, which was great, but those summers were not paid holidays, and, in our house, things got very tense every June while we waited to hear if at least one of them had landed a slot teaching summer school. My parents have pretty nice pensions, for which they paid 5% to 8% of their salaries each year they worked. But just before they retired, Baltimore County switched to a much less generous plan. There is no national standard for salaries or benefits, no lifetime guarantee for pensions--working or retired, teachers are at the mercy of the generosity of their state and county and the strength of their unions.

I asked my folks what they thought of the president’s proposed initiative, and they both have no problem with national testing, if, after discovering the problems through that testing, the federal government plans to pony up to fix them. But that is not the next step in Bush’s plan. Instead, the test results will aid parents who want to take their children out of those schools that aren’t doing well, and send them, and a portion of their tax dollars, to private schools. Not that this will enable poor or even middle-class families to afford private schools--the vouchers will pay but a portion of the tuition; a family that can’t make up the rest will be stuck in the failing, and, at that point, increasingly abandoned public school.

That school vouchers have failed to pass on one local ballot after another; that they have been declared a dead issue does not seem to faze the president a bit.

The way to fix a school system without enough schools, books or good teachers is not difficult, it’s just expensive. In 1986, Connecticut, concerned by its low test scores, committed more than $300 million to raise teacher salaries, and increase the requirements new teachers had to meet and the resources available to them. The average starting salary is now more than $30,000 a year, the average about $51,000, and some senior teachers are paid as much as $80,000. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally sponsored series of tests that allows comparisons among states, Connecticut ranked first in fourth- through eighth-grade reading in 1998 and first in writing in 1999. The number of Connecticut fourth-graders reaching the “proficient” level on the reading test jumped from 34% in 1992 to 46% in 1998, the greatest improvement in the country.

During the presidential debates, Bush informed his rival, then-Vice President Al Gore, several times that regarding education, the Clinton-Gore administration had frittered away eight years and now it was time to get things done.

Testing is not getting things done. Testing is what you do after you’ve gotten things done, to see if there might be something you missed the first time around.