According to a new report by Edsource in California, enrollment in teacher preparation programs in that state continues to plummet.
Teacher layoffs and budget cuts combine to make teaching a bad bet as a career.
The attacks on teachers by prominent reformers no doubt add to the diminishing prestige of teaching as a profession.
The reformers’ insistence that a “great” teacher needs only five weeks of intensive training is no doubt another contributing factor.
So, while “reformers” insist that the teacher is the most important factor in closing the achievement gap and producing students prepared for college and careers, their ideas are destroying the teaching profession.
This is not the lesson to be learned from other nations that the reformers claim to admire, like Finland, where entry into the profession is highly selective and the course of preparation lasts five years.
What is happening is criminal.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The profession is diminishing on both ends. The mass exit is just now underway. Reform is taking it’s toll quietly on the retirement side as well. Any teacher able to leave now is leaving. Semester break will see record numbers silently turning in their room keys and with out media fanfare, moving on, leaving in their wake a substitute teacher to fill the grinding void. Our district still has almost two hundred openings for certified staff and we are into our seventh week of school. The culmination of veteran staff leaving will not be televised, but it will be felt in communities across the country. Reform without qualified teachers makes this whole misadventure even more painful to our country.
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What district do you work/live in that has two hundred openings????
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Albuquerque Public Schools our start pay is pretty low.
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Every veteran teacher I talk to these days seems to have a compelling desire to retire ASAP. the loss of this very under rated resource will result in untold damage to a generation of students.
Heck of a job, Arne!
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What is happening IS criminal.
Teaching already suffered from this lack of prestige in our country. More than once, when I was teaching, I went to a party and got into a conversation and someone would ask, “Who do you do?” and I would answer that I teach, and the person would ask at which university, and I would say that I teach high school English, speech, and drama, and there would be a resounding “Oh,” because that simply wasn’t considered a high-status profession to be in. And, truth be told, every time this happened, it was a wound to my execrable vanity, for though I knew and know that to be a teacher is to be in the same profession as the Buddha, Yeshua of Nazareth, and Socrates, though I was proud of what I did every day, this sort of social slighting is palpable when it occurs.
It’s interesting to think about the possible reasons for the outpouring of disapprobation of teachers that we’ve seen in recent years. There’s doubtless a power dynamic occurring here. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish comes to mind. I used to think, when I was a child, that there was a substantive difference between kids and adults–that people “grew up.” But now I understand that they don’t, really, and that many who struggled mightily to become rich and powerful have not forgotten when they were children and powerless in the classroom of some teacher who misused that power. Bill Gates did not flourish in the regular classroom. He stole time away from that to play with computers. He dropped out of college to do the same. It’s not surprising that the notion that teachers are a problem has so captured his imagination. He was probably not crazy about his teachers.
But for every such person, with such an experience, there are many who look back and honor the teachers who made big differences, for the better, in their lives.
Of course, if you want terrible teachers, here’s how to do that: take away their autonomy. Make them into robots. Dictate standards to them. Subject their students to invalid testing and evaluate them based on those invalid tests. Give them scripts to deliver. Subject them to continual “trainings” conceived by educrats to reinvent everything they do from the ground up every few months. Show no respect, at all, for their wisdom, their knowledge of their craft. Overload their classes. Give them little time. Pile mandates upon them. Send goons into their classrooms with checklists. Fire their older colleagues and replace them with children with no training and no desire to stay in the profession. Pour billions into a public relations campaign to convince people that our schools are failing and our teachers are terrible. Do this to such an extent that simple-minded folks like ex-quarterbacks think they have the right to pontificate about how terrible schools and teachers are in national media. Make teaching into work for people who can’t do anything else but submit because a) they don’t have other skills or b) they are simple, authoritarian types themselves or c) they don’t have ideas of their own about how to do their jobs. The current deforms are guaranteed to run competent people out of the profession and to leave, among those remaining, the mediocre, the scared, the angry, the resigned.
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Wow. Yes.
Also, that robotic delivery you mentioned becomes the default for robotic learning. As my local paper once again promoted CCSS as awesome, it is super formulaic education. Kids just have to master writing in template formats.
And the turnover in my district could be exhibit A. The vets are getting out as soon as their retirements are secure and the kids aren’t sticking around.
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This is one of the best comments I have read about the effects of this mis-guided movement. Sure there are some good points to having goals set and similar. However I know teachers who are counting the days. Excellent, caring, motivated, hard-working, smart, teachers. Teachers in a wonderful school with great kids and support from the community. I can’t imagine how others who work in conditions that are not supportive are faring. It is simply wrong.
