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Back to SchoolCould teachers become the new lawyers?

By Ann HulbertPosted Thursday, Aug. 30, 2007, at 5:25 PM ET

Linda Perlstein's Tested. It's back-to-school season, and students aren't alone in suffering from a case of nerves. Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post reporter who spent 2005-06 embedded in Tyler Heights Elementary School in Annapolis, Md., opens Tested: One American School Struggles To Make the Grade with a snapshot of its anxiety-ridden principal.* "You could not tell by looking that Tina McKnight was in pain," Perlstein writes of the woman desperate to make her all-minority school a success in the No Child Left Behind era. "Her back throbbed, sore from hours of bending over the toilet, possibly from food poisoning but more likely from stress." At the opposite end of the spectrum, Alec Klein spent the 2006 spring term in New York City's most selective public high school, Stuyvesant. In A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America's Best High Schools, he introduces a principal equally wracked with tension. "Shaggy-haired, bearded, emaciated, and incredibly tired," Stanley Teitel "buries his head in his hands, uttering, 'God, I'm not going to get through these weeks.' "

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Enter a schoolhouse door these days with a journalist or a screenwriter, and you'll find the grown-ups within looking like masochistic martyrs. The Hollywood glow of the educator-as-hero, a figure familiar from stump speeches and pop entertainment, has faded. Don't go to HBO's The Wire, set last season in the Baltimore public school system, for a dose of idealism. The much-praised independent film Half-Nelson is grim, too, with Ryan Gosling starring as a drug-addicted maverick trying—and failing—to teach history his own way in a New York City middle school. The Sundance Channel's documentary The Education of Ms. Groves, which aired this week, unsparingly exposes a new teacher's naive optimism, according to the New York Times. Freedom Writers is the exception: To watch Hilary Swank single-handedly create an oasis of harmony in a gang-ridden L.A. high school seems a throwback to a simpler narrative arc.

In the eclipse of the saintly teacher image by the hard-boiled scene in recent insider accounts, are we seeing yet another cause for educational alarm? The picture of beleaguered teams of educators, as doubt-plagued as they are driven, isn't pretty. Yet the new profile of teachers and administrators outlined in Perlstein's and Klein's books may, oddly enough, give a useful boost to the prestige of a profession in urgent need of cultural cachet.

Just how urgent that need is could hardly be clearer. Thanks to baby boomer retirements and high turnover rates among new recruits, many states are confronting a teacher shortage—especially in the lowest-performing public schools in the country. American schools also face the problem of teacher quality. The world's best educational systems—among them, Singapore, South Korea, Finland, and Alberta, Canada—cull their teaching forces from their top college graduates. The United States draws from the bottom third to staff a profession that, like many traditionally female-dominated pursuits, inspires reverence, at its best, but lacks social status. If there is one thing school reformers agree on, it's the importance of raising the caliber of teachers.

But there is no consensus on how to engineer the image upgrade that would help lure more of the best and the brightest. Look abroad, to the premier school systems, and a spectrum of tactics emerges. On one end is South Korea, where teachers get big paychecks—and big classes, which make the salaries affordable. On the other is Finland, where teacher salaries aren't high but social status is: Considered on a par in prestige with lawyers and doctors, teachers are well-trained and wield real influence over curricular and other school policies. Yet to judge by the behind-the-scenes view of American schools that Perlstein and Klein provide, teacher autonomy and authority are rare commodities in the NCLB era. And recruitment incentives and merit pay, while welcome, alone aren't likely to give the cultural boost the profession requires.

For that, more is required. Strangely, perhaps, the spectacle of obsessive administrators and anxious teachers in the trenches presented by both Perlstein and Klein just might help buttress a field that could use some defeminizing. High-pressured and punishing—of such macho qualities is social cachet often built in the world of work. Nowhere in Tyler Heights or Stuyvesant, in Perlstein's and Klein's portrayals, do you hear anyone touting the familiar (female- and family-friendly) perks of the profession: the long summer months off, the seasonal breaks, the 3 o'clock dismissals, the heartwarming kids. Teachers' unions never get mentioned, nor do bonuses. The scene is more reminiscent of, say, the Union army, beset by struggles and squabbles within the ranks, yet striving to make slow headway on divisive home ground.

Stanley Teitel, presiding over a racially balkanized and brilliant student body at Stuyvesant, hasn't had a summer vacation in more than 20 years. In Klein's account, the principal has to deal with battles over instituting time cards and installing metal detectors, per school superintendent dictate. (Never mind that at wonky Stuyvesant, both are a waste of money.) And then there are his run-ins with Daniel Jaye, the math department head, school "fixer," and general upstart. For all his rebel qualities, Jaye—like his colorful colleagues—is finally more harried than heroic, run ragged by a hypercompetitive system dedicated to promoting prizewinning, SAT-aceing stars. Faculty and whiz kids alike, forever up against some contest or other, are regularly on the verge of burnout—yet soldier on.

The tensions are even more intense at the bottom than at the top. At Tyler Heights, Tina McKnight, attentive to every detail, sleeps only three hours a night. Dramatic test score improvements make her an NCLB miracle-worker, trotted out at educational conferences. Flattered, she fills that proselytizing role with her characteristic gusto, preaching a fervent focus on prep for the dreaded annual Maryland School Assessment, which determines a school's fate and funding under Bush's legislation. Yet she's frustrated, too. Buffeted by trendy consultants and shifting curricula, she sees the toll the endless drills take on kids and young teachers. Tina joins her staff in worrying not only about scores but about what the obsession with them is doing to schools. They can become joyless places, especially those that are home to the poorest and least prepared students, who get no respite from test-driven work, for fear they'll slip even further behind.

