On Recruiting Teachers
Would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct;
But since we are all likely to go astray,
The reasonable thing is to learn from them who can teach.
– Sophocles, Antigone, I, 720
Today’s Washington Post has an anecdotal story about the failure of No Child Left Behind to force any improvements at tiny Como Elementary in Como, Miss., a school that has been the state’s worst at a time when Mississippi is coming in last in standardized testing. [Dangit, what happened to "Thank God for Arkansas"?!] The story discusses all what you’d expect: those who can afford it have gone to the local private school, a common occurrence in Mississippi that’s created separate and unequal [although my experience with most of these private rural academies is that they're worse at teaching than the public schools]; the difficulty of bringing in teachers, leading to Como taking on faculty generally considered unqualified or incapable by other districts; and the general issues of getting lost in the system. Most days, I would have read this, shaken my head slowly, and said, “Yeah, NCLB didn’t make much inroads, and it’s made a lot of things worse.”
But as I was in the airport yesterday, I read “How to be top” in the 20 Oct 2007 issue of The Economist. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment studies what makes education actually tick:
Are students well prepared for future challenges? Can they analyse, reason and communicate effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) answers these questions and more, through its surveys of 15-year-olds in the principal industrialised countries. Every three years, it assesses how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society. The results of the PISA 2006 survey will be released on 4 December 2007.
–OECD.org, 28 Oct 2007
There are many things that make other countries’ educational systems perform well, but how they do recruiting is, to me, one of the most important:
In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.
They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren’t. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.
Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).
South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers—11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.
I have friends who are teachers or are studying to be them: Adam, Jeremy’s wife Hallie, Brian, and Kari’s husband Mike. All of them are smart folks who have chosen teaching over other careers where they could make more money or have more prestige. That said, I don’t think that any of them would feel that there was much competition for them to get into their educational coursework. At many universities, including my alma mater, the education department is the 90-pound weakling; as an engineering major, I arrogantly considered most of my liberal arts peers to be slacker punks, but I at least knew that the kids majoring in English or history or whatever were working their asses off. It never felt like the education majors were pushed all that hard, and it was widely known at UAH that education majors had the lowest average incoming ACT and SAT test scores.
And sure, we all know an Adam, a Hallie, a Brian, a Mike—a smart, dedicated student who chose education. But are those folks the norm? The statistics nationwide say that they aren’t. Why is education not considered a high-prestige major at UAH, where nursing is? I’ll argue along with the PISA folks and McKinsey: at UAH, nursing is a selective major. The upper division slots are limited—more folks are trying to get into them than spots exist. Do nurses make more money than teachers—certainly they do. But at UAH, nursing majors were respected because there was competition; conversely, education as a major seemed like a last resort, the degree you got if you weren’t smart or hard-working enough to stick in some other major. Sure, we all know the smart folks who choose to become educators, but they feel like the exception, rather than the rule.
Smart students today in America have a lot of educational and vocational possibilities. Medicine is still considered an ideal, despite the hours and workload, despite the time commitment of medical school, internship, and residency. Even in a time when our nation needs desparately needs more doctors, our nation’s medical schools refuse to lower their standards; instead, we import top talent from South Asia. The statistical evidence of other nations, as taken by PISA, would argue that we might see the same network effects if education suddenly became a difficult school to get into. Just as with highly-selective educational institutions themselves, smart kids seek the selective places not because they’re demonstrably better than anyplace else—most studies show that undergraduate education is generally good at most any nationally-recognized university—but the best of the best want to go to the toughest places not only because they are good, but because there is prestige merely in making it there. Education doesn’t have that cachet these days, and so I believe that smart students generally pass it by in favor of more prestigious, challenging, and lucrative prospects.
[And hey, I'm one of these people that argues that it's not all about the money. I could make a lot more money in middle management in fully private industry than I do working as a government contractor. But dadgummit, there just aren't that many people who get to put stuff into space, either.]
This one seems to have a kind of chicken-and-egg feel to it, and I don’t know which one comes first.
