Pay more to those who promote true learning
Teacher Appreciation Week passed quickly without much fanfare.
Teachers should be appreciated and celebrated all year, not for a mere week. We are losing good teachers because of burnout, lack of incentives and general underappreciation. If you look at teacher pay scales, you’ll find it pays less to be a teacher than an administrator or high school football coach. We are not talking chump change here but thousands of dollars.
Pay scales should be reversed: more pay for teachers. Why? Because teaching requires more critical thinking skills and managing 30 students per class, in addition to counseling students about everyday life, and handling social problems and discipline. Although administrators do oversee entire schools or subject areas, they are not in the trenches.
Teachers should get as much pay and attention as coaches. Winning games is a major accomplishment. Paying bonuses to teachers who win first or second place at University Interscholastic League should be the norm, along with ribbons and trophies. But teachers are not as appreciated as coaches who win football and basketball games.
When I taught at Edgewood High School decades ago, I remember the day we won first, second and third place at a Ready-writing tournament. Our students performed admirably, producing 1,000-word extemporaneous essays on a writing prompt. When the judges announced the winning numbers, we were aghast. A tiny West Side school beat out the major league players.
Teachers had more leverage back then and were given free rein by school visionaries to develop curricula that encouraged critical and creative thinking. Test-taking skills were not the focus. Practical applications of mathematics and science were taught in tandem with Gilgamesh, “Beowulf ” and Shakespeare. Of course, this was years before standardized exams, before STAAR testing and before teaching literature became a privilege.
Unfortunately, test-taking strategies have become a top priority, not critical reading and thinking about great ideas, which is the basis of most college curricula. One school district in Philadelphia has attached annual performance bonuses to improved standardized test scores. Obviously, teachers will soon be teaching to the test.
Reading and writing teachers in those early days reserved Fridays for uninterrupted silent student reading. Students grabbed a book from stacks, sat comfortably on beanbags and read uninterrupted for an entire hour.
Teachers tell me that standardized testing has killed the love of reading, and made skills and job placement the center of attention. Learning for the sake of learning has been all but eliminated.
We must return reading to the center of joy, of discovering new adventures and allowing the mind to explore new worlds. One district is doing this admirably — Somerset ISD. I have had many of its students in my classes at Palo Alto College, and they are inquisitive and provocative — not afraid to engage rhetorically and question what they read.
Getting students back on track toward learning, not test taking, should be everyone’s goal. Teachers are the unsung heroes of education.