To the editor:
A letter in another publication by a teacher in the Cleveland Public School District (“Do School Officials Want Teachers to Give Up?”), along with disturbing photographs inside a few schools, reminded me of Jonathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities. We never see this kind of degradation in hospitals, malls, and government buildings, but it seems to be OK to have conditions of squalor in many schools.
Society wants public schools to be all-purpose institutions. Teachers who thought they were hired to teach subject matter are instead asked to be social workers, moms, dads, therapists, cops, nutritionists, public health workers, medical technicians, psychologists, counselors, and perhaps, in the opinion of some students, jailers.
Phillip C. Schlechty, author of Inventing Better Schools: An Action Plan for Educational Reform, said it best: “Schools are not welfare agencies, hospitals, juvenile detention centers or psychological treatment centers. They are educational institutions with the singular purpose of ensuring that all children have school work they can and will do and from which they develop the understandings, skills and insights that are considered important to them and to the culture and society in which they will live.”
To paraphrase Dick Feagler in a past column, Where does our school’s responsibility for your life and education stop and yours (the individuals’) begin?
This is ultimately the “great human question.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
The writer is a nature studies science teacher at Cleveland Heights High School.
The Brain behind Bush’s Speeches Is Not His Own
To the editor:
I hope everyone realizes that 90 percent of George W’s speeches come from the brains of his advisers, not his own brain. Also, all his demagoguery about education standards and testing ad infinitum, ad nauseam, doesn’t make him an education president. Why? Here are a few quotes from W:
• “Is our children learning?” (from a speech on Jan. 11, 2000, in Grand Rapids, Michigan; quoted in a book of the same title by Paul Begala).
• “Higher education in not my priority [sic]” (San Antonio Express News, March 22, 1998).
• “Laura and I sometimes don’t realize how bright our children is until we get an objective analysis” (Meet the Press, April 15, 2000).
As Begala states in his book, “It is ironic that a guy who was a crummy student and boasts of his anti-intellectual grievances should choose education as his top issue.” He went to Andover, Yale, and Harvard with a 550 SAT verbal. This must be OK because Bill Bradley became a senator with an embarrassing 480, and Al Gore flunked out of college and became vice president.
Marian Wright Edelman is correct: “You can get all As and still flunk life.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Students, Not Teachers, Hold Key to Learning Process
To the editor:
After reading Susan B. Ketchum’s article (The Sun Press, Sept. 14, “National Certificates Hard to Earn”) about the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, I couldn’t wait to get a pen in hand and start writing.
“About 800 Ohio teachers have earned National Board certification. What does that mean to the average citizen?” It means that those 800 teachers—just one of every 135 teachers in Ohio—have proven they are at the top of their profession (by the way, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook 2000 labels teachers, nurses, social workers, and librarians as semiprofessionals), and the students in those classrooms will get a quality education for that year.
Great. What about the other 107,000 Ohio teachers? Does that mean their students do not receive a quality education? What does quality mean? What about the future years of students? For the teachers who choose to attain National Board certification (which seems to be more appealing to younger teachers with less than twenty years experience), I say good for them and congratulations.
Personally, a $2,500 annual stipend for ten years is not enough to externally motivate the overwhelming majority of classroom teachers (especially those with more than twenty years experience). There are just too many hoops to jump through that require an average of 120 hours to complete. Make it $10,000/year, and now you’re talking. I may even consider it with thirty-two years of experience. A much better incentive is teachers being able to retire at any age with thirty years of experience with 66 percent of your average highest three-year’s salary (e.g. $62,000, 28th year; $64,000, 29th year; and $66,000, 30th, master’s degree plus equals $64,000 × 0.66 equals $42,240). However, the State Teachers Retirement System has increased the incentive to 35 years at 87.5 percent. This is much more appealing to teachers with thirty-plus years of experience. National Board certification is not given much thought.
Now think about this. A recent study by the Rand Corporation, a California think tank, of student performance in forty-four states found that higher teacher salaries had “little effect” on outcomes. Similarly, “having a higher percentage of teachers with a master’s and doctorates and extensive teaching experience appears to have comparatively little effect on student achievement across states.” Stiffer teaching-licensing requirements would, for example, compound the teacher shortage by making it harder for people to switch careers into teaching.
A better approach would be for states to “scrap nearly all the hoops and hurdles that discourage good candidates from becoming teachers,” writes Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. In his book Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do, Laurence Steinberg states, “No curricular overhaul, no instructional innovation, no change in school organization, no toughening of standards, no rethinking of teacher training or compensation will succeed if students do not come to school interested in and committed to learning. In order to understand how this commitment develops, we need to look not at what goes on inside the classroom, but students’ lives outside the school’s walls. Until we do this, school reform will continue to be a disappointment and our student achievement will fail to improve.”
Personally, I think that I have been at the top of my career in teaching/education for many years—without National Board certification with two master’s degrees. I also think I am giving
