Kevin Drum points to a report comparing international education systems from McKinsey and Company management consultants. The report (9.5 MB PDF) does double duty: it serves as a useful and important contribution to the study of education reform, and also as a case study in how to use PowerPoint to generate documents that are well nigh unreadable– it’s tarted up with so many pointless graphics that it makes even FoxIt run annoyingly slow.
Kevin’s got the key conclusions, though: if you want better schools, you need better teachers, and if you want better teachers, you need to make education a more attractive career choice:
School systems, from Seoul to Chicago, from London to New Zealand, and from Helsinki to Singapore, show that making teaching the preferred career choice depends less on high salaries or ‘culture’ than it does on a small set of simple but critical policy choices: developing strong processes for selecting and training teachers, paying good starting compensation, and carefully managing the status of the teaching profession.
Kevin has a graphic from the report that sums it up nicely: the average starting salary for a teacher in most of the world is around 95% of per capita GDP. In South Korea and Germany, who routinely clean our clocks in international tests, it’s 141% of per capita GDP. In the US, it’s 81% of per capita GDP.
It’s as simple as that. Of course, the consultants at McKinsey are well-known communist sympathizers and union dupes, so this can safely be ignored.
Duh?
I took my first big pay cut when I left lucrative Aerospace systems and software engineering for college and university adjunct professoring, and then another big pay cut when I moved to high school and middle school teaching.
Imagine my shock when, late in a year of substitute teaching in the Pasadena Unified School district I received a memo that the $142.97 pay for a full day’s teaching was retroactively being cut to $136.13, due to an inexplicable combination of arithmetic error and the union having improperly bargained for substitute teachers rather than only for full-time teachers (the two categories being non-exclusive).
The next memo was on 10% budget cuts across the board, state-wide, and on when letters were being sent on which teachers’ contracts were not being renewed.
Also, they live on the “float” here. I don’t get paid my pittance for my February teaching until 10 April 2008.
Now I’m awaiting word from the nearest College of Education if they can offer me at least a partial scholarship for the courses that I’m required to take to be certificated as qualified to teach the classes that I’ve been teaching. Last semester I paid out-of-pocket, but should not, I think, in the allegedly most prosperous country in history, be required to take negative net pay for teaching. Or was that President Bush’s plan all along?
I’m up now because of the 5:00 a.m. phonecall from the “SmartFind Express” phone system to review an offered substitute position for the day. But, though I’ve taught Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Ancient History, Art, English Lit, Creative Writing, Biology, Chemistry, Geometry, Earth Science, Modern History, Physics, Pre-Algebra, and Pre-Calculus, in this District, I did not feel qualified for 3rd grade Special Ed P.E., so I went through the elaborate menu to decline the offer, brewed coffee and started blogging. And waiting for the next phone call.
I sympathize with you Jonathan. I too made the switch from medical research into high school teaching and at the time it was a big gamble. I had plenty of student loans already and switching to a career with much lower pay was a bit scary. Luckily I found a position at an amazing school in the north Chicago suburbs and the gamble has more or less paid off. I’m being paid well enough that my gamble was not a foolish move as what I am getting less in salary is being made up for in immense job satisfaction. However, this seems to be the exception to the rule. Until more schools can get the funding that we have, this problem will continue.
Best of luck to you.
The mistake made in this sort of comparisons is making an invalid assumption about the goal of the Bush Administration (and the GOP as a whole): to make public education so bad that taxpayers insist on it being shut down because they aren’t getting anything worthwhile for their money.
The elimination of public education has been a core part of the GOP platform for 50 years now, I’m not sure why this doesn’t get mentioned in the media more nor why any GOP candidate who claims to be pro-education is excoriated by either the public for being a liar or the party for betraying a core principle of the party.
Making teaching a more respected profession is only a start. If those of us in the United States really want to get serious about improving education then we have to actual deal with poverty. My fiancee is a teacher in a poor district. She is looking to move on to another district. Why? She emotionally can’t make it another year at the school she is in. It is too heartbreaking. Not to mention she was trained to teach not to deal with students who have post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, etc. Kids whose only meals come at school (i.e. no dinner). She has visited a few of the homes her students live in, they would not be acceptable to most of us but it is the best these parents can provide. Very little teaching gets done when confronted with a student population growing up under those conditions.
Thank you for comment # 3, Marcel Grdinic. There are some attractive suburban schools fiarly close to my home in, for instance, La Canada-Flintridge, which has a hefty tax base from JPL being in their borders, and San Marino, with a majority upscale Asian High school population. Yet I have chosen to attack the problem which is endemic in poorer urban school districts, as suggested in comment #5 by ponderingfool.
I attach part of a homework assignment that I did this morning for one of my School of Ed graduate courses. I admit to putting it in a Progressive Left frame to please the teacher.
Article Summary report for
Annual Editions in Education 2008-2009, McGraw-Hill Publishing Company
by
Prof. Jonathan Vos Post
Unit 2, Article 5:
“Where Have All the Strong Poets Gone?” by Alan C. Jones
BRIEFLY STATE THE MAIN IDEA OF THIS ARTICLE:
Our nation’s schools have been resegregated into an urban poor system and a suburban white system. We need school leaders such as John Dewey [20 October 1859 – 1 June 1952, American Pragmatist philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer], George Counts [George Sylvester Counts, 1889-1974, American educator and founder of the New York State Liberal Party, who in 1932, with a single address to the Progressive Education Association (PEA), “Dare the School Build a New Social Order”, became the most discussed educator in the United States], and Paulo Freire [19 September 1921 – 2 May 1997, Brazilian
educator, 1967: Education as the Practice of Freedom; 1968: Pedagogy of the Oppressed] — whom Richard Rorty calls “Strong Poets” — to advance the needed message, with courage.
