Multiplying Good Teachers

California demands so much of teachers. They are expected to help every student hurdle the state’s new, high academic standards no matter where he or she starts. They struggle to help those who don’t speak English, are impoverished, are burdened by family problems. The best teachers could take home more money, and have fewer headaches, outside the profession.

Despite challenges that would make quitters of most of us, many talented teachers succeed. There just aren’t enough of them.

Gifted teachers are scarcest at inner-city and rural schools, where the children, usually disadvantaged, most need the best teachers. Therein lies a challenge for California.

How can the state guarantee every child a well-prepared, caring and competent teacher? That is the goal of a report issued a few weeks ago by a task force put together by Delaine Eastin, state superintendent of public education, and co-chaired by Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond, a national expert on teacher quality.

The recommendations start with a call for more money and a laundry list of legislation, including some bills that have already passed and some that will certainly run up against California’s new economic realities. The report urges pay raises of at least 20% to 25%.

If teachers were paid according to their knowledge and skill and if their working conditions were improved, the report says, more of California’s 1.3 million credentialed teachers would still be on campus. Because so many have left the profession, the state must depend on 42,000 untrained teachers, many of them enthusiastic and willing but some simply ineffective. A credential does not guarantee that a teacher is good, any more than a license guarantees that a lawyer can win trials, but it increases the chances.

California could reduce the need for untrained teachers by rewarding instructors who face the most difficult challenges, by providing a warmer welcome to credentialed teachers from other states and by reducing the disincentives that are all too common at hard-to-staff schools: sluggish administrators, a shortage of supplies, crowding and year-round schedules on run-down campuses.

High school students with the desire and potential to become good teachers should get scholarships and start their training in their undergraduate years, instead of cramming all the education courses into a fifth year of college. New teachers should get expert mentors. More longtime teachers should seek to refresh their methods and maintain their enthusiasm. Administrators should create opportunities for teachers to learn from one another.

The best teachers are in the game to see the dawn of learning on a student’s face. In this season of thanks, teachers particularly deserve our gratitude.