PAY TEACHERS MORE. MONEY OR RESPECT?

I read this editorial piece in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, concerning the recent trend in Conservative politics to attack teachers and lay the blame for various state's financial woes on them.  While it was refreshing to hear a balanced approach to the issue, after weeks of comments about lazy teachers having easy jobs, I have to disagree with some of what Kristof believes.  More than that, I have to again state that teaching is a profession.  A few of Kristof's statements lead me to believe that he, like most Americans, don't know the first thing about child development, the human brain, and how learning occurs.

Kristof begins by arguing that teachers are not earning huge salaries and deserve to be compensated much more than they are.  He then brings up the issue of gender discrimination in the past; a time when one of the only career paths open to women was Education. 

"Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them."

"These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores)."

I have several issues with these statements.  At face value, I would agree with the first one.  Obviously, if teaching was the only job available to women, both the brilliant and non-brilliant worked in that field.  The fact that Kristof defines brilliance based on SAT scores troubles me.  Once again, the debate about US education has dissolved into the swamp of standardized test scores.  This 47 percent of teachers were in the bottom one-third of their college classes?  Since SAT scores are taken by high school juniors and seniors, it seems like Kristof (and the authors of the original study) doesn't believe that these students learned anything in college.  Just because someone didn't score well on a standardized test, doesn't mean they aren't potentially brilliant or capable of learning more in their adulthood than they did in adolescence.  Nit-picky, I know, but I really cannot stand standardized tests as the basis for judging people or groups of people's intelligence.

Ignoring my argument about using SAT scores to determine brilliance, let's look at the figure again.  If 47 percent come from the bottom, then 53 percent comes from someplace closer to the top.  There are plenty of brilliant women who choose to become teachers, rather than surgeons or lawyers.  Based on scores alone, my standardized tests indicate that I place in the top one-third.  I did not pursue education as a career because it was all I could do.  Unlike other women I know, I didn't choose it because I would be off with my kids on holidays.  Call me sensitive, but I think that too little attention is paid to women (and men) who choose to become teachers because they are passionate about children and the learning process.  We already exist, yet politicians continue to talk only of recruiting higher quality people to the profession.  If our society doesn't treat the professionals it already has as such, why in the world would anyone but the most idealistic or the least qualified want to join up?
 

"Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later."

What exactly does Kristof mean by "even kindergarten teachers"?  In child development terms, the road kids follow is laid in the very first years of their lives.  Kindergarten being the first time many kids from uneducated and/or poor families are exposed to a nurturing learning environment, how can we cling to the notion that it isn't important?  What happens to our five and six year olds sets them on either a path to exploration and learning or one filled with boredom and failure.  Kindergarten teachers may just be the most important link in the chain.

"Moreover, part of compensation is public esteem. When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them."

I have no complaints about this comment.  As a public school teacher, I was treated with suspicion by parents who had struggled in their own school years and scorn by the parents who felt superior to me because they had chosen to become doctors or lawyers.  The occasional parent who looked on me as a professional, with valid opinions about their child's education, stand out in my memory because they were so few and far between.


"Research suggests that students would benefit from a tradeoff of better teachers but worse teacher-student ratios. Thus there are growing calls for a Japanese model of larger classes, but with outstanding, respected, well-paid teachers."

Really?  So "better" teachers could inspire and educate larger groups of kids?  How exactly does this research define "better"?  Anyone who has not actually taught classrooms full of kids shouldn't get a vote here.  I had thirty kids in my classes.  Being a high standardized test scorer somehow made me more able to silence noisy kids, still wiggly kids, etc?  Throwing in the comment about Japanese models is laughable.  First of all, Japan is rapidly moving away from their current model of high-pressure education because they realized that it didn't produce valuable results and led to too much stress on the students.  Secondly, has Kristof ever visited an American classroom and a Japanese one?  My mother-in-law visited a few Japanese schools, as part of a teacher exchange program, four years ago.  The grade school students worked on a rotating schedule to deliver lunch.  They spent the last ten minutes of every school day scrubbing their desks and cleaning the floor.  I happen to think that level of responsibility is great.  Mainstream American parents would have strokes if someone made little Johnny clean anything.  American students are not like Japanese students; they aren't taught the levels of respect, discipline, and responsibility here.  You cannot compare a large class of Japanese children to a class of our kids, unless we change our entire society first.


I began to read Kristof's piece with optimism that someone would cut through the layers of misinformation swirling around the teaching profession.  While I am glad that he defended the need for higher pay, and I agree with some of his criticism of teachers unions, I was underwhelmed by his knowledge of how children learn, and the true importance of teachers.