As education professors who previously taught in the New York City public schools, and who now prepare education students to teach in them, we find working in the current education climate more and more difficult. The last decade in New York City and elsewhere has seen continuing public attacks on teachers and the profession. Teaching -- inherently intellectual, complex, and challenging work -- is progressively determined by scripted curricula and teach-to-the-test mandates, which have served to deprofessionalize it.
It is not surprising then that recent studies show that teachers are increasingly dissatisfied with their jobs and the profession. According to the 2011 annual MetLife Foundation Survey of the American Teacher, only 44% of those surveyed, down from 59%, say they are satisfied with their jobs and a rising number of teachers (from 17% to 29%) say they are thinking of leaving the classroom.
Rarely mentioned are prospective teachers, such as our own education students, who are now having second thoughts about becoming teachers. In our work with them we face a conundrum. How do we help prospective teachers remain excited and hopeful about teaching, while at the same time they are realizing that teaching is being deprofessionalized?
Unlike some candidates in fast-track programs like Teach for America, who generally spend only two years in classrooms before moving on to careers as lawyers, public policy experts or education technology entrepreneurs, most of our education students view themselves as preparing for a career in teaching and see it as a profession. However, increasingly our students have raised questions about whether or not they should enter a field where their hard work is not valued, where many administrators are required to evaluate them based on checklists and some do little to support them, where they would have little autonomy and are required to implement scripted curriculum and assessments which they played no role in creating. Our students' disenchantment with their chosen field corresponds with the 50% of teachers who leave teaching within five years on the job.
Historically, men and women, but mostly women, entered teaching because of the opportunities it provided them, including its status as a profession. While during the second half of the 19th century prospective teachers attended normal schools, which offered a level of education similar to a secondary school, by the beginning of the 20th century, university-based teachers' colleges were established to professionalize teaching. Their founders believed that an in-depth scientific approach to education would lead to professionalization for both school administration and teachers.
But can teaching be considered to be a profession today? A profession iinvolves intellectual work that requires a specialized knowledge base developed through both academic study and applied practice. It assumes autonomy in decision-making and the opportunity to work with other professionals on complex cases, and encourages an ethic of service. It is a pursuit where one develops skills over time, and with it the respect of the larger community.
Recent school policy and practices -- referred to as "corporate reform" by some critics -- with mandates from above dictating everything from curriculum, teaching and assessment with little teacher input -- have meant eliminating teacher capacity in the very domains that define teachers as professionals. There is little interest in developing in teachers what scholars Michael Fullen and Andy Hargreaves call "professional capital," a combination of individual expertise, the ability to work closely with colleagues to develop skills, and opportunities "to make decisions on the ground."
While we have deep concerns about how teachers and teaching have been undermined in New York City because of policies implemented by Mayor Bloomberg and the New York State Board of Regents, we maintain hope for the school system to which we have devoted our professional lives. Whoever becomes mayor in 2013 will be in control of the schools, as Bloomberg has been. The new mayor will have the opportunity to reshape both educational policies and practices in New York City. Most importantly, he or she will have the opportunity to place educators at the center of school reform, which can, among other things, remedy the disenchantment that many prospective teachers experience.
As teachers and observers of the New York City schools for together nearly 50 years, we respectfully present the following six-point program to those running to become mayor of New York City:
Sonia E. Murrow is Assistant Professor of Education at Brooklyn College. Jessica Siegel is Assistant Professor of Journalism, English and Education at Brooklyn College.
1. Fire all the people hired by Klein and Bloomberg and replace them with professional educators
2. Make absolutely sure our students receive instruction in ALL subject areas
3. Prohibit schools from buying or using test prep. materials
4. Abolish all six NYC Dept., of Ed. standardized reading and math tests.
5. Allow teachers to organize their rooms any way they see fit
6. Allow teachers to decide how long their lessons should be
7. All principals should be called "principal teacher"
8. Quickly replace incompetent principals
9. All students must have science text books and hands on material
10. All students should be taught to read using a direct systematic phonics program
11. All student should use a classroom library consisting of both fiction and nonfiction books
12. Give schools enough money to replace the horrible Everyday Math Program
13. Prohibit the opening of any more charter schools
14. Make sure charter schools are not "creaming" students and illegally expelling them
15. Abolish the 150 minute tutorial program and use the time to extend the regular school day
16. Allow teachers to teach to the whole class or to small groups at their discretion
17. Adopt a curriculum similar to E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation curriculum
18. Provide remedial instruction starting in Kindergarten
only pointing what others should do.
this is typical of many teachers.
Display reflexivity prof. No one accepts unidirectional stuff.
Let's be honest...according to the US Department of Education statistics, teachers are some of the very worst students who go to college. Only ag students, home economics students and public relations students are less qualified.
Gee.....I wonder why teachers hate tests......hmmmmmmm
For example, Latham, Gitomer, and Ziomek (1999) examined the SAT scores of candidates who took and passed the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Praxis II tests between 1994 and 1997 and found that those seeking to teach mathematics and science had higher average mathematics and verbal SAT scores than other college graduates.[12] Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), Cardina and Roden (1998) found that female high school graduates intending to major in education in college exhibited a range of academic abilities measured by mathematics, science, and reading proficiency levels comparable to that of females intending to major in other fields such as psychology, business, or the health professions.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind04/c1/c1s5.htm#c1s5l1
Blogger equals "no value added'.
"No value added" equals loser.
Teacher basher equals loser.
And your description of what engineers and physicists do--bizarre and pathetic. "They just discover what is and then try to mathematically approximate it." This is an example of the more highly qualified non-educators? Shudder...
One more thing: are you suggesting that physicists don't enjoy autonomy at work because they are *constrained by physical laws*?
LOL!
You win! We can't match that!
Women entered teaching because it had a short workday, they get every conceivable holiday off and they got the summers off....to be with their own kids. To say it was because or professionalism is laughable.
(My dad was a local farmer. After the war, on the GI bill, he became a teacher, too.)
Not sure why they didn't end up firing her for the dating and marrying thing--I guess they thought better of it. My mom ended up teaching for over 30 years, in addition to raising 9 kids.....
My mom, my aunts--many in my family--made enormous sacrifices in the 30s and 40s just to go to college. They started in one room school houses, earning their master's degrees late in life, working hard for decades to educate a generation or two of rural students through the middle of the 20th century.
Your words belittle their very lives.
It's ironic to me that our units and curriculum maps are given to us--the literature chosen for us, the essays prescribed--but we're required to PROVE in our evaluations that the observed lessons were presented at the correct level of difficulty for every sub-group and for 90%+ of the students individually.
A good teacher can make Othello, for example, comprehensible to tenth graders, even to average students in the inner city where I teach, but not necessarily in the time-frame they now allow us.
If I were allowed to make decisions in a professional way, I could make a curriculum map that matches the needs of my students.