Producing Teachers Who Understand, Believe, and Care
Teaching lacks a career line that keeps alive the dedicated service orientation that so many would-be teachers express. This orientation came through strongly in interviews of thousands of young people about to enter teaching conducted by colleagues and me in the late 1980s. Absent a well-paid career line of advancement, the alternative attraction for many of those who remain in teaching is to seek out the most supportive teaching circumstances. The principle at work is no different from that in other occupations. It simply is easier to sustain test-score levels year after year in some schools than in others--and thus not have to live with the threat of being fired. If possible, why not teach where only the slowest group, rather than all three reading groups, is below state or national norms? And so, children in advantaged communities enjoy the advantages of a stable teaching force; many of the disadvantaged experience only a succession of substitutes. Research (especially that of Linda Darling-Hammond) clearly reveals the inequitable distribution of teachers across the United States, adding seriously to our landscape of inequities. The pressure for charter schools for some must be converted into commitment and action to create schools that are commonly good for all--a condition that is unattainable in the absence of good teachers.
We carry in our collective heads a misguided set of images regarding what teaching in schools requires, many of them reflecting legacies from the beginnings of schooling. When the teachings of religious orders in the 17th century transmitted to many parents a moral ethic to the effect that family apprenticeship was not sufficient preparation for adulthood, the school proposed was to be "an instrument of strict discipline protected by the law-courts and the police-courts," according to Philippe Aries in Centuries of Childhood (1962). Subsequently, the military became and remains a teacher source pool of such validity that the necessity for other credentials often is waived.
In the early 1840s, the rapid rise in school enrollments stimulated a call for men to give up their business enterprises for a month or more each year to offset the shortage of teachers. Few responded. But the concept of a masculine presence in the orderly classroom and school remained. The consequences of this image for the emerging system of schooling are too obvious and many to recount here. The gates into teaching always have been loosely latched for recruits from business management, as have been the gates into...
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