Benjamin Riley
September 23, 2012

Benjamin Riley

Benjamin Riley

"Our most glaring problem is still recruitment/preparation of skillful teachers & principals and that'due south no closer to being solved."

So tweeted Seth Lavin (@SethLavin), a instructor in Chicago, in reaction to the recent settlement of the loftier-profile teachers strike in that same city (a strike he supported). Not only exercise I wholeheartedly concur with Seth, merely I believe the entire political-spectacle-slash-debacle we but watched unfold in the Windy City illustrates everything, and I mean everything, that is incorrect with education politics in America today. Nosotros saw otherwise rational grownups behave like tempestuous children as they fought over minor, incremental changes (at best) to a fundamentally broken organisation , all while ignoring the needs of actual children – and managing to destroy whatever semblance of trust and collaboration between school officials, spousal relationship leaders, teachers, and parents in the process.

What is truly remarkable about the Chicago teachers strike is how utterly oblivious all sides seem to exist to the problem that Seth, and for that affair anyone who'southward been inside a classroom lately, so hands identifies. We demand adept teachers, particularly to teach our poorest children. This is the biggest education-related problem facing Chicago. This is the biggest problem facing California. Long term, I think it's the biggest trouble facing the nation. All the same, we pay woefully inadequate attending to attracting bright young people into the educational activity profession, or properly training them to become effective when they enter the classroom.

First, every bit to attracting talent, only imagine for a moment the offering nosotros're making to prospective teaching candidates today. No one in their correct mind truly thinks that anyone wants to enter the profession because of the accept-home pay. The combination of imploding budgets and seniority-based layoff policies has destroyed whatsoever notion of job security in the early part of a teacher's career. And creativity and experimentation at the school and classroom level are stifled through a confluence of rigid workplace rules and inflexible accountability systems. In a related story, the number of credentials issued to new teachers in California dropped by forty% in the past seven years.

2d, as to teacher training, our system is a complete mess. We have somewhere around one,300 teacher-preparation programs in the U.S. embedded in institutes of higher education. Most of these programs happily accept anyone who applies, offer coursework that'southward irrelevant to bodily classroom instruction, and and so buss the teachers they train cheerio at graduation, without any endeavour to track their graduates' effectiveness at improving student learning. This isn't just my opinion, either – Katherine Merseth, the manager of the teacher education program at Harvard, estimates that 100 programs are adequately training teachers only the other 1,200 "could be shut down tomorrow."

The good news is that we're starting to wake upwardly to the problem. For example, the "Greatness past Blueprint" report on California teacher grooming, issued by the Task Force on Educator Excellence  and deputed past Superintendent Torlakson, contains a few good suggestions. These include requiring all school leadership programs to reapply for approval based on new, higher standards (expert idea) and infusing the Common Core state standards into instructor preparation (even better). At the federal level, I'm fractional to Senator Bennet's Slap-up Teachers and Principals Act, which would back up new teacher grooming programs similar to those we come across at High Tech High in San Diego, or the Aspire Teacher Residency programme.

Just neither these nor whatever other policies are likely to have any meaningful issue unless the adults that purport to care near education cease behaving similar ninnies. Reformers need to stop assuming union leaders are all retrograde, lazy-teacher-protecting bureaucrats, just as spousal relationship leaders need to end spinning conspiracy theories suggesting that all reformers are privileged hedge fund managers hell-bent on school privatization. These stereotypes serve no one, least of all kids, and forbid any meaningful overtures toward collaboration.

Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Educational activity and the Economy, recently wrote in a curt paper, Teachers, Their Unions and the American Didactics Reform Calendar, that if education reform:

… consists in the chief of forcing the unions to the wall, that is a policy that is about certain to atomic number 82 to no improvement in the qualifications of teachers too as a broad decline in the morale of teachers we already have. In fact, further eroding the morale of our current teaching workforce will show a very effective deterrent to recruiting young people to teach in our schools….Getting to a place where these issues can be productively addressed requires commencement a relationship of trust between government and labor. Building that trust ought to exist the first order of business concern.

Let'south outset building.

Benjamin Riley is the Director of Policy and Advocacy at NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit system that supports education entrepreneurs. Previously, Ben worked every bit a deputy attorney general for the California Department of Justice, where he worked primarily on didactics-related matters. He currently lives in Washington, D.C. but volition one day return to the Gold State.

To go more reports like this one, click here to sign upwardly for EdSource's no-cost daily email on latest developments in education.