Would These Ideas Bolster The Teaching Profession

Of everyone in the Chalkbeat stable, my fave by far is Matt Barnum, who is consistently fair and good with numbers, so when he decides to run a listicle of ideas to "bolster" the teaching biz, I pay attention (especially since you don't see anyone get some good mileage out of "bolster" these days).

The piece is actually a follow-up to his piece about data suggesting that the worsening teaching exodus is a real thing, which is also worth a read. And since Barnum is talking about policy to bolster the teaching profession without using it as a smokescreen for his favorite policy ideas ("Let's do away with tenure! Let's reduce pay but offer bonuses based on spurious measures!"), I think it's worth looking at this list. Here we go!

Raise early- and mid-career teacher salaries

An unsurprising-but-proven idea. How many of the vast number of people who bail from teaching within their first few years are doing so thinking, "Good lord! I can't live on this, let alone get a house or family," nobody knows, but it's way more than "none." Nor is a proposal of "We'll start you out at a decent salary and then never raise it" a big winner. 

The problem with raising teacher salaries is that it would cost money. Specifically, taxpayer money. Barnum suggests that some money could be taken from benefits and used to bolster take home pay. Retirement pay does, as Barnum points out, make teacher pay backloaded, and I will say that as a retired teacher I appreciate the hell out of that, but I'm not sure I would have thought twice about it in my twenties or thirties. 

But Barnum's idea reminds me of something else--  You know what would allow districts to spend way less money on teacher benefits? Universal single payer health care. Medicare for all. The day that went into effect, every district could give every teacher a raise without bothering the taxpayers at all. Just one of the seventy gabillion reasons to do it.

Pay teachers more in shortage areas

Geographically, this is tricky to pull off, because the schools that most suffer from shortages are the same ones that can't afford to pay extra to bolster their teaching force. 

And when it comes to subject areas, the union is not going to like the idea of different pay tiers for different subject areas, and there are certainly reasons to be wary. Maybe it has to be done with special signing/staying bonuses. But it's a hard idea to avoid.

Turn the first year in the classroom into an apprenticeship

I'm all about this (done correctly). I have written at length about my not-entirely-conventional teacher prep program, but support through the first steps of a teaching career were a critical piece. While student teaching, I saw my supervisor from the college about once a week, for a couple of hour. Then my first teaching job had to be within forty miles of my college's field office, and that same professor came and saw me teach at least once a month. During both experiences, I took my methods courses at the field office with other folks in the same program. And how practical can a methods course be when you're talking not about some hypothetical student, but the guy you were working with six hours ago in your classroom?

People stay in teaching because they feel successful. And teaching is a job for which nothing can fully prepare you. Too many colleges provide minimal support through the student teaching, so you depend on the luck of the draw with your co-op. And in your first year, you have to hope that somebody takes you under her wing. It's a lousy way to start a career.

So call it an apprenticeship or internship. Create a Master Teacher position in which someone teaches a half day and mentors the other half. But if you want to keep people, you must support them, bolster them like crazy so that they can experience success, not despair, early on.

Assign teachers to students more strategically

Barnum means that administrations should not just shuffle teachers around every year, willy nilly. 

Teachers get better if some elements can stay constant from year to year. Yes, there may come a point where Mrs. McBolster gets stale teaching the same History of Widgets class, but that point comes after ten or fifteen years, not after one or two. 

Looping can be a great idea, depending. It's like marriage-- if you have the right partner, you'd love to go on forever. But if it's a bad match, divorce may be the best option.

Provide teachers with a strong curriculum

Is anyone, anywhere going to disagree with this? Of course not--the devil is in the definitions.

Beginning teachers need every tool possible to be successful, and that includes high quality curriculum materials, or, at the bare minimum, a clear curricular framework. The trick here is to provide support without strapping the teacher into a straightjacket. A scripted program with day by day scripted plans is not going to create a successful teacher, nor is it going to bolster any sort of love for the profession if one is told the job is just glorified content delivery unit.

