Time to 'Reinvigorate a Noble Profession'

Last week Time magazine featured on its cover a piece on 'How to Make Great Teachers.' The article, which primarily focused on the 'merits' of performance pay, begins poignantly with its author, Claudia Wallis, writing: 'We never forget our best teachers -- those who imbued us with a deeper understanding or an enduring passion, the ones we come back to visit years after graduating, the educators who opened doors and altered the course of our lives.' She describes her high school science teacher who taught her to 'think like a scientist' and her English teachers who helped her develop 'the art of writing essays' and embrace the 'pleasures of James Joyce.' 

Ms. Wallis transcends the usual debate over whether or not to measure 'great teachers' by standardized test scores or not or whether or not teachers need to be trained before they begin teaching. Indeed, she argues that policymakers need to get 'beyond merit pay' and look for more comprehensive teacher development plans--like the one emerging in Denver with its ProComp system.

Time turns to Linda Darling-Hammond to describe how other nations recruit, prepare, and pay their teachers. They do recruit bright students to teaching, but they do far more than train them for just for a few weeks and send them to the highest needs schools. And they expect more than for them to stay for 2 years, ­well before they can learn to teach like Ms. Wallis' exemplary teachers. Instead, the nations who outperform the United States fully pay for extensive teacher education programs and offer a career ladder that allows teachers to lead and be paid as professionals. In Singapore, new teachers are paid on par or even better than beginning doctors.

Taking a page from the TeacherSolutions playbook, Ms. Wallis ends emotively:

'If the country wants to pay teachers like professionals -- according to their performance, rather than like factory workers logging time on the job -- it has to provide them with other professional opportunities, like the chance to grow in the job, learn from the best of their peers, show leadership and have a voice in decision-making, including how their work is judged. Making such changes would require a serious investment by school districts and their taxpayers. But it would reinvigorate a noble profession.'

Thank you Ms. Wallis.

Comments

[Bob Heiny]

Ms. Wallis overstates a good case by saying, "... (the country) has to provide (teachers) with other professional opportunities, ..." I suspect she and I hope Teacher Solutions people know that's hyper talk, not factually based cause-effect fact. I wonder how such hyper talk influences public policy makers and "outsiders'" thinking about teachers as professionals?

[Renee Moore]

Sorry, Bob.
I think the lady said what she meant and meant what she said: Teachers need other professional opportunities. That you and others think that should be taken figuratively, shows how much more work we have to do to make the reality of teachers' lives visible outside the classroom.