I try to hold on to the idea that the pendulum will swing. Has anyone read Silberman’s Crisis in the Classroom lately? I fear that the mind-numbing focus on information and skills will kill the passion, joy and commitment to wanting to learn in our kids. William Glasser writes in The Quality School that teaching is the hardest profession there is. Harder than neurosurgery since we do not always have cooperation from our “patients” ie students. There is so much to understand about what makes for good teaching and so much variety of approach to achieve the stated goals. JUDGE output NOT input. Let teachers teach. Sure help raise standards appropriately and bring in qualified, dedicated, talented, hard-working teachers. But take care of the poverty that holds so many children in its grip. The home counts. The neighborhood counts. Policy counts. The push to hold teachers accountable for growth scores is also wrong. It needs to be tested and these new “programs” that purport to being “the answer” to bring students to success on the “new, harder tests” are no guarantees. Scripted teaching of lessons and units that excellent teachers think will bring lower results is wrong.
Thank you John Sheppard and Diane Ravitch.
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Gil Scott Heron sang his song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and yes, this is one version. A deathly quiet tip-toeing so no one notices as wise, deeply talented teachers are driven out of their profession. We call on NBC’s “Education Nation” to dump the panel format and instead cover this with their cameras, that “grinding void”, emptied of the promise democracy once extended to all children. Reminds me of the original b/w documentary, Harvest of Shame.
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“So, while “reformers” insist that the teacher is the most important factor in closing the achievement gap and producing students prepared for college and careers, their ideas are destroying the teaching profession.”
Amen.
Arrogance with a soft, chewy ingorant center.
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ignorant
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I have been recently forced out of Education after 30 years – perhaps there’s a truth that i am tired, a bit worn out and old school – i cared as much about the child as their progress. But I still have a child in the midst of it (although not in the US) and am appalled at what is happening.
Good teaching is paramount and that means good training and an understanding of educational theories and practises, such that most children can be taught and more importantly they will learn. I feel for young teachers who are led by inexperienced leaders, too many who have come through these ‘fast track’ programs. It’s the business-ification of teaching – cheaper teachers, profit and quick turn over if you fail to meet all these silly targets based on dubious data.
The persistent dismantling of the teaching profession in many Western countries is doing untold damage – to the profession and more importantly to the students. It’s very hard to delivery good quality lessons when you are constantly under attack, being observed by others, criticised by politicians and others who should know better. Our under-achievers need more consistency, more calm and continuity in order to feel secure in their learning, take some risks, learn and make the needed progress.
Teachers are being scape-goated for years of political interference in the US and UK especially: two countries that have NOT improved outcomes for the poorest students. Check the various reports and look to Finland and Australia if you really want to do something about social mobility.
If reformers genuinely want to improve education and not just grand-stand and parade their egoes, they should talk to classroom teachers and perhaps some exit-polling might be informative…
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A bit of anecdata regarding the quality of some teachers and school districts today:
Here in New Jersey, a school recently published a compilation of their children’s fictional narratives which is being sold on Amazon. The teachers involved contributed essays documenting the process by which the children learned and employed their writing skills. They also went to great lengths describing the honor they felt in having their work published and associated with a well known author. Unfortunately, you would be hard pressed to find another book on Amazon, especially one that purports to celebrate the art of writing, with more spelling, grammatical, punctuation, and other mistakes than those found in these teacher’s essays. The book has been available online for months and the district superintendent, the school board, and the county board of education all know about the errors and have done nothing to correct them. You can go on Amazon today and buy this book, warts and all, with the name of the school proudly displayed on its cover. It remains a mystery why some of the most obvious errors weren’t caught before publication–perhaps laziness or incompetence or both. I suppose the silver lining is that the kids in the district may remain so illiterate they’ll never realize the embarrassment they’ve been associated with.
A few tasty morsels: “These stories spurned (sic) us on.”
“As the students began to ponder, they began to realize what made their story hook them in.”
“The books allowed our classes to have great discussions on the ending of these books and really improved their ability to go back to a book and prove their thinking.”
“This is what created suspense and would want (sic) the reader wanting more.”
“Severtal (sic) class sessions were spent talking about the main character…”
“Every piece of writing since the writing of our fictional stories…”
“One (sic) you are done, you have only just begun.”
“Ideas that had good intentions, but somewhere along the way, where (sic) lost and had no hope of finding their way home.”
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Did you have a point?
