What's Wrong with Teaching?

SUNDAY, MAY 30, 2010


If you have been following these posts, you know that I feel pretty frustrated with our current model of public education and the way in which we are structured. Legislators, in my opinion, have taken what should be the bastion of democracy and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare of high stakes accountability, competition and choice. None of these attributes are good for the kids or for the adults who work with them.

How many kids would you trust your babysitter to safely monitor? Five? Ten? How about 22? Imagine being responsible for the safety and well-being of 22 6 year-olds. Or, 22 14 year-olds. If you cannot picture walking into a room with 20 to 30 kids and knowing that you are responsible for them for at least an hour, then you cannot fathom the pressure of teaching.

What are you willing to pay your babysitter to just keep your child safe? I'm not talking about adding value to your child like teaching them something, I'm just talking about making sure they do not stick a finger in an electrical socket, turn on the gas jet, or treat your medicine cabinet like a Luby's Buffet. Minimum wage good enough for safety? OK, if you paid a babysitter $5.25 per hour for 7 hours you would owe them about $36.75 before tipping or rounding up. If you employed them for 180 days per year, you would pay them $6,615. If 22 other parents did the same, they would owe the babysitter about $145,530. Sounds reasonable. So, what if we took this same babysitter, required that they have a college degree, spend time learning child development, mastered certain subject matters, and we asked that while they provided babysitting they also provided knowledge, that is, teach the kids something while they are responsible for them? What would that be worth? Maybe $10 per hour? If so, you and the 22 other parents would now owe this skilled sitter about $277,200. Seems reasonable, therefore, that we pay teachers somewhere around $30,000 to $60,000.

Hogwash and balderdash.

I argue that a teacher performs a service that is more demanding and more worthy of reward than a medical doctor. People go to doctors for the purpose of returning to the status quo, that is, they used to feel good, now they don't, and they want the doctor to prescribe something that will return them to their previous state of well-being. While doctors perform that function for each patient one at a time, backed by a slew of paraprofessionals, professionals, laboratories, and high tech equipment, we ask teachers to take a group of students who are OK and make them better, add value, and improve their lives! And do all this in a group setting, with little or no professional or paraprofessional support, few resources, little control over their day, and with low tech gadgets. All while maintaining order in the group. No medical doctor could handle it. The closest doctors come to this is a triage setting where patients are pouring in and they have to segregate people into groups to administer some preliminary care delivered by folks trained less than they are. Doctors do not say, "The illness of today is a strep throat, so everyone that I see will get penicillin." If they did, they would be charged with malpractice. And yet, that is what we ask teachers to do, treat the illness of the day with a state defined prescription. Ludicrous.

Let's apply the medical model to schools. We would make the teacher the doctor. He or she could not prescribe until they had a diagnosis. Paraprofessionals would administer the assessments, collect the data, and report to the teacher where each pupil is relative to the prescribed instructional outcomes. The teacher would review the diagnostic data and prescribe a treatment, that is, a series of learning experiences that would support the growth of knowledge and skills for that particular student. Paraprofessionals could carry out the prescription, in large groups, small groups or individual as appropriate, collect new data to confirm success, and move on.

We would have an emergency room for those students whose vital signs are future threatening. Students way behind in learning and acquiring the skill set to learn more (such as reading and mathematical reasoning) would receive educational triage from a host of teachers and paraprofessionals. Once stabilized, they could be returned to the normal cycle.

Following this model, it is incumbent that teachers become experts in learning theory, learning disabilities, content knowledge and delivery methods. Such a teacher would merit the pay described earlier. Further, we would not need many of them to serve a student body. A school of about 400 kids would probably need about 4 or 5 teachers. At the upper grades, those teachers would be specific content specialists. At the lower grades they would need to be more skilled in learning theory and developmental learning. Instructional aides and technology would replace the classic instructional model of one teacher per 25 kids.

School would become like a hospital. Each kid would have a diagnosis and a treatment. Data would be constantly collected and reviewed. New prescriptions would be appropriate on a weekly basis. And, it would cost less money!

We would have to stop building schools in little rectangular boxes designed to capture 25 kids at a time. We would need about the same square footage, but the walls would become very flexible, with small group settings, individual settings and large learning theaters. Libraries would disappear for lack of use as we use technology to access external resources and stimulate learning experiences. We would even dramatically improve the current unemployment rate if our instructional aides were trained at the same level as say an LVN.

What's wrong with teaching is the old industrial model of one teacher per X number of kids in a rectangular room. Teachers deliver shotgun lessons and many kids simply don't get it. Teachers are judged more on classroom management than outcomes. And simply managing a class of diverse 8 year-olds or 16 year-olds is a major accomplishment, especially if they receive the same prescription regardless of illness. Textbook publishers, software developers, and private sector curricula purveyors have all made a fortune selling better shotguns. But, their products are still shotguns and not individual bullets. (As an aside, I thought the addition of technology was to be labor saving, but in every school I know, the new technologies have required the hiring of brand new categories of people just to keep the gizmos running while we still have the same number of teachers. What's up with that?)

(Whether you buy this argument or not is fine with me. I would only suggest that the last place we need to look for models to improve teaching is the university. Lord help us. Professors profess and it is entirely up to the student to get it. When college level folks lament that incoming freshmen are not "college ready" I hoot. Sounds the same to me as an emergency room doctor complaining that all his patients are sick. We need good research from universities to apply in schools to promote academic learning, but I'll be damned if I am going to take instructional advice from a group of folks who do not have a clue about diagnoses and prescription, who value content more than students, and who are in no way held accountable for drop out rates or standardized outcomes. I've worked at the university level and escaped quickly when I discovered the major motivation is impressing peers and transmitting information.)

Want a real job? Become a teacher. A real teacher who demands success from every kid, who spends summers learning new stuff, and who beats on the door of the principal's office demanding additional trainings, additional resources and additional opportunities for their kids. That's a pro, and there is nothing wrong with that.