Make Teaching a 12-Month Job

The nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Assn., or NEA, held its annual convention in early July in Los Angeles. The agenda was filled with many of the usual items: the dangers of merit pay, the effect of vouchers on public education and how to recruit and retain good teachers for the sake of our children and our nation.

Important as they are, these have the mind-numbing quality of so much business as usual. In fact, the public has been so desensitized by the rhetorical assaults on both sides of these issues that little progress is possible on any of them.

It may be time to shift the terms of the debate and ask what it is that will make teaching a profession that can bear the enormous weight that we, as a society, place on it. The first step is simple: Make teaching a full-time job and raise our expectation of what teachers do when they are not in class.

Ask business leaders or executives in not-for-profits how their enterprise would fare if their professional staff decamped for three months each year. Crazy, right? Yet this is exactly how we run our schools.

In the vast majority of schools, teachers leave for the summer. Some attend seminars, but the majority moonlight or simply take a well-deserved rest. As a result, schools across the nation lose the ability to reflect, evaluate the prior year’s results and plan individually and collectively to do better. Moreover, we lose the opportunity to insist that teachers undertake professional development.

Charter schools in Chicago and Newark already have switched to 11-month professional calendars. Each summer, teachers assess the previous year and learn how to improve their ability to assess student work, to use new technology and to concentrate on specific areas targeted for improvement at their school. Public schools in Kentucky and Indiana, while still taking traditional summer breaks, have created summer institutes where teachers assess their performance and seek to integrate new strategies into their teaching.

California, through a unique partnership between the state, led by Gov. Gray Davis, and the University of California, has embarked on an ambitious set of summer academies designed to address the “emergencies” in reading and mathematics instruction. The point, however, is not to create a patch on a system that expects less of its teachers but to change that system into one that expects more.

We must hold teachers accountable for the work they do, but the nine-month contract is an excuse for them and us. We can and must expect more, but as we make teachers more accountable, we need to give them access to the tools they need to succeed: a year-round contract and continuing professional training. They deserve no less as professionals, and we can afford no less as a nation.

Let’s start a new national debate about professionalizing teaching. Let’s talk about a 12-month professional calendar during which teachers will teach for the same number of days and be required to take courses aimed at improving their craft, to participate in school-site planning activities and, perhaps, to even make contact with the families of the children who will be in their classes the following year. Then let’s hold them accountable for results.

As former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley, an advocate of the 12-month contract, reminds us, “We can no longer get teachers on the cheap.”

If we are to truly address issues of educational quality, we must break through the conceptual barrier of the nine-month contract. Until we do, we will continue to try to get teachers on the cheap, demeaning the professionals who work in the most important jobs in the nation and shortchanging our children and our future at the same time.