What Kind of Teacher?

This post is going to focus on how we recruit the best teachers. President Bush thought all we needed to do was make prospective teachers get degrees and certifications and take tests. This might require decent training and prevent some bad teachers, but it does not in itself recruit good teachers. Instead, we need to focus on incentives that would attract and retain more of the best and the brightest. Teaching can be an exciting and rewarding endeavor. But for public schools, we would need to change some things first.

Salary
Of course salary is a big issue. Granted, teachers, after a couple decades of service, do pretty well. However, I do think it is less than other occupations where workers have similar credentials. I also think though that salary isn't the only thing.

Flexibility
I am confident that most of us highly value flexibility in our jobs. We don't want rote tasks dictated to us from on high. Having direction is good. But no flexibility is bad. With teaching, the more strict curricula become, the less likely people are going to be to want to teach. Teachers should be told generally what the students are expected to learn, and they should be free to operate within that. We lose central control, but we would recruit better teachers. This is one of the reasons talented teachers choose independent / private schools; they have flexibility over curriculum.

Responsibility
With flexibility should come responsibility. A fairly recent David Brooks column has this quote that I agree with:

"What’s needed, Howard argues, is a great streamlining. He’s not calling for deregulation. It’s about giving teachers, doctors and officials the power to actually make decisions and then holding them accountable. Some of their choices will be wrong, Howard acknowledges, but it is better to live in an imperfect world of individual responsibility than it is to live within a dehumanizing legal thicket that seeks to eliminate risk through a tangle of micromanaging statutes."

For teachers, this specifically means eliminating tenure and using test scores and a lot of other measures to evaluate a teachers effectiveness.

Grow and Learn New Things
There are two other things people value in a job: the ability to gain new responsibilities and the ability to learn new things. For the former, there are some opportunities for teachers - move to administration or become a team leader / mentor. But that is about it. So if we want to attract and retain smart people in teaching, we should be heavy on the later. Staff development for teachers is not only good to keep teachers' knowledge up to date, but serves to recruit people to teaching that want to be lifelong learners. We should be prepared to spend a lot more on staff development.

What We Have Now
Instead of the above benefits, we have a system whose main attractions are summer vacations and job security. And when those are the main benefits, you don't attract the best and brightest.

The point isn't to disparage teachers. I do think that most of our teachers are capable, smart, and dedicated. The goal though is to replace the ones at the bottom of the curve with more people at the top of the curve. We can only do this by changing the incentives on the margins.

Many really smart people work in jobs where there is little security because they are confident in their ability and believe that they will have a boss will be reasonable and make the right decision in most cases. Teaching could be the same way. As for summers off - I would not argue that teachers do not deserve it. I just think that right now, absent incentives for more really good teachers, it attracts people to teaching for the wrong reasons.

I will say, and I think I have said it before, that the unions are a serious impediment. In other occupations as well, they go out of their way to protect people from management at all costs. But this means you are not rewarded for good performance and not punished for poor performance. Everyone moves along in a uniform system. This protects everyone, but does nothing to attract the best we can have.