Two separate items crossed my monitor this weekend: first, an editorial/ad that ran in Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Review section by AFT President Weingarten. The second is an essay by Wendy Kopp, Teach for America founder, in the Huffington Post.
Here’s a snippet from the Weingarten Piece:
Since some people think that everything in education can be reduced to a number, let’s follow their lead.
• 50: The approximate percent of teachers who leave the profession within the first five years .
• $7.3 billion: The cost to American school systems each year as a result of teacher turnover.
Weingarten blames the low teacher retention rate, and its attendant cost, on an overemphasis on standardized testing, budget cuts, and low morale. Also, she writes,
a rogues’ gallery of governors across the country has used the mantra of ‘education reform’ as a ruse to cut budgets and strip teachers of their voice in their profession . Teachers have even been portrayed in the movies as the villains, leading dedicated educators to wonder how they became the bad guys.
Many of the pundits and policymakers who have leveled the most destructive attacks on teachers claim to care about elevating the status and professionalism of teaching. But the data tell the real story: They are shattering teacher morale and making it harder, not easier, to recruit and keep good teachers.
Over in the Huffington Post, Wendy Kopp notices a different trend, challenging the view that new teachers are leaving in droves. (She’s actually responding to an critical review of her new book, published in the New York Review of Books and written by Diane Ravitch.) Kopp writes about career choices of TFA alumni after their two-year tenure as Corps members:
Teach For America is working hard to be one significant source of the leadership we need. More than two-thirds of our 24,000 alumni are working full-time in education. Although few of them intended to enter the field at all before their involvement with Teach For America, today a third of them are teaching, 600 are serving as principals, and many others are working as district leaders. Of the remaining third of our alumni, half have jobs related to low-income communities or schools, and only three percent are working in the private sector — hardly the “corporate” stereotype Ravitch is so fond of perpetuating. This growing alumni force is working, together with many other dedicated teachers and leaders across the country, to fundamentally change things for the better…
Certainly, Weingarten is correct: teachers endure far more stress and pressure than they did before the “accountability movement,” and the cost is high, both pedagogically and financially, when we lose effective, experienced teachers. (The “rogue’s gallery of governor’s” refers to the National Common Core Standards signed on to by 44 governors, including NJ. Her disdain for government intervention in public schools places her firmly in the Romney/Santorum camp, but that’s an irony for another time.)
Is it possible that the nature of teaching is changing? Accountability is here to stay; so are efforts to add rigor to curricula, standardized testing, and teaching evaluations. We ask much more of our teachers than we once did. Perhaps it’s not unreasonable that such a shift in expectations would lead to higher turnover. Maybe teaching, at least for those in higher-demand positions in poor communities (like those staffed by TFA members), is becoming more of a “young man’s/woman’s game.” And such a shift would be right in line with this generation’s serial careerism, as they eschew lifetime jobs for a series of consecutive positions.
We need to worry about teacher morale. And we need to significantly raise the salaries of teachers who devote enormous amounts of time and energy to our poorest students. But the reasons for low retention rates among teachers can have many more causes than a “rogues’ gallery” of governor or our new-found respect for accountability.
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