The back-to-school season is under way for 50 million
students in the United States. Parents are
scrambling to give their children the tools to make
the school year a success: pens, pencils, calculators, and
computers. But every parent knows that one vital ingredient
in their children's academic achievement is something
that can't be put in a backpack. Good teachers are
that key to quality education.
Good teachers are also one of the keys to restoring
Americans' faith in public education. If Democrats don't
develop solutions for what ails our schools, then our automatic
defense of public schools will become the defeat
of the public schools. Parents at every rung on the economic
ladder will support the abandonment of the public
system if we leave them no real alternatives.
Succesful public schools represent our only hope of fulfilling
the promise of this country. But they can't achieve
that mission without good teachers in every classroom.
Even as we recognize the importance of high-quality
teachers, we struggle to find them. In June, 59 percent of
teaching candidates in Massachusetts failed the first
round of state certification tests. In Virginia, one-third of
aspiring teachers failed a similar test of basic skills, and
in Philadelphia one-fourth of would-be high school English
teachers flunked an essay exam designed to test mastery
of grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. And
although studies confirm that a teacher's mastery of his
or her academic subject is crucial to his or her performance,
one-third of our high school science and math instructors
did not major or minor in the subject they teach.
The statistics are even more alarming in urban schools.
Public education will receive a passing grade only if we
insist on putting a highly capable teacher in every class-room.
Finding quality teachers is imperative: The United
States will lose 2 million teachers to retirement alone in
the next decade, more than 60 percent of them in the next
five years. Never before have we had to hire so many
teachers so quickly. Never before have we had such an
opportunity to revitalize the teaching profession.
The solution is not to design tests that subpar candidates
can pass but to attract candidates who can pass
the tests we already have. We must embrace comprehensive
reforms to make teaching attractive to college
graduates capable of meeting high standards. Low
salaries, poor working conditions, and limited opportunities
for advancement are keeping many graduates
away from this profession. It is an issue of respect and
professionalism. We must give teachers the respect they
deserve by providing competitive salaries with performance
incentives to reward excellence and dedication.
Higher teaching salaries, signing bonuses, and increased
student loan forgiveness are necessities to making teaching
viable for our best and brightest. North Carolina has
recruited future teachers from within public high
schools with the lure of college scholarships.
Scholarships ought to be available for talented high
school students in every state in return for a commitment
to teach in the public schools. The federal government
must be prepared to empower states and local school
districts to take these steps forward.
Improved teacher quality also depends on our willingness
to expand the pool of candidates. Our teacher recruitment
policies badly need structural change.
Communities must recognize that there are many answers
to the question, "Who will teach?"
Two centers of energy and creativity in our society remain
unengaged in the search for a new generation of
teachers: corporate America and our finest liberal arts
colleges and universities.
It is time we gave liberal arts graduates greater incentives
to teach in public schools. Private schools long
have hired top liberal arts graduates as teachers. In most
states, graduates of liberal arts colleges who want to
teach are required to enroll in an education school for
two to three years to get certified. We ought to encourage
all states to streamline and improve certification so
that liberal arts graduates can quickly enter the classroom
while meeting high standards. Many confuse
streamlined certification for these liberal arts majors
with the haphazard policies of emergency certification. I
envision a system that would team liberal arts graduates
with blue ribbon teachers as mentors to transfer teaching
skills on the job to these qualified young people.
School districts also should have the chance to hire
businessmen and women as teachers. Although few have
more reason to care about a well-educated work force,
corporate America has not been enlisted sufficiently in
our efforts to improve public education. While entrepre-
neurs such as Ted Forstmann and John Walton have chosen
to turn private school vouchers into a new philanthropy,
their generosity is arguably misplaced. Ninety
percent of our children remain in public schools. If our
economy is to continue to grow, the nation must rely on
well-trained graduates -- from the public schools. One
way to produce skills-savvy students is to build a 21st
Century Teaching Corps of midcareer professionals that
the private sector provides and pays for. That teaching
corps would bring technical know-how to our classrooms
and help educate children for the Information Age.
Once we have hired the very best to teach, we must keep
them. Nearly 40 percent of new teachers quit the profession
in the first four years. Crumbling buildings and skyrocketing
crime rates have driven away young teachers.
The teachers are abandoned in the toughest environments
and left with less than 12 minutes a day on average
to plan lessons and collaborate with senior colleagues.
Their counterparts in Japan spend 45 percent of
their time in professional development. We too must invest
in meaningful ongoing education and mentoring for
our young teachers. Every school ought to be conducive
to good teaching. Each should be safe and secure. And
mentoring by senior colleagues and evaluations to monitor
performance must become as common in our public
schools as they are in our Fortune 500 corporations.
To preclude burnout in urban school systems, a new
career ladder must be built into the teaching profession.
Today, ambitious teachers discover their only chance for
advancement is outside of a classroom, as administrators.
A better system would reward entrepreneurial, innovative
teachers by providing them the chance, for
example, to develop curricula, work collaboratively with
education technology firms, and even take yearlong sabbaticals
at our finest universities. We must remember
that good teachers crave freedom and autonomy as
much as they do financial compensation.
We cannot be afraid, either, to touch the third rail of
education reform: teacher tenure. Local efforts are necessary
to end teacher tenure as we know it and replace it,
as in Massachusetts, with a fair dismissal policy. Every
teacher should have due process and protection from arbitrary
firing, but no teacher should have a lock on a job.
Exorbitant legal bills and years in court should not be required
to dismiss a teacher who cannot or will not empower
our children to succeed. Tenure reform at the
state and local level is an integral step to restoring the
accountability so badly needed in our schools.
Many observers are astonished by these frank discussions
of education reform. Some even argue that it is
heretical for Democrats to engage in this dialogue on
raising teacher quality. It is only heretical in a political
world of false choices where Republicans speak only of
private school vouchers and Democrats speak only of
the need for greater resources in our schools. That is not
a prescription for progressive change, and it does nothing
to honor teachers. Parents and teachers both demand
a better answer.
As political leaders are finding common ground on
teacher quality, their efforts are creating a ripple effect in
the education community. Former Seattle Mayor Norm
Rice persuaded teachers' unions to permit student
achievement to be a factor in measuring teacher performance.
Democratic primary contenders in California all
embraced teacher testing. Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles
signed legislation to streamline the process for dismissing
ineffective teachers. Democrats in Massachusetts
continued to emphasize the importance of keeping
teacher standards high after the alarming results of the
certification tests, and the certification debacle has reframed
the debate. The president of Northeastern
University, home of one of Massachusetts' largest education
schools, recently introduced new quality controls,
emphasized subject-area mastery, and argued that "to be
effective in a classroom, it's not enough for a teacher to
stay one chapter ahead of the students." None of these
steps forward would be conceivable in a climate where
political leaders were afraid to think outside the box.
We must not be stopped in our tracks by limited budgets
or powerful interest groups. Comprehensive school
reform requires that we liberate schools from bureaucracy,
transform every school into essentially a charter
school within the public school system, and add competition
and choice to our education model. These reforms
will be meaningless -- even counterproductive -- without
good teachers in our classrooms. The teacher-quality
debate is too important to get stuck in an ideological cement
of our own mixing. We need to break free and ask
how we can recruit, train, and retain high-quality teachers.
Only then will we develop a vision that honors
teachers and serves the 50 million students in our public
schools today and those who will follow. Only then will
the back-to-school season mean a real new beginning for
America's teachers and a good long-term prognosis for
comprehensive school reform.