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I take it you graduated from or work for a similar school district where proofreading, attention to detail, and basic writing skills are unimportant to everyone from the top down. Were I to patronize your snark laden question, since you’re having trouble processing information without an explicit agenda attached, I might suggest that this is another example of basic skills being tossed out of our schools in favor of teaching to tests. Its clear these teachers were not hired because of their depth and experience in the subject matter. Its also clear that no one above them cares that they’ve been put in charge of teaching children how to write. However, as you don’t seem a bit concerned regarding how proudly and publicly this school district flaunts its ignorance, I won’t bother responding.
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Your point is apparently that you want to impugn all teachers on the basis of this one book, with about seven alleged examples of egregious errors, most of which are simply careless typos/brainos which may indicate carelessness, but certainly not lack of knowledge or understanding. Yes, the work probably should have been better proofed. After all, it’s not like teachers have anything better to do.
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You should read the entire thing and decide for yourself. Ask the owner of this blog to email me and I’ll forward the info. If she decides to publish it here, that’s fine–it’s on Amazon after all. I will not. And I just included some of the smaller examples so as not to clutter this page. Many entire paragraphs need to be rewritten and proofread.
Though perhaps you’re right, a writing teacher has much more important things to do than write well and proofread. Especially when they and their school are being published. And even more especially when they write about all the painstaking effort their students went through to write their stories. LOL!
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Baseball or football?
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Football.
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Good-was hoping it wasn’t baseball-ha ha!
And it looks like the majic number will be two in after another inning in St. Louis!!!!
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I loved being a teacher. I ran into one of my former kids and her Mom yesterday at the store. She is a senior in HS now and running track. The chance meeting left me with pangs of missing my kids. I know that law will probably not give me the same satisfaction.
However, I will discourage my child from becoming a teacher unless things change dramatically. Hate me if you must, but to choose to be a teacher in the current climate is not only illogical, it is masochistic and borderline stupid.
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I feel exactly as you do. This is the real result of the “reform” movement and soon everyone will realize it.
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Ditto.
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Back in those giddy times when “hope” and “change” we’re the buzz in teacher break rooms:
Teachers’ views on their profession have become markedly more positive over the past quarter-century, according to a retrospective-survey report released earlier this year by MetLife, Inc.
The financial-service company’s 25th annual survey of educators found that the proportion of teachers saying they are “very satisfied” with their careers increased from 40 percent in 1984 to 62 percent in 2008, while more teachers today (66 percent) feel respected by society than their counterparts did back then( 47percent).
http://www.edweek.org/tsb/articles/2009/10/01/01metlife_sb.html
Now:
The latest national survey by MetLife found that teacher satisfaction levels have plummeted, In 2008, 62 percent of teachers expressed satisfaction with their jobs, the highest level since 1984. By 2012, only 39 percent said they were satisfied –
http://www.edsource.org/today/2013/enrollment-in-teacher-preparation-programs-plummets/39380#.UkLuscu9KSO
Their declaiming fortunes, notwithstanding, teachers came out again to re-elect obama
“There are definitely some differences of opinion about education between even Obama’s education reform plan and what teachers feel is best for students,” says Ohio Federation of Teachers President Melissa Cropper. ”What we have to keep in mind is that there’s an open door with Obama at least.”
They continue to support Obama, despit the fact that:
With Arne Duncan, a political operative with no formal training in the field, as education secretary, the administration has aggressively promoted an education program with three principal elements: using test score data to evaluate teachers, shutting down and “reconstituting” schools deemed to be failing, and expanding privately-run, mostly non-union charter schools. Other elements include the standardization of curriculum and the lengthening of the school day. This agenda is supported by a nearly unified front of the powerful—Wall Street, Democrats and Republicans at all levels, and many non-profit organizations.
Obama signaled the lengths to which he’s willing to go to implement this agenda. Speaking before an audience of business executives at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the president supported a Rhode Island school board’s decision to fire all seventy-four teachers and nineteen other school employees at Central Falls High School. “If a school continues to fail year after year after year and doesn’t show sign of improvements then there has got to be a sense of accountability,” he remarked. As the only high school in the poorest community in Rhode Island, Central Falls has been chronically underfunded. Yet it seems that the only people being held accountable are the teachers who have dedicated their lives to working with Central Falls students.