LIST AT LEAST THREE IMPORTANT FACTS THE AUTHOR USES TO SUPPORT HIS MAIN IDEA:
(1) The split into two school landscapes is documented in Jonathan Kozol’s latest book, “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America” [Random House, Hardcover, 416 pages, September 2005, $25.00, ISBN: 978-1-4000-5244-8 (1-4000-5244-0)]
(2) As “white suburban students are being prepared to become the future bosses in our country, African American and Hispanic students” have inexperienced teachers in inadequate facilities.
(3) The public and policymakers have failed to notice this — Strong Professors, Strong Deans of Education, and Strong Poets are morally bound to change this.
IN YOUR OPINION WHAT WERE THE MOST IMPORTANT POINTS OR QUESTIONS
RAISED BY THE ARTICLE
(1) Why has this resegregation remained unnoticed?
(2) White suburban schools have it all. Why talk of policies that would require wealthier parents to share their resources?
(3) What message and course of action should we be pursuing in a country that has all but accepted a school system segregated by race and income?
AFTER READING THE ARTICLE, ARE YOU IN AGREEMENT OR DISAGREEMENT WITH
THE AUTHOR AND WHY?
I strongly agree. I have unusual experience (as does my Physics
professor wife who has taught in 4 countries) with extremes of wealth and poverty. I have taught over 3,000 students, including the most challenging “special populations” (At Risk, Culturally Diverse, High Achievers, Low Achievers, Pregnant Teens, Gang Members, Learning
Handicapped, Homebound, Non- and Limited-English Speaking, Low Peer Group Acceptance, Disadvantaged, Disciplinary Problems). Mr. Alan C. Jones’s analysis and Jonathan Kozol’s books resonate with me.
ANY OTHER COMMENTS PURSUANT TO THE ARTICLE:
Richard McKay Rorty [4 October 1931 – 8 June 2007] has not just named the “Strong Poets” — not literally poets, he means those with the imagination to create a new story about what teaching and learning should look like, and have the courage to develop an oppositional vocabulary that critiques the motives and consequences of wealth and power — but has also articulated a complete theory of social justice, which fits that of Rawls. Because the original Greek meaning of “poet” is “maker” — we MUST re-make American schools.
Rorty, at his death, was acknowledged as perhaps the most important American Philosopher, who dominated and the rejected Analytic Philsophy, through extensions of Wilfrid Sellars, Willard van Orman Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Donald Davidson. As the Stanford Encylopedia of Philsophy summarizes, Rorty: “developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative–a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive–an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty’s view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted.” In the last fifteen years of his life, Rorty continued to publish voluminously, including four volumes of philosophical papers, Achieving Our Country (1998), a political manifesto partly based on readings of John Dewey and Walt Whitman in which he defended the idea of a progressive, pragmatic left against what he feels are defeatist positions espoused by the so-called critical left personified by figures like Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Rorty proposes that philosophy (along with art, science, etc.) can and should be used to provide one with the ability to (re)create oneself, a view adapted from Nietzsche and which Rorty
also identifies with the novels of Proust, Nabokov, and Henry James.
Alan C. Jones is Principal at Community High School District 94 in West Chicago, and earlier he wrote:
“As educators, we must provide policy makers at local, state, and national levels with the terminology to “redescribe” the current discussions about what we teach. Included in that terminology should be words and metaphors that will support a young person’s ability to survive in the public world-the world of work and the world of the human condition. This terminology must also recognize the private world of meaning-the world in which we make sense out of our experiences by constantly redefining ourselves in relation to circumstances and proclivities. Though different terminology may evolve out of both worlds, the commonality that should bind both worlds together is, in Dewey’s (1938, 44) words, the ‘powers and purposes of those taught.’ Learning has to be an adventure; otherwise, it’s stillborn.”
[“Where does the truth lie?”, The Educational Forum, Winter 2002]
Jonathan Kozol states, after visiting a hundred schools, and observing that conditions have grown worse for inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education: “The nation needs to be confronted with the crime that we’re committing and the promises we are betraying.
This is a book about betrayal of the young, who have no power to defend themselves.” As Random House’s web page on this book adds: “a protomilitary form of discipline has now emerged, modeled on stick-and-carrot methods of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons but targeted exclusively at black and Hispanic children. And third, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education in our inner-city schools has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society.”
Jonathan Kozol concludes, in a magazine article adapted from his book:
“Whether the issue is inequity alone or deepening resegregation or the labyrinthine intertwining of the two, it is well past the time for us to start the work that it will take to change this.”
[“Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”,
JONATHAN KOZOL / Harper’s Magazine v.311, n.1864, 1 Sep 2005]
Public school teachers are generally paid better than private and parochial school teachers, which of course is still not enough, considering all the extra issues they have to deal with. Beginning salaries for all teachers is dismally low here, so it’s a wonder anyone chooses the profession. Thank goodness some of us are willing to eat beans and rice and drive jalopies just so we can teach.