Oprah doesn’t like us. Barack Obama thinks we aren’t getting it done. Movies are made about how incompetent we are. We’re responsible for everything from nearly bankrupt governments to inner city poverty. China owns our country, and it’s our fault.
We’re America’s public school teachers, and
we’re the problem.
As I finish my 32nd and last year as a high school English teacher, I wonder how a profession that managed to turn out luminaries like Steve Jobs and Gen. David Petraeus and Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan suddenly, in the eyes of the public, and the media, got so stupid, s
o incompetent, so fast. Public school teachers are America’s favorite scapegoat.
I’m not sure how it happened, but if Oprah isn’t giving you any love, you know things have gotten bad.
One of the problems with being a scapegoat (there are many) is that whenever scapegoats try to defend themselves, they come across as, well, defensive. Whiny even. A scapegoat is automatically in the position of having to prop himself or herself up.
When we teachers try to defend ourselves we invariably talk about the difficulties of teaching large classes of frequently unruly, uninterested kids. We defend ourselves by telling anyone who will listen that we have to go back to school in the summers to get more education. We talk of having to spend money out of our pockets in order to have supplies for our students. We invariably mention the hours we spend at home grading student work. All these complaints are valid.
The problem is, nobody but teachers themselves care. We appear to just be trying to justify our own value. It’s an awkward position, being a scapegoat.
Allow me to give a little personal background. My career is probably pretty similar to the careers of many of my colleagues. As a young man, I completed my student teaching at a racially diverse Seattle high school. My first job, for which I was woefully unprepared, was teaching 10th grade English in a dusty, depressed little Eastern Washington wheat and hay town. I hated it. After a couple of years, I moved to an equally depressed little Southwest Washington logging town and for some reason, loved it. For the last 26 years, I’ve found mostly satisfaction teaching in a large suburban high school. I’ve taught maybe 7,000 students and worked with probably 300 teachers, and I’ve noticed a couple of things.
First, the single most important factor in determining the academic success of the individual student is not the teacher, as so many educational “leaders” have been telling us recently, but rather the involvement of the parent. Teachers are important, no doubt. Money to keep classes small is fundamental. But the single most important factor in a kid’s success is the extent of the parent’s care for his or her child’s progress.
For the last few years, I’ve had the mostly pleasant experience of teaching honors level students. Two things are always obvious, time after time, about these kids. They do very well in school, and also, their parents are everywhere, all the time.
These folks live in my school email. They check the academic progress of their kids obsessively. If their student is going to be absent, they want that work so it can be completed during the absence. They go to parent-teacher conferences. They’re possessed. Sometimes they make pests of themselves, but never do they have anything but the success of their kids in mind. I get tired of these parents sometimes, but I admire them.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that the vast majority of the teachers I’ve worked with have been dedicated, hard working and extremely self critical. We beat ourselves up regularly. This is one reason that the merit pay idea doesn’t stand a chance of improving teacher performance over the long run. No teacher says, “I’m going to teach harder so I can get 10 grand more.”
Teachers work hard because we know there’s a price to pay if we don’t. Weak, unprepared teachers become known as such to their peers. There’s a painful stigma attached to it. It’s embarrassing. A weak lesson plan results in bored, disruptive students and a migraine headache for the teacher. I’ve been there. It’s a nightmare. Work that isn’t corrected and returned in a timely fashion sits on the teacher’s desk, a reminder that the job isn’t getting done.
Teachers may not know how to correct their weaknesses, but every teacher I’ve ever talked to knows on a deeply personal level what his or her weaknesses are. It’s such a personal profession. In my 32 years in the business, I’ve known maybe five colleagues (all males, strangely) who were just going through the motions, not caring about teaching or the progress of the kids. There have been others, perhaps seven, who simply were not meant to be teachers. It wasn’t for a lack of effort. They wanted to succeed, but they struggled with important aspects of the job, usually classroom discipline, were personally miserable, and usually left of their own accords. Again, this is in a career of working with 300 teachers.
I don’t know how we teachers got to be the center of the bull’s eye, but today, we sure are. Maybe it’s the economy. Hasn’t there always been a general understanding that a guy would never get rich being a school teacher, but there was job security for the most part and the benefits were good? These days there are so many folks who have neither job security nor any job for that matter. Many in this economy have lousy or no benefits. Certainly, an anti-tax wave is rolling over our country. Maybe the critics of teachers simply feel they aren’t getting their money’s worth.
I don’t really know why teachers have so suddenly come under attack. I just know that my fellow teachers and I are the same public school teachers who taught Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Colin Powell, and yes, that queen of American daytime TV, a self-made billionaire, Oprah Winfrey — graduate of Nashville East High School, class of 1971.
Conrad Wold is a soon-to-retire English teacher at Marysville-Pilchuck High School.
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