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(glass bulb rolling on a table, electrical sounds)
No great public education system is any better than the quality of the teachers
within it.
We have to start taking a look
at how we're recruiting, rewarding and retaining teachers.
There's a great study that was done out of Tennessee. Pam Carter is the researcher,
and she took teachers who were having
phenomenal pupil learning over a period of five to seven years
and then going in and videotaping and studying their practice, and she found
that those teachers, you could find five characteristics which were important
that they all had.
So, first and foremost they were very good at classroom management,
organizing the classroom. Second thing is differentiation,
so, the ability to differentiate instruction.
So if you have a a high school classroom
where you have all types of learners -- you're seeing 150, 200 students a day --
you need to be able to differentiate and do it on the fly.
The three other things are things that we can't teach,
and that is a love for kids. The teachers really cared about kids; they cared about
their welfare, cared about their learning. That's a key characteristic.
A third thing is the ability to form alliances or partnerships with parents.
Effective teachers have to be able to have that partnership with families, with parents,
with caregivers. You know, it's got to be a joint exercise, and then the final thing,
and I think this is the most important characteristic, but we tend to ignore it,
they all had expectations that their kids were going to perform at high levels.
They weren't going to give up on them. They weren't going to do one
assessment and say, "Well, they're not so good in this, so I'm going to put them in the low group."
They always were pushing kids and had a belief that they could learn in spite of
all kinds of different variables. So, those five characteristics
are things that are important for teachers to have and effective teachers to have.
We also haven't really invested a lot in career development for teachers.
In the United States, if you're a teacher if you wanna make more money you have to go the
administrative route.
So, you have to go out of the field that you're very successful in.
We don't do that in medicine.
If you're a very successful surgeon and good at what you do, you don't have to go into
administration to make more money; you can be, you know, rewarded for what you're good at.
There are some countries -- they have three tracks for teachers:
a teacher track;
they have a leadership track, and then they have a specialist track,
so that in your career you can choose. Do I want to be compensated and stay as a
teacher? Do I want to become an administrator?
Do I wanna become an art specialist? And so these career tracks are things that
people can pursue as opposed to being stranded
in a career or not being able to make enough money within a certain strand.
There are many people that could fulfill their entire careers in a teaching strand, if you will
if they were making the right amount of money, and that's the thing that
we have to address sooner or later in this country.
What would it take, what would be the levers to wind up recruiting good people into teaching?
And they've been able to figure it out. It's not really involved.
Sixty-five thousand dollars starting salary,
150,000 dollars as a veteran,
having good school conditions, people that would pay for people to go through
and get their professional development, and then ongoing professional support
when they're on the job. When we look at retention of teachers, we're losing up
to 50 percent of teachers after five years in inner city schools.
So, I can't think of another workforce where we have that kind of turnover
and just lack of investment.
So, think of the money that's saved by having people spend 30 years in a
career vs. five years and having to go through a whole career change.
So, unless we start focusing in the United State on the quality of teachers
that we have in the system, everything else, from my standpoint, is window dressing.
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