You're a college senior at Cornell University about to get a bachelor's degree in history. You are in the top 20 percent of your class and you want to find a job you're passionate about and will gain you some respect in society.
You ponder your uncertain future, facing a bleak job market and a desire to do good and raise a family some day.
Should you become a teacher? Well, the pay is quite low and it will be hard to face your friends in five years at your first college reunion who will be newly minted lawyers and MBAs, making gobs of money on Wall Street or by billing $500 an hour to corporations or divorcing spouses.
As a public school teacher, you think to yourself, I will likely be making less than $50,000 per year, be looked down upon by my peers, and then, to add insult to injury, be evaluated and publicly ranked by a convoluted system that will crush my ability to truly motivate and inspire my students.
No, this isn't for me, you think to yourself. I may as well enroll in that Kaplan class and take the GMATs and apply to business school. I may not make a difference in kids' lives, but I will receive professional respect and will not have to worry about supporting my spouse and children.
This hypothetical interior monologue is likely to be played out on more than 2,000 college campuses throughout this country this spring. When we should be attracting the best and the brightest to public school teaching, like Finland and Singapore do, we are doing the opposite: by focusing on soulless evaluation policies and public degradation of the teaching profession, we are driving potential teachers further away from the ranks.
This is yet another reason why we are falling further behind globally in education. Elected leaders who have pursued ill-fated policies in education are now patting each other on the back for wearing down teacher unions and achieving teacher evaluation formulas that only insiders will fully understand and which, as documented in a recent published story in the New York Times, has led to 116 rubrics for evaluation that are flawed and miss the point.
What we need, immediately, is a plan for attracting inspiring teachers with passion and real pedagogical skills. We must train them rigorously before sending them into the classroom and then provide them with mentors for their first five years and give them a career path to become "master teachers" after a decade of distinguished service.
Like all professions, teaching needs a path for advancement and merit pay and an effective way to terminate those who do not progress sufficiently to be strong teachers. It needs mentors and master teachers more than anything so that inexperienced teachers can learn from the best in the profession.
I know all this from personal experience. Thirty years ago, I was that Cornell history major pondering my future. I did teach public high school for two years, and did not have the proper training or systematic mentoring to become a great teacher or even encourage me to stay in the profession.
I did have one great advantage though: an unconventional colleague, a 20-year veteran teacher took me under his wing and mentored me unofficially and made me realize what it took to become a better teacher.
During my first week in 1986 as an English teacher at Stuyvesant High School (my alma mater), a charming English teacher named Frank McCourt (later to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoirist) told me: "Get out while you can. It's five shows a day and the toughest audience you'll ever face."
He was being slightly cheeky, but his admonition was repeated by other battle-weary teachers there: pursue your passion, journalism, they told me. This is not a career that holds great prestige or financial promise for someone like you.
A peer who worked with me at the New York Times on weekends looked down at me condescendingly when I told her I was a teacher during the week at a public high school. "Why would you do that?" she asked with a mixture of pity and scorn.
But watching Frank McCourt light up the classroom (we combined our classes occasionally on Fridays) was a true delight and an enlightening experience. He was not worried about evaluations or teaching kids to a mind-numbing test. He challenged them to think, to describe the quotidian details of their lives (assignment: what did you eat for dinner last night? Describe in minute detail).
He made students write the most creative excuse notes they could come up with. Students wrote about their romances, read their work aloud, critiqued each other, laughed, and generally learned a heck of a lot about life, the importance of great writing and great literature and left his classroom eagerly anticipating the next day's lesson, passionately becoming real thinkers and real writers and real students of literature.
Today, the Frank McCourts of the world, if they even ventured into the classroom to pursue a teaching career, would likely be crushed by the new systems that evaluate teachers by rubrics that can't quantify motivation and inspiration.
This is what needs to enter the school debate -- how do we start attracting, and retaining, the next generation of Frank McCourts?
Tom Allon, a Democrat and liberal candidate for mayor of New York City in 2013, is a former Stuyvesant High School English teacher and now is the president/CEO of Manhattan Media.
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Add to this that you will be constantly criticized by the government who pays you, you will have your rediculously small pay cut even more, you will have your benefits reduced, you will be forced to pay more for medical coverage, you will be blamed by society for everything that is wrong with the educational system (even though you had little to do with creating that system), and you will be forced to teach to a test which you had zero imput in creating.
No wonder the best and brightest DO NOT BECOME TEACHERS.
All that college, for what? I have 2 degrees and my friend who drives a truck makes more than I do. His union gets respect and sympathy from the public, while teachers are disrespected and blamed for just about everything.
NCLB single-handedly turned teachers into the bad guys.
Why do they need this?
