No experience desired

If you’ve ever questioned the wisdom of the latest bandwagon school “innovation,” or wondered how we got where we are today, consider a Public Agenda report published back when this year’s high school seniors were born. At that time surveyed parents and veteran teachers endorsed “safe, orderly schools” that emphasized “mastering basic skills,” “good work habits,” and “values such as honesty and respect.” In contrast, four out of five education professors considered these goals “outmoded and mistaken.”

Parents and working teachers rated classroom discipline as a top priority, but only one third of the professors ranked maintaining “discipline and order in the classroom” as an essential teaching skill. Barely half thought teachers needed to be “deeply knowledgeable” about the subject they teach. This means that almost half the people training teachers believed that knowing your subject isn’t “absolutely essential.”

No wonder we’ve got problems.

Taking a contrary tack, then Secretary of Education Rod Paige was looking for “smart teachers with solid content knowledge.” He proposed beefing up the teacher corps by eliminating teacher training programs’ “burdensome education requirements.”

As early as 1983, A Nation at Risk had rightly condemned teacher preparation programs as “too weighted in methods courses.” Aside from student teaching, though, I needed just three education courses to qualify for my license. Elementary level license requirements are more extensive, but the trouble with most teacher training programs isn’t that they’re burdensome. The trouble is they’re unsound and ruled by fashion. They produce teachers weaned on bad ideas.

Setting teacher quality aside for a moment, if you’re looking for factors behind public education’s decline, there’s also the breakdown of families, time-devouring social agendas, misguided mandates, crippling regulations, fifty years of pipedream reforms...

You get the idea.

That said, it’s not wholly unreasonable to connect teachers and administrators with problems at school. Critics, for example, often blame mediocre teachers for declining student achievement.

The fallacy is that most practitioners in every field are mediocre, meaning “average” or “of moderate quality.” It’s unrealistic to rest education reform proposals on a contrary expectation. While teachers can improve, we’ll never all excel, any more than all dentists or carpenters will.

In pursuit of higher quality teaching, some policymakers prescribe broadening the pool of prospective teachers. According to these reformers, thousands of highly trained, intelligent professionals in other fields like engineering, accounting, and business management secretly long to be teachers and would flock to the classroom if it weren’t for the “burdensome” licensing requirements Mr. Paige laments.

Newsflash: Most engineers, accountants, and business tycoons enjoy making more money than teachers do. They also prefer not spending their days immersed in adolescents. That’s why they’re not in classrooms.

One contingent of thinktankers, presumably without consulting taxpayers, has proposed luring these closet educators with “dramatic new pay scales” including “an increase of at least fifty percent.” Others, more mindful of budgetary concerns, suggest leaving salaries where they are and instead simply declaring teaching a “prestige” profession. Both proposals prove you don’t have to be an education professor to hatch a dumb idea.

Remove every licensing requirement, and you still won’t see a flood of “real world” applicants for our classrooms. Of the few you do see, most won’t be around two years later.

Critics have also advocated replacing principals and superintendents with “nontraditional” administrators drawn from business and the military. Chicago initiated plans to license ex-soldiers as principals. After three years of training, these non-teachers were unleashed to run schools. Other districts in more of a hurry convened “boot camps” where business executives spent “a weekend” – yes, an entire weekend – “training to become superintendents of urban school districts.” New York placed its entire school system in the hands of the ex-CEO of a media conglomerate.

In thirty-odd years of working in a classroom, I can’t recall ever wishing for even more school officials who didn’t know anything about teaching.

Boosters counter that inexperience doesn’t matter because “leadership skills translate from one field to another.” Successful soldiers and executives make successful principals.

Terrific. Let’s make our successful principals generals and hand them an army.

Reformers gush about drafting nontraditional administrators with the “stamina and capacity to lead.” Except how will these novice leaders know where they’re going? What sense does it make to assert that “public school experience” isn’t the proper “route to leadership” in a school system?

Public education already rests in the hands of bureaucrats, experts, and lawmakers who wouldn’t know a real classroom if they tripped into one. That’s the problem. Too many schools are run by people who lack real school experience. Replacing administrative educators who have little or no classroom experience with administrative non-educators who have absolutely no classroom experience doesn’t make much sense or offer much hope.

As for classroom teachers, irrelevant requirements shouldn’t be part of any licensing process. And there’s doubtless teaching talent out there in other fields.

It’s fine to hope your child will have inspiring teachers. It’s reasonable to expect that her teachers will be competent and that your school will take action when one proves he isn’t.

But before you cast your lot for the new and unconventional, you can do more good for your child and her school by preparing her to learn and by supporting reasonable standards of classroom behavior.

I suspect her teacher would appreciate the help.

At least this teacher would.