The importance of teaching and teachers will be one of the lessons we learn from the Time of COVID.  The need to educate children is a constant and daily issue in every community.  This has focused attention on the essence of teaching.   As educators work to improve and refine strategies for in-person and at-home teaching and learning, we can use every community’s attention on educating children to refine and enhance teaching as an essential and newly-preferred professional career.

Take Away

Lesson 1 learned is that public education is essential to the economic and family structures of every community.  Across all states, local business interests want schools to be open for in-person learning to provide daycare for employee children.  Parallel to their employers, parents need to work to support their families.  They prefer in-person learning.  State, county, and local governments want children to be educated.  An under educated generation is a lost generation.   This makes teaching a profession of essential employees.  Fundamentally, this status is true with or without a pandemic. 

Lesson 2 learned is that teachers teach and others do not.  I apply to this to the teaching of school-age children.  Certainly, parents who choose to homeschool their children make a commitment to become teachers for their own children.  However, a vast majority of parents who are forced by school campus closures to be teachers-at-home want out of that role immediately.  A good day for a parent-teacher is buried by a score of bad days.  Parents are not prepared to be their children’s teacher.  They know it and so do their children.

Professional educators are essential to the education of a community’s children.  The pandemic has proven that there is no substitute for professional educators.

What do we know?

The pandemic will change teaching; the direction of the change is not yet known.  The need for remote, virtual, distanced, synchronous and asynchronous teaching have been so great and widespread that their effects will be part of the ongoing features of school for years to come.  The profession can passively go with the flow of the pandemic and do what it can, when and where it can, and provide continuous, responsive education for children.  Or, the profession can understand the moment and use the reality of educating children in a pandemic to inform and reform educating children after the pandemic. 

As a people, we focus on a problem if it personally affects our well-being in the immediacy.  This is the reality of our national attention span.  When these two conditions – personal well-being and now – are present, we can address large-scale problems.  As soon as the problem no longer is personal or immediate, we lose our focus on the issue.  Sadly, this is us.  Even large and enduring problems fade once the emergency subsides.  If there is to be a positive change in the profession of teaching, it must be addressed now. 

This is the problem.  We are not in an era of teacher shortage, but an era when teaching is an undesirable career choice. 

Before and during the pandemic, schools have had difficulty attracting and retaining teachers.  However, the problem is not the scarcity of persons entering the profession.   It is the scarcity of people wanting to be teachers.  These may sound like contradictory statements, but they are not.  Our problem is that teaching is perceived as an undesirable career pathway by college students considering their future and young teachers in their first five years in a classroom.  Too few people are being trained as teachers and too few trained teachers are teaching.  These are the issues this moment in time requires us to change.

Why is this thus?

Employing and retaining teachers is an historic problem that has plagued public education for more than a decade.  “The share of schools that were trying to fill a vacancy but couldn’t tripled from the 2011-12 to 2015-16 school years (increasing from 3.1 to 9.4 percent), and in the same period the share of schools that found it very difficult to fill a vacancy nearly doubled (from 19.7 to 36.2 percent).  These difficulties are also shaped by the dwindling pool of applicants to fill vacancies.  From the 2008-09 to the 2015-16 school years, there was a 15.4 percent drop in the number of education degrees awarded and a 27.4 percent drop in the number of people who completed a teacher preparation program.”

U.S. schools struggle to hire and retain teachers: The second report in ‘The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market’ series

We can point to many contributing agents leading to this problem.  Low starting salaries.  Slow and inadequate financial advancement.  Attacks on teacher unions and teacher organizations.  Blaming education when all other social institutions are failing.  Constant cuts in state financing.  Draconian federal accountability legislation. 

To address these issues, politicians, colleges and universities, and state departments of instruction continue to look for peripheral solutions.  Legislators massaged statutory requirements for teacher preparation and created alternative pathways to a teaching license to make it easier for college graduates and second-career adults to become teachers.  State departments allow teaching with permits not licenses.  A teaching permit is like a learner’s permit for a student in driver education.  A school board can employ a permitted teacher for several years without the teacher completing the full certification process.  School boards work within limited finances – an increase to salary is a decrease to classroom supplies.  Robbing Peter to pay Paul means that an increase in teacher pay is paid out by the teacher to purchase class room supplies.

