By Tamim Ansary
The Chinese philosopher Confucius was known by many titles but his proudest honorific was “great teacher.” In fact, over the centuries, teachers have been revered figures in many cultures and countries.
I thought about this the other day when I ran across an online rant about teachers seeking more money in some school district somewhere. “FACT,” this ranter wrote. “LAZY TEACHERS JUST WANT A THREE DAY WEEKEND! Just say NO to them, they are already OVERPAID and UNDERWORKED, and the public needs to remind them who they work for …”
Unfortunately, this fellow is not alone. A few years ago, when I wrote a column suggesting that teachers were underpaid, I got a flood of responses from readers. Some agreed with me, but they were mostly teachers. Others – perhaps half – not only disagreed but expressed quite a surprising hostility toward teachers. In essence, they said teachers had some nerve expecting to be paid like engineers when their work was more like filing and babysitting.
Growing disrespect
I was aware, of course, that teachers have long been under attack. In 1979, Pink Floyd recorded an immensely popular song that featured a boot-stomping chorus of children chanting, “We don’t need no education! We don’t need no thought control!” interrupted by the singer shouting, “Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”
When I first heard this song, my mother was an elementary school teacher in the last years of her career, and I was acutely aware of how she struggled every day to stay upright under the blows and buffeting she received from tyrannical bureaucrats, clamorous parents and unruly children. What made her struggle all the more grinding was the growing disrespect she could sense for her profession in the society at large.
One such current took a seminal turn in 1978, when California passed a ballot measure known as Proposition 13. With that initiative, the state slashed its property taxes by one-third. Within five years, 37 other states had enacted similar legislation, and within a decade the prairie fire of tax revolt had spread to every corner of the nation.
But property taxes had been the primary source of school funding; that has been an American tradition. When those revenues shrank, something had to give. No one wanted to cut necessary programs, so budget slashers looked for unnecessary ones. The pressure they were working under, however, predisposed them to see more and more programs as unnecessary, as “frills.” They had to. Summer school classes vanished, arts programs dropped away, school libraries were closed and many extracurricular activities, such as music clubs and even sports, which had once softened the core programs of basic skills training, were eliminated.
This sparser education gave students less to look forward to at school and less fodder, therefore, for fond memories later. When they became adults, these students were apt to remember school as bitter medicine: Good for you at best, but nothing to look back on with nostalgia, any more than one looks back nostalgically to root canal work, though one might appreciate still having teeth. This feeling surely infects, at least subliminally, public sentiment toward teachers.
The tax revolt, however, was just one current. Coincidentally, in the years leading up to Proposition 13, school reformers were developing a set of ideas that ended up fitting in neatly with the coming funding crisis. They proposed to improve schools with measures that not only would cost no money but actually depended on spending less. In brief, they proposed to replace funding-driven solutions with punishment-based ones. The old view, in place since the 1930s, had held that the key to good education at the K-12 level was to research how kids learn and then fund activities that promoted learning, no matter what the cost. The new reformers by contrast recommended that we as a society decide what kids should learn and then punish those who failed to learn it, ultimately by withholding funds from schools and teachers.
Someone to blame
The new approach failed to deliver the desired results, and this has had consequences. It’s true that today some observers see progress, but others see none. Both opinions probably reflect political agendas, and neither rests on indisputable evidence, which leaves the public free to believe, as it does believe, that America’s educational system is in crisis. And if there is a crisis, someone must be to blame.
But who is to blame? Potential targets abound, of course: bureaucrats, educrats, the left, the right, the spineless middle, “kids today,” funding cuts, throwing-money-at-the-problem, society at large – each of these is someone’s favorite scapegoat. Teachers, however, hold pride of place as potential blamees: They’re the hardest targets to miss.
Public school teachers are all the more vulnerable to blame because of another current in that perfect storm of social forces I mentioned above. Throughout the 19th century, when few people went to school beyond eighth grade, teachers were almost universally women; society regarded them as hobbyists working for “pin money” to supplement their husband’s incomes, or they were marking time while waiting to get married. Since they supposedly weren’t supporting families or even themselves, they didn’t have to earn much and they weren’t paid much. Things changed, deepened and diversified in the 20th century, but it wasn’t until the late 1960s that the teaching profession became unionized. After that, teachers’ salaries and benefits improved at a pace exceeding the national average for a period. Teachers never reached parity with high-end professions such as medicine and law; even so, by the 1980s, compared to most workers, they enjoyed enviable benefits including job security, health plans, pensions and summer vacations.
The trouble was, they were flowing against the tide. Teachers were developing dynamic, politically influential unions just as union strength in general was fading: The bulk of the old industrial unions lost ground as manufacturing moved overseas. Many workers, unionized or not, were losing benefits just when teachers were gaining theirs. In the 1980s, private companies began scaling back health plans. Employers cut down on pension contributions. Economic changes eroded job security. Technological changes forced many workers to contemplate not just changing jobs but careers. These trends, which continue to this day, cannot help but feed resentment toward teachers. (It’s those summer vacations people seem to find most galling.)
But there’s more
When industrial unions struggled for higher wages, they were going up against the owners of specific private businesses. People outside those companies had no stake in the struggle and no personal reason to care which side won or who got how much of the company’s profits.
Teachers, by contrast, get their money from taxpayers. When they seek a raise, they seek it from “us,” not “them.” Teachers and parents may have a natural confluence of interests, but teachers and taxpayers have an inherently adversarial relationship. For a taxpayer, the question is never simply, “Do teachers deserve more money,” but “Do teachers deserve more money from me?” Anyone who feels a reluctance to say yes is predisposed to assign a lower value to teachers’ work and consider it easy. And indeed, when people reacted to my column about teachers being under- or over-paid, their opinion correlated pretty precisely with whether they saw teaching as difficult and sophisticated or as a rote, near-clerical job that anyone could do.
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And now, to complete the perfect storm: School reform based on standards, testing and accountability, the movement born in the 1970s and still going strong, tends to reduce teachers’ decision-making powers and their creative role in the educational process. It’s the accidental but inevitable by-product of a reform project that seeks to systematize education by establishing exact, detailed curriculum objectives, mandating how these are to be taught, testing to see if they have been learned and dispensing funds according to test scores. This approach tends to reduce teachers to mere conduits between curriculum development specialists and kids, between kids and testing experts, between tests and funding agencies. Their job can be codified into a function. This prevents the worst teachers from wreaking damage but prevents the best teachers from soaring. The metamorphosis in the teacher’s role helps to validate limiting their earnings but also reinforces whatever disregard the public may already feel toward teachers.
Best and brightest
Lee Iacocca once said, “In a truly rational society, the best of us would be teachers, and the rest would have to settle for something less.” Although this is clearly not how it works now – people whose grades and SAT scores give them broad options tend to favor more lucrative professions – some extremely gifted people do still go into teaching, simply because they feel a calling. It’s the same reason some people become artists. But if the concept of “Great Teacher” doesn’t exist in the public imagination, what will draw the best and brightest into this career?
Cont’d