As a Democrat and the country’s first Black president, Obama has much more leeway to implement a conservative agenda than the Bush administration did, under the guise of promoting equity and civil rights. Though Obama may use different language, his education policies are an intensification of the Bush agenda. Yet many teachers’ union leaders who derided NCLB during the Bush era are now supporting Race to the Top (RTTT). American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, after praising the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its contributions to the AFT, announced that, “With the exception of vouchers, which drain vital resources from public schools, everything is on the table in terms of reform, as long as it is good for kids and fair to teachers.”
http://isreview.org/issue/71/obamas-neoliberal-agenda-education
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The 2008 election was a difficult time for those of us in education who had a sense that the wrong candidate was nominated. I guess we’ll never know…
Education Week, 27 April 2007:
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, the current front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, today blasted the No Child Left Behind Act as narrowing schools’ curricula and relying too heavily on standardized tests at the expense of student creativity.
“We can all agree that we do need measures,” she told the New York State United Teachers’ annual convention in the nation’s capital. “We do need accountability. But not the kind of accountability that the NCLB law has imposed on people.”
“It’s time we had a president who cares more about learning than about memorizing,” Sen. Clinton added. “The tests have become the curriculum instead of the other way around.”
The crowd of about 3,000 at the Washington Hilton, which had been waving “New York [Heart]’s Hillary” signs when Sen. Clinton took the stage, erupted into thunderous applause. She was the only presidential candidate appearing before the union.
http://elladvocates.org/media/NCLB/EdWeek27apr07.html
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In her blog entry of 25 Sept 2013, “Enrollments in Teacher Preparation Program Plummets” at http://bit.ly/14H7sTQ , Diane Ravitch states that “The attacks on teachers by prominent reformers no doubt add to the diminishing prestige of teaching as a profession.”
One such attack, due to the late physics-education “reformer” (in the strict sense of the word) Arnold Arons http://bit.ly/19zfeyW, was emphasized in my discussion-list post “Why Have K-12 Educators Ignored Benezet’s Breakthrough?” at http://bit.ly/1fhomzu . The abstract reads:
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An educator wrote to me (paraphrasing): “I’ve just come across the Benezet Centre http://bit.ly/926tiM. Benezet’s method seems superb. If it was such a success, why did it not spread?” GOOD QUESTION !! I think the best answer was given by the late Arnold Arons. In “The Arons Advocated Method” [Hake (2004)] at http://bit.ly/boeQQt , I quote Arons as follows:
“I have looked at the Benezet papers at http://bit.ly/926tiM, and I find the story congenial. . . . . . .[but] whence do we get the teachers with the background, understanding, and security to implement such instruction. They will certainly not emerge from the present production mills.”
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“Production Mills”? Diane comments that in Finland “entry into the [K-12 teaching profession] is highly selective and the course of preparation lasts five years.” According to Wikipedia http://bit.ly/18WvLAO :
“Both primary and secondary teachers must have a Master’s degree to qualify. Teaching is a respected profession and entrance to university programs is highly competitive. A prospective teacher must have very good grades and must combat fierce opposition in order to become a teacher. Only about 10% of applicants to certain programs are successful. The respect accorded to the profession and the higher salaries than the OECD average lead to higher performing and larger numbers applying for the positions, and this is reflected in the quality of teachers in Finland.”
The above raises TWO MORE GOOD QUESTIONS:
(1) Do Finnish teachers have “the background, understanding, and security” to implement Benezet-type instruction?
(2) If so, to what extent is Benezet’s method employed in Finland?
Perhaps there are Finnish educators who might answer the above questions.
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No, it’s not. I’m the most gifted teacher in the state–and you’ve never heard of me, and I don’t want to go through any teacher preparation program. I did not need five years of training, it is a natural skill for me. I do not want a credential and do not want to deal with bureaucratic politics. I do not want some idiot who knows less than I do telling me what I can or cannot say (were I to teach English), or telling me how to teach. I do not want bad teachers controlling me because they have “experience.” But these are persistent factors in education in California. The reformers are right, not criminal. But in order to work their magic we need to get rid of the public school system in California altogether, which is not a bad idea but will never happen.
Think about it. What I just said makes total sense.
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Wow. Your hubris is astounding. And your premise has been borrowed from the reformy-fided handbook. Peace.
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Is that LSD, psylocibin or peyote I need to be on to understand your post?
Or do I just need to eat more Snarkies?
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“Think about it. What I just said makes total sense.”
Not last I checked…
As it says in Fiddler on the Roof, “A Rabbi who must praise himself has a congregation of one.”
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Wow, this is a great article! So concise.
I know that many schools have begun to hire teachers from those 5 week training programs. LAUSD starts those teachers’ salaries at around $40k per year- about $10k less than a fully credentialed teacher. So, now principals have a choice to offer quantity over quality. And since enrollment into credentialing programs is low, principals may not have that choice for long.
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