| 来源类型 | Article |
| 规范类型 | 评论 |
| Rethinking the teaching profession | |
| Frederick M. Hess; Amy Cummings | |
| 发表日期 | 2019-02-08 |
| 出版年 | 2019 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | This chapter originally appeared in the Sutherland Institute’s Policy Publication, Innovation in Education. Frustration with teacher pay is widespread. This is true even considering that school spending (per pupil, adjusted for inflation) has grown by more than 30 percent since 1992.1 A big part of the challenge is that it’s tougher to pay teachers more when school systems keep adding bodies. In recent decades, schools have added staff at a faster rate than they have added students. Between 1992 and 2015, for instance, student enrollment grew by 20 percent – but the teacher workforce grew faster still.2 Today, there are more than 3.1 million teachers in the United States.3 The sheer number of teaching positions makes it not only difficult to pay well, but also to recruit as many talented educators as we’d like. Each year, schools race to hire more than 300,000 new teachers, even as U.S. colleges award just 1.8 million bachelor’s degrees across all fields.4 5 In other words, current circumstances mean that schools need to hire one out of every six graduates – simply to plug attrition. The very shape of the teaching profession has made it increasingly difficult to recruit or compensate educators in a fashion that both attracts and retains talent. So what can we do about this? Rather than simply shovel more money into the familiar system, a better option is to rethink the profession of teaching. Here are four promising ways to do that: Expand the pool of potential teachers. Recruiting new college graduates for teaching positions made sense 50 years ago, when the average bachelor’s degree recipient held just five jobs throughout an entire career. Today, they can expect to hold more than 11.6 Early career transience, coupled with the increasing prevalence of midcareer transitions, makes it impractical to identify future teachers at age 22, fully train them before they enter the profession, and expect them to remain in it for the long haul. The likelihood that talented college graduates in 2019 will be won over by the promise that they can do pretty much the same job, day in and day out, into the late 2040s is simply divorced from the way the job market works today. At the same time, current methods of talent-seeking discourage career changers from becoming teachers. Balky licensure systems, seniority-based pay, and factory-style pension systems punish career-changers, even as such transitions have become increasingly the norm in the American workforce. When one considers the skills and knowledge that a 40-year-old former engineer, journalist, accountant or computer programmer might bring to the classroom, those norms seem remarkably misguided. Meanwhile, individuals who enter teaching at an older age may be more inclined to stay in the profession than those who become teachers in their early to late 20s and 30s.7 None of this is to discourage young entrants or discount the notion that some 22-year-olds are ready to play a valuable role in schools, but there are good reasons not to presume that the just-out-of-college teacher should be the default recruit. Expand instructional specialization. Schools require all teachers to devote time and energy to bureaucratic duties – patrolling hallways and cafeterias, taking attendance, and compiling report cards. The problem is that school officials are conscious of expenses related to salary and materials, but they fail to account for the opportunity costs of not leveraging the talent already in schools. The typical teacher, for instance, spends only about 60 percent of their total classroom time on instruction related to core academic subjects, with the remainder consumed by administrative tasks, fundraising, assemblies, socialization and so forth.8 The challenge, then, is to find ways to “squeeze more juice from the orange” by utilizing support staff and specialization to ensure that effective teachers are devoting more of their time to educating students. Between 1992 and 2015, the number of support staff in schools grew by 47 percent – nearly twice the rate of the teacher workforce – and the scant evidence available leaves one skeptical that these employees are utilized in a way that maximizes teacher effectiveness or alleviates teacher responsibilities.9 Other professions arrange work patterns much differently. Over 12.6 million people work in the health care industry, but just over 660,000 of those are physicians and surgeons.10 The rest are trained practitioners and support staff with complementary talents. In a well-run medical practice, surgeons do not spend time filling out patient charts or negotiating with insurance companies; these responsibilities are left to nurses or support staff. Such efforts to fully utilize talent and expertise have been largely absent in schooling. Leverage technology in meaningful ways. Another approach is to utilize technology for tasks where teachers add limited value.For instance, apps that monitor student progress can alleviate the need for teachers to devote substantial time to administering, grading and entering student assessment data. There are also apps that allow parents to track students’ progress in real time without teachers having to put together and share reports with each individual family. Technology can also help us rethink the way some educational services are delivered. Today’s model requires schools with many classrooms, each with a teacher working face-to-face