Better Understanding, Not Bashing is What Teachers Need
by Mark Sklarow, Executive Director, Independent Educational Consultants Association
In Sunday’s Parade magazine, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose own children receive private instruction, said the following: “In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching.”
An interesting thought, Mr. Gates, but despite the recent piling-on to bash teachers, it is utter nonsense.
Are you comparing teaching today to the days when students in rural areas attended schools only on days that chores could be set aside and teachers barely got students to literacy levels and simple arithmetic? Or are you comparing to the days when only 10 or 15% of our students went to college and schools were only socializing students for life as factory workers?
Perhaps you are comparing to times when you and I were in grade school. There, small, homogeneous classes excluded those with learning disabilities and emotional needs. Things may have been better for some, but certainly not all. Today, teachers have larger classes that may contain four, five, or more students with special accommodations requiring them to attend to these students’ specific learning and behavioral needs.
Perhaps you refer to the days when I taught social studies in Philadelphia. I could seize on student interest in some topic and take them to City Hall or a courtroom for an impromptu lesson with a judge. I could drive a point home by doing a simulation activity in history or an experiment in psychology that might take up two or three class days, but pay huge dividends in promoting student thought and engagement. Today, a teacher only wishes they could engage in such activities, but statewide testing mandated by federal law has shifted emphasis to the learning of facts and figures and dates with the singular goal of increasing the numbers who pass, rather than promoting individual creative thinking and problem-solving.
Perhaps, Mr. Gates, you are comparing to a time when teachers spent almost all of their time teaching, rather than completing paperwork, filling in forms, supervising lunchrooms, and handling bus arrivals and hallway behavior. I am certain all teachers long for the days when a student was disciplined and they were supported by parents at home, rather than attacked by parents with threatened lawsuits.
In many fields and professions pay increases brought more and more highly qualified people to their careers. Somehow with education we think it is enough for people to have a “calling,” which I fear has become code for keeping salaries low. Squeezed budgets mean teachers have fewer opportunities for professional growth and training while class sizes increase; the complexity of student needs (like the growing number of those diagnosed with ADD or ASD) should dictate greater training and fewer students in each room.
Finally, some experts have said that more information has been uncovered in the last decade than in the entire recorded history of man before. Somehow we expect our teachers to not only keep up with new developments in science and technology, but to also educate students about these. We expand the teaching of culture and history to include more of the world—a worthwhile and valuable enterprise. In short, we ask our teachers to increase the volume of information with fewer resources, and in a disturbing trend, reductions in time (based on the need to ‘reduce costs’ by turning off electricity and heat on Fridays!).
I would argue that it is remarkable that so many teachers do so much with so little support (administrative, financial, and parental). Until we fully fund schools, provide adequate training and support, lengthen the time in the classroom, and pay teachers a salary that will attract the best and brightest, I for one won’t join in the teacher bashing. We daily ask our teachers to be miracle-workers. At least we should lend the support they need to accomplish what we ask.
Amen, Mark. As a former classroom teacher myself, I can attest to the challenges that teachers face today. I don’t know if anyone can truly understand what an impossible task it is to juggle so many competing interest and demands without having done it themselves. Thank you for speaking out so eloquently on behalf of those who work with and for our children.
Well said, Mark! Mr. Gates, “Are you listening?”
What a wonderful response to that article. As a former classroom teacher and high school guidance counselor myself, I found myself agreeing with all of your points. My great grandmother was a schoolteacher in a one room schoolhouse, grades 1-8, in rural Wyoming. She could not have dreamed of a world in which a teacher today works. To say that the profession has not improved over time is simply unfair. The profession has evolved in step with our world-that is indisputable. Whether it has improved depends on how you view our world today (which was shaped in no small part by Bill Gates!).
Well said, especially about the standardized testing, which as anyone who conducts testing knows does not really say enough about a student’s progress or knowledge so much as it provides a simplified benchmark. Yet so much attention is given to these tests that real teaching goes out the window.
I also agree that in this litigious society, it is too easy to “blame the teacher” in an increasingly disconnected culture, where parents and children are more likely to communicate by cell phone, email, or text messages than sit at a dinner table together and talk about the day. And then there are the financial issues that plague schools. . .
Still, I have met many teachers, not just a few, who really are unhappy in their jobs, and this unhappiness is fed to the students. I have had students who knew about strikes, contractual issues, health insurance, etc. because that is all their teachers could talk about! How can learning take place in such a stressful environment? And unfortunately there are teachers who do not want to learn! While it is true that in classrooms today there are wider ranges of learners, I frequently have to deal with school systems and teachers who continue to deny these differences: there is no such thing as dyslexia; if a kid with AD/HD takes his medicine, he’ll be fine; dysgraphia just means he doesn’t practice writing enough, etc.
In sum, education is a dance, one we all must partner in. And if we partner successfully, hopefully we can find ways to help each other become the best dancers we can be.
I’d like to add my 2 cents. No one has mentioned the parent’s role in teaching their children. In past times children worked alongside their parents learning practical aspects of the trade or business. When I was a teen we had jobs with training and supervision by adults unlike today’s teens who work for teens or young adults a year or two older.
Parents are a child’s first and most consistent teachers. When parents stress extracurricular activities they diminish the importance of formal education. I overheard a conversation between 2 mothers of third graders. After school ended at 3:15 the girls went to scouts followed by choir practice, the drive through then soccer practice. They returned home at 8 PM and did homework and went to bed. That was a 12 hour day for 8 year olds. How much are they getting out of school?
Many parents believe they have a duty to run interference for their children, criticizing homework rather than supervising it. When teachers give up and don’t push students to do better the parents don’t bother to ask for more from the class room.
Parents and voters get the education they demand. The difference between a great school and a poor one is whether parents show up at conferences, ask for tutoring or study help for athletes, stay on top of what is going on in the class and building. Parents always have the opportunity to supplement what is taught in the classroom but they must to make the effort.
Instead of bashing teachers we need to scold the parents who hover and complain but don’t support either the schools or their students.