Is the exclusivity of education training in those countries the root cause or merely an effect of societies that value teachers more than ours does? Can you really cause society to value teachers more merely by restricting the supply?
From another direction… let’s take doctors. It’s true that medical schools tend to be very selective, and many more want to to get in than actually do. Why is that? I don’t think it’s so much because those schools simply decided to be selective. I think it’s more because it’s very difficult to get through all the training and requirements to become a doctor. Doctors are held to a higher standard than most other professionals. If I ran a medical school, part of my success would be tied to how many of the people I let in became successful doctors. That’s a big incentive for me to be selective.
So… is the root of this “market” equation really a matter of raising the requirements necessary to become a teacher? I think that’s probably what it would really take to bring about the exclusivity you’re talking about. Otherwise, I don’t see the incentive for schools to restrict enrollment.
The problem, of course, is that I’m speaking entirely in the abstract. One effect of doing anything like what we’re talking about is that there are fewer teachers to go around. We don’t have enough of them as it is, so who gets screwed if the numbers get turned down even more? Probably exactly those poor schools you’re talking about.
*sigh* I don’t know how to fix it.
October 28th, 2007 at 22:03I think that you’d see some short-term issues, to be sure, but I think the problem could be resolved in a generation. Compare it to police and firefighters: both of those professions are areas where we could arguably use more of both, but they’re generally selective and see people choosing them for non-financial reasons. Add into that the knowledge that many smart kids have that handful of teachers that they really admire that make them want to teach at some level, and as soon as you add prestige to it, I think you’ll see a lot of people going towards primary and secondary education as a profession.
October 28th, 2007 at 23:13I’m not sure about how competitive it is to get into UNCG’s Education Program, but I do know that it always seems to be winning awards for “best in the state” and that sort of thing (and has been well-known as an excellent choice for educators since it was Women’s College, which may have something to do with it being more well-respected). I know people who haven’t gotten in, and it’s generally known that Education majors work their butts off, because UNCG requires more classroom hours (at least twice as many) than the state does. So that bias you feel certainly isn’t everywhere. I didn’t want anything to do with the Education department when I was in college, but even then I could see that my friends in the Education department were working very hard.
October 29th, 2007 at 07:44Yeah, my mother and grandmother both attended Montevallo when it was widely considered to be a teacher’s college. It’s good that there are places where Education isn’t seen to be a low-prestige major—I feel pretty strongly, after reading that piece in the The Economist and thinking about it since, that this is a large part of the problem.
October 29th, 2007 at 07:49But doesn’t the low prestige of that also have to do with the fact that it’s long been considered a “women’s profession”? (Hence the low salaries, hence the lack of male teachers, etc.)
October 29th, 2007 at 08:21And I will add . . . my mom was an elementary school teacher (now she teaches adults at the community college) and her sister and two of her sisters-in-law and her mother were all teachers as well. And my dad said, and I quote, “If you go to college to be a teacher, I won’t help pay for your education.” Because of the way that the school system treats teachers, basically. (Which, I must say, is only worse with NCLB.) The system itself has to be taken into consideration, probably more than the major.
October 29th, 2007 at 08:31For the record, I’m not currently teaching. My experience with the system and politics is that they do not foster, at the high school level, and environment where a teacher teaches. A high school teacher manages discipline problems and paperwork, attends meetings on “workdays” and turns in lesson plans. After all else, if there’s time, and the students are in the right mood, and Saturn is aligned with Jupiter, you might have a moment where the students forget they hate learning.
I think that happened a total of four times…maybe five.
October 29th, 2007 at 09:20Absolutely, but the same used to be said about nursing, and those attitudes have certainly changed [although not enough].
And as far as how teachers are treated: at the same time you’re reforming how you recruit faculty, you have to reform administration. The good thing is that the US has a surplus of management talent that it can put to good use.
The system is certainly broken, Brian. I think that a large part of the problem is that primary education is so poor that asking for focus and motivation in secondary education is such a laugher—if you haven’t built the foundation, you’ll not build a good house.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:28