It's enough to deter anyone from a career in education. Or is it? In resisting the urge to romanticize the profession, the recent portraits accord administrators and teachers a hardheaded seriousness you don't find in the more familiar story of the rare starry-eyed saviors surrounded by mediocrities. The educators in these books, constantly under pressure to deal with some deadline or demand or dilemma, are anything but slackers. They're mired in, but not blinkered by, recalcitrant everyday realities, from getting through rote exercises to dealing with kids with suspicious bruises. Unillusioned realists, they're aware of the strains and inevitable trade-offs entailed in trying to arm both the brightest and the poorest for a fast-paced knowledge economy.

This blend of dogged energy and chastened maturity might almost look glamorous, especially to the kind of well-groomed college graduate the profession is eager to attract. For the super-credentialed, trophy-laden "organization kid" cohort, here at last might be a chance for anti-heroic apprenticeship in messy experience, the kind that will shake up studiously mapped horizons. Indeed, this year, according to Business Week, the not-for-profit Teach for America ranks among the top 10 most desirable employment opportunities for undergraduates, up there with Google and Disney. It is precisely the draining rigors of the job that are intrinsic to teaching's appeal, helping it shed its schoolmarmish taint, suggests Fortune in an article about TFA's popularity. "The program has been likened to a domestic Peace Corps, with long work hours and much emotional demand, so it's not for the faint of heart."

But is it for the fickle? There are plenty for whom TFA is merely a worthy way station en route to a more lucrative vocation. Attrition rates in general are rising, with a third of all new teachers, according to the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, leaving the field within three years. Still, as states now hurry to fill empty spots, doling out incentives in the process (including bonuses, housing subsidies, and teaching fellows programs designed to lure mid-career professionals), an aura of rugged commitment to uphill team efforts can only help.

So do ever-more-visible role models, demonstrating how influential—and entrepreneurial—a sustained educational career could be in an era when school change is on the agenda. Veterans of the now almost 20-year-old Teach for America program are beginning to make headlines, most notably 37-year-old Michelle Rhee. A TFA graduate who went on to found the New Teacher Project, which trains teachers for high-need schools, she was just named schools chancellor of Washington, D.C., home to the nation's worst performing education system. A thankless job, more conducive to ulcers than to miracles: It would be hard to find a better showcase of the new ethos.

*Correction, Aug. 31, 2007: An earlier version of this story misstated the title of the book Tested. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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Ann Hulbert is the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

The saint portrayal allows the public to assume that the fact that most teachers aren't rising to these unrealistic expectations means that clearly the teachers are at fault. But portraying teachers as martyrs, as the reviewed films and literature seem to, [doesn't] really perform a better service for teachers or their students.

This just allows the public to assume that teachers knew they were going to have a hard job and shouldn't demand better conditions. Just as portraying teachers as saints perpetuates the myth that teachers just need to work harder, portraying them as martyrs will perpetuate the myth that they just need to be willing to suffer more. Neither set of assumptions will improve schools or help students have positive and meaningful learning experiences.

--Calirodan

(To reply, click here.)

As a 35th year teacher with students who live in poverty and often speak a language other than English, I see that young teachers get hired in poor districts, because most of the jobs are there. They get good training and learn quickly because they have to in order to survive. They work long hours because underperforming schools have to do extra intervention programs to meet the criteria of NCLB. After two or three years, they are hired by a suburban middle class school and email back to tell us how much easier it is there - and they get more pay because the school is meeting all the performance criteria.

And we start training another round of new teachers who will almost certainly leave us in a few years. The baby boomers will be gone soon, and there will be a shortage of mentors with significant experience to bring new teachers along. Meanwhile, the stakes are continually raised until we meet the goal of 100% of our students passing standardized tests in 2014. Is it any wonder there is a teacher shortage?

--margescan

(To reply, click here.)

I just finished my first year of teaching last year in a Title I district. I actually attended education courses with other TFA corps members for a year while we all dealt with being "thrown in" to a largely dysfunctional system. I discovered, however, that even the Princeton and Georgetown grads with whom I worked rarely received any special treatment simply because of their lofty educational goals. These teachers were only able to break through to their students once they forged relationships, because quite frankly, it doesn't matter to a low-income kid who doesn't know how to read if you had the highest GPA in your class.

I had a rough first year in the classroom. I received a high rating as a first year teacher, but I know of the many ways in which I could have done better--if only I had had the time. Maybe I would have done better if I had taken more education coursework, but I also should have practiced more of the basics before entering the classroom.

I think that TFA is a great organization, but it does need to make some improvements. Teaching certainly takes more skill and patience than I ever imagined, and even brilliant Princeton grads need time to adjust. Also, there are a few of us "rejects" who would have benefited from some of the more rigorous TFA training. Additionally, a large percentage of TFA corps members do leave teaching after their two-year stint, but I believe that this is largely because most are quite young and are still making major life decisions.

Several people I met simply entered TFA to "try out" teaching, and many will move on simply because their personalities and interests may be better suited to other careers. For example, one just re-entered medical school. He will probably be a greater asset to society as a neurosurgeon than as a high school biology teacher. But at the same time, he will always be an advocate for education reform.

--opentochange

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