California is currently suffering through the worst teacher shortage in our history. In the last five years, there have been only eight fully credentialed teachers for every 10 teaching positions in our public schools. In the last two years, the state Department of Education has issued over 50,000 emergency teaching credentials.
Worse, the teachers we do have may not be there for long. Twenty percent of all new teachers quit within three years and 50 percent quit within five years. Why is teacher attrition so high? Salaries are too low to consistently attract and retain top-quality, stable professional staff. (In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, salaries are so low that many new teachers cannot afford to rent a home. Some districts there are even researching the idea of providing low income housing for poor teachers. How's that for irony: bright, talented people with five years of college as recipients of old-fashioned company town largesse!)
But salaries aren't the only reason teachers take flight from the classroom. Teaching conditions are terrible: classes are overcrowded; teaching materials - even basic textbooks - are in short supply; classrooms are old and rundown; and, last but certainly not least, administrators are poor to incompetent. Lacking full due-process protections, many new teachers are driven from the profession by personality clashes with some incompetent principal rather than by lack of ability.
And the job itself keeps on getting more difficult. The average elementary school teacher works with 35 students all day, and the average high school teacher teaches 175 students per day. California has the second highest class size in the nation. Moreover, the students themselves aren't always willing, let alone eager, to benefit from their teachers' hard work: the Kaiser Foundation recently reported that these kids spend nearly three hours a day watching television and very little, if any, time reading or writing.
Whether the kids are in there trying or not, the teacher plugs along, doing more and more paperwork along with all the time spent preparing for lessons and evaluating student performance. The numbers are scary. If an elementary school teacher spends just an hour per week per student outside the classroom - grading papers, creating bulletin boards, preparing lessons (not counting attending professional meetings and classes or studying subject matter to be taught) - it adds 35 hours to the time he or she spends in the classroom, amounting to a 75-hour workweek at the absolute minimum. The same or worse goes for the secondary teacher. If he or she spends just 15 minutes per week per student grading papers and recording the grades, it adds more than 43 hours to the time spent in the classroom.
Then there are the report cards. Lou Maso of the Santa Ana Unified School District gave me a copy of the administrator-designed district elementary school report card. It requires 46 separate grades and three written comments for each student in each grading period, and the teachers must also hold a conference with each parent (assuming the parent's willingness) during the report card and grading period. The high school teacher gets to compute grades and figure absences, tardies, work habits and cooperation for the 175 kids four times a year and then bubble in the data - 865 tiny dots. Not a prescription for ocular or mental health!
The stress level of such a job is horrendous and rising. For intelligent, well-educated people, a good part of the stress and frustration comes from having no real professional control over their jobs. Even the conservative Fordham Foundation recognizes the issue and rates California an "F" in teacher autonomy. Teachers are still being told what, when, where and how to teach. Creative, talented people - and classroom teachers, counselors and librarians are just that - know better than anyone else (including principals who may have had only a half-dozen years in the classroom, if that much) what they are doing and how it should be done. But they have no voice in how to perform their own professional jobs.
Yet Governor Gray Davis and newspapers like the Los Angeles Times are advocating more training, higher pay and more control for principals as a way to improve schools. This is exactly the opposite direction in which schools should be heading. Giving the principal more control and power is simply adding to the existing problem, not solving it.
Despite all these problems, Governor Davis provided only a 1.4 percent unrestricted COLA to local school district budgets. This is the only money that can be used for salaries and benefits. We were very disappointed in such a stingy approach to the serious financial problems of California's teachers. We had hoped for more from a person who has been supported by teachers in every one of his political campaigns and who seemed to understand our issues.
It is still possible to rescue our schools and our profession. Here's what needs to be done:
- Improve teacher salaries to be competitive with other college-trained professionals. Long ago, schools could count on bright women to become teachers, since there wasn't much else available to them. No more!
- Give professional teachers a majority voice in everything that affects their classrooms and their peers. If we can evaluate our peers, if we can assist our peers (now state law), we can also select and hire our peers and collectively make any decision a principal makes.
- Dramatically improve teaching conditions to the point where the norm is clean, safe, well-stocked, air-conditioned classrooms. Remember that teachers' working conditions are children's learning conditions.
- Cut back on useless paperwork required of teachers.
- Above all, stop blaming teachers or trying to hold us accountable for the problems of society which are reflected in our classrooms. If we have no control over a problem, we can't be accountable for its solution.
Make no mistake about it. CTA will fight for changes in the public school system that will reduce the teacher shortage, not add to it. If California wants a top-flight professional teaching staff for the future, those in power must hear those in the classrooms.