with a group of students. This “people-everywhere” strategy is expensive, and it makes schools dependent on their ability to attract talented, high-energy staff. Technology has the potential to eliminate such geographic obstacles. For instance, only about three-quarters of U.S. public schools offer Advanced Placement courses, often due to the challenges of attracting qualified teachers to smaller, rural schools.11 By utilizing platforms which make these courses available online from qualified instructors, students in these schools can remotely gain access to high-quality instruction. Identify and reward good teachers for the role they play in their schools. Proponents of compensation reform have too often advocated variations on the Pavlovian approach of paying more for higher student scores, while neglecting the broader design of the profession. After all, nearly 90 percent of school districts in the U.S. still use a step-and-lane pay scale, in which teachers enter the profession at roughly the same salary and with roughly the same job description.12 Every teacher pursues the same bonuses and seeks to climb the same career ladder. However, there are initiatives that are wrestling with how to reward good teachers for the role they play in their schools, such as Opportunity Culture.13 In such schools, a multi-classroom leader (MCL) leads a team of about six teachers, coaching and mentoring while themselves continuing to teach. MCLs are accountable for the results of the entire team’s students and receive supplemental pay for their extra time and effort. Such initiatives encourage exceptional teachers to remain in the profession and provide an opportunity for upward mobility. Ultimately, the goal is to rethink the teaching profession to meet the demands of the 21st century. We have been slowed by habits of mind, culture, and institutional inertia, but we are feeling our way toward a new and hopefully more fruitful era of teaching and learning. Expanding the pool of potential teachers, incorporating instructional specialization, utilizing technology, and rewarding teachers for the role they play in their schools all provide terrific teachers the potential to make a bigger impact not only within, but beyond their classrooms. Notes 1.Digest of Education Statistics, “Table 236.55. Total and current expenditures per pupil in public elementary and secondary schools: Selected years, 1919-20 through 2014-15,” National Center for Education Statistics, last modified October 2017. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_236.55.asp?current=yes↩ 2.Benjamin Scafidi, Back to the Staffing Surge: The Great Teacher Salary Stagnation and the Decades-Long Employment Growth in American Public Schools (Indianapolis, IN: EdChoice, 2017).↩ 3.Rankings of the States 2017 and Estimates of School Statistics 2018 (Washington, DC: National Education Association), 22.↩ 4.Digest of Education Statistics, “Table 208.20. Public and private elementary and secondary teachers, enrollment, pupil/teacher ratios, and new teacher hires: Selected years, fall 1995 through fall 2026,” National Center for Education Statistics, last modified March 2017. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_208.20.asp?current=yes↩ 5.Digest of Education Statistics, “Table 318.10. Degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by level of degree and sex of student: Selected years, 1869-70 through 2026-27,” National Center for Education Statistics, last modified March 2017. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_318.10.asp↩ 6.“Number of Jobs, Labor Market Experience, and Earnings Growth among Americans at 50: Results from a Longitudinal Survey,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 24, 2017, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf.↩ 7.C. Emily Feistritzer, Profile of Alternate Route Teachers (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Information, 2005), 33.↩ 8.Schools and Staffing Survey, “Average Number of hours and percentage of the student school week that regular full-time public school teachers of first- through fourth-grade, self-contained classrooms spent on each of four subjects, total instruction hours per week on four subject, total time spent delivering all instruction per week, and average length of student school week: Selected years 1987-88 through 2015-16,” National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ntps/tables/ntps1516_20180125001_t1n.asp↩ 9.Scafidi, Back to the Staffing Surge.↩ 10.Occupational Employment Statistics, “29-0000 Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations (Major Group),” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2017, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes290000.htm.↩ 11.Nat Malkus, The AP Peak: Public Schools Offering Advanced Placement, 2000-12 (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2016).↩ 12.Shortchanged: The Hidden Costs of Lockstep Teacher Pay (New York, NY: The New Teacher Project, 2014).↩ 13.“About the Opportunity Culture Initiative,” Public Impact, accessed June 7, 2018. http://opportunityculture.org/our-initiative/↩ |
| 主题 | Education ; K-12 Schooling ; Leadership and Innovation |
| 标签 | education ; K-12 education ; Teacher Quality ; teachers |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/articles/rethinking-the-teaching-profession/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/265377 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Frederick M. Hess,Amy Cummings. Rethinking the teaching profession. 2019. |
| 条目包含的文件 | 条目无相关文件。 | |||||
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