And why did they FAIL the teachers that are presently in our schools?
Why are they allowed to walk away from this crisis?
Yep, their universities and their major professors.
Anyone who does not think the ball is rolling that direction is a fool.
The boat is on the bottom.
All hands are on deck.
The reformers must right this boat and get it to the surface.
It will require an entire change in their methods and attitude.
Can the boat be brought up?
They have about six months to do it.
They have relied upon cynicism, malice, envy, and ignorance to complete their first mission.
Now they must begin the LONG process of restoring confidence to THEIR MODEL of education.
I do not think they will succeed.
The cultural fabric of this nation has been torn and in a fashion that may be irreparable.
Hey reformers, you do not have much time before the crowd turns on you.
Teachers are on the ground and a bloody pulp.
You are next.
worth even less.
Cornell graduates SHOULD expect to become rich and respected. That's what they paid for!
Don't become a teacher since you will get neither.
Two years teaching at Stuyvesant? Who did you know to get that gig.
But you are 100% correct about everything you posted.
Take your bachelor's in history. Get a masters in anything and then get a job that pays well and commands respect. Which in this country is pretty much the same thing. The more money you make the more you are respected. This is why no one respects teachers and they have become easy targets. Add politicians that are attacking teachers to get elected and Corporations that want to profit off of privatizing education using public tax dollars and this is no time to become a teacher.
The question should be "Why would anyone want to become a teacher?"
You have incredible freedom to run your classroom the way you wish. The creativity is limitless. No drones/bosses to limit your ambition or tell you what to do.
If they try to control you...you remind them that you are a lifer and they cannot touch you. The smart ones back off and look for easier targets.
Now you can set to work changing the world for the better, one student at a time. Lets say...33 per year times 30 years? That's powerful magic.
And that's why you do it.
In my state (Hawaii) most of the schools are in corrective action because no matter how much we improve, it is never be enough for NCLB. The idea that 100% of students will be proficient will never happen. EVER.
We are told how to run our classrooms, what to teach (we teach to the test), how to teach it, etc. We have a board of ed appointed by the governor with ZERO teachers on it. We have lawyers, we have CEO, but no teachers. Funny how that works, isn't it? But teachers are still blamed when things go wrong.
Tenure does not mean you cannot be fired. It means you have due process before you can be terminated.
Obviously, you are not a public school teacher.
Many teachers do it for the students, but it would be nice to be payed what you are worth while you do it. In Hawaii, a teacher has to have a minimum of a 4 year degree, and a 1 year teaching certificate (minimum of 5 years of college). Many teachers have 2 or more BA's, a MA, or even a PHD, yet we are paid less than many long shoremen, union equipment operators, and truck drivers.
Most states have cut into pension plans
Cut the benefit packages
Increased class size to beyond manageable
Extended the school day
Extended the school year
Increased the amount of time before you tenure or eliminated tenure
Are trying to cut union negotiations
Are trying to get rid of unions
People will generally blame you for every failure of their student
Don't expect to be backed up by administrators (more like thrown to the wolves)
Rules that change constantly
Policies that change constantly
No help, long hours, no life during the school year
Having to constantly take more classes to keep up your certification and rise on the pay schedule.
I could go on and on
Oh I forgot. They keep running ads everywhere that say they need lots and lots of teachers. Fact is there are no openings.
I'm a Navy veteran with a degree in mechanical engineering and 5 years experience working with children in foster care. I'm currently a long term substitute for industrial arts. The school would love for me to become the permanent teacher but when I contacted the office of public instruction they told me I didn't qualify for licensure.
I have an engineering job offer at 60,000 per year, compared with 23,000 per year for the teaching. I'm still on the fence about which job to take but with the 2 years of online courses I have to take for the teaching i'm starting to lean toward engineering.
If teaching is to get the best and brightest they will have to provide a path to licensure which doesn't include a degree in education.
I don' think that's unreasonable for a teaching certificate.
If you think that is too much, go into engineering. Not only will you make twice as much but you will not be vilified in the media, assumed to be incompetent or attacked for being lazy and greedy.
Teaching is not a profession I would encourage anyone to pursue at this time. Until this nation comes out of it's psychotic attack and abuse of the teaching profession, I would council anyone on the fence to go the other way. You can always come back to it in 5-10 years. But for now? The rewards of working with the kids won't outweigh all of the other grief that you will be exposed to.
1. Major in something that is going to get you a job!
2. Major in something you're passionate about because you'll burn out/be miserable with the job you really didn't want!
I initially went to school to be a computer programmer, but didn't like being locked in a room writing code when I could've been working with the things I truly cared about.
Fortunately for me my job is currently what I went to school for and I more or less love just about every moment of my job (except for the crazy parents, oi vey).