Mediocrity of Teacher Recruitment

Mediocrity of Teacher Recruitment

Some teachers are better than others. This is a simple and, I hope, obvious fact. But the culture of American schools is not friendly to it. Particularly in our hiring of public school teachers, we tend to avoid notions of serious discernment, of picking the very best in our society to become our teachers, and we accept that the most talented of our young people will gravitate to other fields. Overcoming this acceptance of mediocrity in teacher recruitment and retention represents the greatest opportunity to bring a quantum improvement to our schools.

To focus on the elite among new teaching recruits as a matter of method is, in fact, the radically democratic way to give our society's most valuable resources to our poorest and neediest children. That simple fact should trump any concerns about the ill effects of meritocracy on job applicants. The work of educators is to educate young people. So long as we have the courage to make the very best possible experience for those young people our highest goal, we must attend to fairness for teachers only after we have attended to excellence for our students. And we have yet to do that right. Today, the best teachers in many schools are in a way the dissidents, the people who stand out, who attract criticism as well as praise for being remarkable educators, and they resist a strong pull toward mediocrity in the professional culture of too many schools.

We must recognize that this is a problem, and we must fix it. The solution is not difficult to imagine. New teachers must come to know that there is an early-career, merit-based threshold to cross, similar to what doctors, lawyers, and many business professionals face in their first few years of professional work. If we can make this a reality, the most talented and most effective among them will be able to earn their place in a truly elite, dedicated corps of teachers. We will keep the very best of the new teacher recruits, and we'll attract large numbers of people in other professions who today don't sign on to become teachers because they believe that American schools haven't fostered a culture of achievement and haven't been able to make the profession of teacher as respected or respectable as many other professions.

In many school systems today, new teachers are, officially, on some kind of probation for a period...

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...s job security. A district that wants to fire a tenured teacher must typically undergo a lengthy process of hearings and appeals. One purpose of tenure laws is to protect teachers from being dismissed because of political or personal views. Opponents, however, argue that tenure makes it difficult for districts to fire unqualified teachers.

On a similar front, several studies are also now being conducted to examine ways to dramatically overhaul the entire teacher-compensation system--not just change a bit of it here or there.

Undeniably, much remains to be done. A major report issued in September by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future offered a scathing indictment of current practices, including inadequate teacher education, bureaucratic hiring procedures, and the placement of unqualified teachers in classrooms.

The report set the price tag for remedying these problems within a decade at nearly $5 billion a year in new federal, state, and local money which should be spent on upgrading teacher education, subsidizing people to teach in high-need fields and locations, reforming the licensing and induction process, and better professional development.