Nor is it a "strong curriculum" to have teachers just kind of work their way through a standards-based checklist. Ditto for its close cousin, the Preparing for the Big Standardized Test curriculum. 

In particular, provide materials that help new teachers hit the right level. This is one of the great undiscussed challenges of beginning teaching. Odds are that you didn't even student teach at the level of your first job, and now you are trying to figure out how to aim your teaching. You don't want to aim too low and bore them or insult their intelligence, but you don't want to overshoot the mark and lkeave them frustrated and overwhelmed. 

Give the new teacher solid, proven materials in a framework that provides direction and guardrails while still allowing the teacher room to breathe and move and grow as she successfully teaches students.

Give teachers more support to manage student discipline

This has never not mattered, but for whatever reason we have hit a rough patch when it comes to student discipline. And Barnum is on the mark here:

Research does not provide simple solutions to this challenge — neither schoolsuspensionsnor an alternative ofrestorative justicehas a proven track record, according to existing studies.

All of the above items help with this, because Step One in good classroom management is to know what the heck you're doing. Step Two is learning how to effectively exercise leadership in the classroom, how to be the adult who's in charge.

Barnum calls for support support support. Support personnel, both for intervening with students and with teachers who face particular extra challenging challenges. It also helps to have actual support from your administration, but that's not something that can be fixed by policy ideas.

Ease the teacher certification bureaucracy

I was licensed in 1979, and I have been amazed at the layers of bullshit heaped on the process ever since, from Praxis to EdTPA to silly hoop-jumping if you want to move between states. None of it has improved the profession one iota. Scrap it all.

Prioritize recruiting and retaining teachers of color

We've known for years that the teacher pool of mostly white ladies doesn't really look like the student pool in this country. Teachers of color enter the professional at a disproportionately low rate and leave it at a disproportionately high one. All ideas to better recruit and retain go double for teachers of color. Policy makers could even take the radical step of talking to current and former teachers of color to learn what particular factors are involved in bolstering the teachers of color pool.

Consider alternatives to seniority-based layoffs

On this, Barnum and I disagree completely. I understand the arguments in favor. When budget cuts come, you have to cut more low-paying jobs to get the numbers to add up, and this also tends to disproportionately affect teachers of color. Barnum's third point is that high-poverty schools lose more teachers because their staff is mostly beginners at the bottom of the scale, but what that tells me is that no matter whether you're FILO-ing or not, young teachers will be the most hit.

I totally get the desire for an alternative. I just don't see any that don't have worse side effects (and we've seen plenty of alternatives because doing away with FILO and other forms of job security has long been a dream of reformsters who want to make schools cheap for owners to run and hard for unions to organize).

But here's the thing about teaching--part of the appeal, part of what offsets the pay and conditions and etc-- is the stability. I just can't see the appeal of a job that promises, "Welcome. You'll have a job here right up until the moment you get too expensive for us. Then you can go shopping for another job-- which will involve promising to start over at lower pay." If you want to bolster teacher retention, you have to convince people the job has a future.

Barnum suggests other criteria, but again we have problems. Teacher performance? We still don't have a valid way to measure it. Considering school-level needs? That effectively already exists. High schools don't lay off Mrs. Beakerface--they cut a position in the science department. 

The best bolstering ideas are at the top of Barnum's list. Better pay. Much better support through the first several years. On top of the items on this list, it wouldn't hurt if leaders stopped attacking teachers and public schools and just generally amplifying the many voices that denigrate the profession. "Join us and be called a child molester" isn't a big sales pitch. How much policy makers and leaders could do to reverse the current tide of teacher disrespect isn't very clear, mostly because none of them appear to be trying all that hard.

All of this taken together wouldn't create a miracle bolster effect, but they would certainly help. And after all, a bolster is just a gentle support, a kind of soft place to land that helps hold you up, not some massive supporting structure. It's not asking a lot to bolster teaching, really. I will bolster my hope that such a thing could happen.