Teacher shortage, however, is the symptom and not the problem.  People who invested money and time to graduate from college with teacher certificates choose not to teach. 

“The last time we checked we have about 120,000 people who hold a valid teacher license, and about 60,000 are teaching in public schools,” said David DeGuire, director of teachers, education, professional development and licensing at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.”

https://www.wbay.com/2020/08/29/as-school-districts-reopen-during-pandemic-many-also-struggling-to-find-teachers-substitutes/

Further evidence that teaching is not a preferred career comes to us anecdotally.  High school counselors, a traditional recruiter for would-be teachers, report that in their conferences with high school seniors and their parents many parents say to their son or daughter “… you don’t want to be a teacher…” and redirect college planning toward a different and more preferred career.

Further evidence derives from the choices made by the talent pool of students in college.  Prior to 2000, teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities attracted many students from the top quarter of their graduating class based upon grades and testing.  Many of these were young women who perceived teaching as an accepted profession for their gender.  Since 2000, teacher prep programs have drawn fewer, if any, college students from the upper half of their class.  The more talented collegians are choosing other professions, not teaching.

Unless we change these perceptions of teaching and the trend lines of people choosing teaching as a career, the outcomes of teacher shortage, understaffed schools, crowded classrooms, and discontinued school programs will continue unabated.  We cannot look to our politicians or state departments to change the attitudes about teaching.  We need to change the realities of schoolhouse teaching so that a new professionalism can attract and retain new professional educators.

To do

The list is long and varied. 

• Focus a teacher’s work on professional teaching.  To do this, we remove all non-instructional duties for the usual teacher job descriptions.  A characteristic of a profession is its well-defined and accepted area of expertise.  Think about professionals in law, medicine, engineering, and architecture.  Each of these professions has an explicit educational and training requirement, as do teachers.  However, other professionals are not generalists and do not abide a constant addition of “…duties to be assigned”.  Teachers have this line in every contract.  A teaching contract is a potpourri of assignments, classroom teaching being just one.  In a school board’s employment, we can disaggregate the professional duties of teachers, counselors, administrators, school health specialists, and non-certified personnel.  Each of these has a specific purpose in the school and a matching training and span of duties.  Teaching is an expertise in pedagogy, subject area content, dispositions necessary for teaching and learning, and assessment of learning.  Professional teachers teach professionally.

• Employ non-certified staff to do all supervisory work.  Segregating teachers from other schoolhouse duties will require “someone” to supervise playgrounds, bus zones, cafeterias, and hallways.  The trade-off of improved teaching is the cost of non-certified staff to execute these duties.  Children need adult supervision when they are “at” school.  Assigning teachers to these duties is at the expense of time, effort and focus on instruction and exacerbates the professional standing of teaching.

• Hold teachers accountable for student learning of district-approved curricula.  Teachers are not independent contractors in a school.  There is a legal and linear relationship from the School Board’s responsibility to provide a free and appropriate education to every child, to ensure compliance with state statutes, and to align instruction and student learning outcomes with standards-based and performance-based curricula through school administration to classroom teachers.  A Board employs teachers to teach the district-approved curricula.  This is the “what” and “when” and “how much” of teaching.  The teacher supplies the “how” based upon assessment of child readiness, need and capacity.  Adherence to this simplified linearity greatly increases and improves the professional standing of teachers as pedagogical experts accountable under administrative supervision for causing all children to successfully learn their annual curricula.

Concomitant with accountability is the understanding that high quality teaching and achieving district expectations for student learning are a requirement of continued employment.  Professionals deliver profession work to achieve professional outcomes.  A teacher who cannot deliver will be counseled out of the profession.

• Teaching is perceived by too many in the public as part-time work with nine months of school and three months of vacation.  Our school year organization has roots in an agrarian calendar when children were not available to attend classes year-round.  Farming communities required children as farm labor in the summer months.  In our state, children who are 13-years and older populate many of the summer jobs required for our tourist industry.  For this reason alone, schools cannot begin classes until after September 1 and local business owners decry a school calendar that extends past the first week in June.  Summers off creates the assumption that teaching is part-time annual work.

A more informed reality is that a school district’s professional development programs already are creating a fuller work year.  Many districts employ teachers in June, July and/or August to review student achievement from the prior school year, review and improve curriculum, learn new curriculum and delivery strategies, and learn and practice new technologies.  The list of summer work activities grows every year.  However, this work is understood as supplemental to a teacher’s contract.  And, it is not uniform for all teachers. 

