Give best & brightest reason to teach

I HADN'T SEEN Vince's son in years. He had grown into a charming, intelligent and articulate high-school senior. His father wants him to work on Wall Street but he's always dreamed of becoming a teacher. Teaching is a wonderful profession, I told him. Sure, you'll make more money in finance, but you'll never feel the satisfaction of working with young people and making a difference in their lives.

On the other hand, it seems that the days of being admired and valued for dedicating yourself to the education of young people may be over.

Are we doing everything we can to attract young people like Vincent to teaching? Or are we scaring them away?

Aspiring teachers know that they will be expected to work in difficult settings every day, especially in poor urban schools; fortunately for us, they choose to go anyway. Their youth and idealism win out over the triple threat of declining resources, incompetent administrators and lack of community support.

In recent years, however, a whole new set of issues has arisen for which new teachers have no training. Politicians of both parties, blaming teachers for "failing" schools, are increasingly eliminating some or all collective-bargaining rights, effectively eliminating job security. Over-testing and elimination of art and music to make room for test-prep classes quashes the creativity of both teachers and students. The destabilizing of neighborhoods by closing schools, the firing of teachers based on faulty data from standardized tests, the growing influence of outside corporate reformers - these subjects are not taught in education class. Teachers must figure out how to deal with them or find themselves and their careers threatened.

Decisions about crucial school issues - curriculum, discipline policy, class size - are usually made without consulting teachers, yet teachers are punished when those policies fail.

Every day, teachers are expected to overcome the effects of poverty and crime: poor nutrition, parental neglect and abuse, lack of sleep, traumatic stress. Corporate reformers, including Bill Gates, continue to repeat the truism that the most important factor in any child's education is having a great teacher. However, David Sirota writes in Salon of a recent report from Stanford University that "showed that . . . a family's economic situation is a bigger determinative force in a child's academic performance than any other major demographic factor. For poor kids, that means the intensifying hardships of poverty are now creating massive obstacles to academic progress."

The most recent threat to education is the idea that teaching no longer needs to be a true profession. Earlier this month, the New York City Department of Education requested permission from the state to bypass certification laws in order to train teachers in its own significantly abbreviated program; an assistant chancellor declared that they no longer wished to "depend on universities." The proposed five-year plan for Philadelphia's schools, written by the Boston Consulting Group and soon to be voted upon by the School Reform Commission, advocates increasing recruitment from Teach for America, which places college graduates in inner-city classrooms after a five-week summer training program. Most parents would certainly vote against a dumbed-down education curriculum that places unqualified and uncertified teachers in their children's classrooms.

Unless we develop fair evaluation systems, find a way for teachers to be part of the decision-making process in their school districts and use some of our nation's vast wealth to ensure funding of all schools, we cannot expect young people of Vincent's caliber to commit to a career in education. And who really needs him - our schools or Wall Street?