At the same time, there is a body of teachers who prefer nine-month employment.  One of the things that attracted them to teaching was summers off.  Additionally, other teachers enjoy a different employment during summer months, often outdoor and work with adults not children.  Finally, summer has traditionally been a time when teachers engaged in post-graduate studies and continuing education.  Although much of this work is now on-line and year-round, we still abstractly connect a teacher’s summer with their going back to school.

A professional work year should be 221 days of paid employment, including 180 days of student instruction and 41 days of PD, district and school work.  A teacher would have a standardized four weeks of summer vacation plus Christmas/New Year’s and spring vacations and usual holidays that match their community’s annual calendar. 

• Professionals have dedicated time for planning and assessment.  Teacher contracts include language regarding planning time or prep time.  In elementary grades this often is the time when children move from academic instruction with a grade level teacher to special instruction – art, music, physical education, foreign language, library, and technology instruction.  In secondary grades, a class periods) is designated as a teacher’s prep period.  In addition, teachers are expected to use time between their arrival at school and a first class and time after a last class and their departure from school for preparation. 

However, as soon as children arrive at school, all teachers share in the responsibility of student supervision.  Children are not let loose throughout the campus.  Also, teachers are to be available to assist children with their assignments before and after school.  And, administrators schedule school meetings, meetings with parents, and professional development activities before and after school.  Planning and review time are forfeit to each of these.

The result is that preparation, planning and a review of daily work seldom takes place at school.  Teachers do their reviews, planning and preparation at home.  Other professionals may also take their work home, but in other professions the norm is not preparing for every next day’s work at home.  Office time is carved out of the workday and officially reserved for review, planning and preparation.  This is not the case for teachers and it must change.

• Teaching is a commitment to each child everyday.  This is a commitment of quality instructional and personal interactions between a teacher and each child the teacher teaches every school day.  It contrasts with assumptions that instruction presented to a whole class or group of students reaches to each individual child.  The commitment eliminates class periods or days of instruction in which a teacher and child have no direct, person-to-person interactions.  No children should be allowed to hide in class or to be invisible – never called on to speak or participate.   Instead, a teacher commits to personal interactions with each child and these interactions emphasize an “I care about you and your learning – personally”.

For decades, critics of public education have written about the school as a factory.  Children are the widgets of our industry, they say.  When schools are interested in outcomes only and are not people-first, this is a valid complaint. 

The list goes on with lesser detail.

• “Japanese lesson studies” for all teachers.  This type of study parallels the ways in which other professions conduct a formalized, internal review of their ongoing work.  Lesson studies are a peer review not an employer evaluation.
• Effective Educator assessments based upon student outcomes and attributes only.  Evaluate the effects of teaching not the characteristics of teaching.
• Teacher discretion over how they use all school time but class time.  Professionals have control of personal professional time.
• Use of science-based strategies.  As an example, the Science of Reading presents data- and performance-based pedagogy that is proven to cause all children to become readers.  Other subjects also have data- and performance-based pedagogies.  Using these, rather than anecdotally supported pedagogy, strengthen a teacher’s claim to professional preparation.
• Employ more school counselors for social-emotional student care.  As caring as classroom teachers are for every child, a teacher is not a counselor and not prepared for SE counseling.  SE is another unprofessional piling on of the classroom teacher list of expectations.
• Pa a bonus to teachers who are fluent in non-English languages.  Language-diverse school communities require linguistic- and culture-diverse faculty.  We need more teachers with the capacity to communicate effectively with non-English speaking children and families.
• Annually enter student work in every state competition as a showcase of teaching and learning.  Successful work begets more successful work.  Professionals publicize their successes.
• Annually nominate teachers for Teacher of the Year competitions as a recognition local teaching talent.  A local nomination is a local recognition and has meaning in the community.

The big duh!

COVID is the most significant change agent of this young century.  Its effects will last for decades to come.  As with all prior pandemics, mankind will survive but be changed by its experience.  We will be changed in ways not yet understood.  The extent and the after-effects of those changes lie within us not with the disease.  I prefer not to mourn the ways in which the pandemic changed schools and teaching but to celebrate what we learned and can use from the experience to enhance the future of teaching.  COVID reinforces the values of high quality teachers as essential at all times.