What’s Wrong With Public Education? It seems this question and any number of answers are tossed around whenever politicians want to get the general public to show support for a civic-minded candidate for a political office. You have all heard the list of answers: underfunded schools, lousy teachers, lousy parents, immoral society, etc. There is probably a grain of truth in each of the "causes" of poor showing of students. Most want to throw a quick-fix solution at the problem and expect instant results. Most are disappointed when the educational institutions seem to keep plugging along without much change. Perhaps real changes can take place in a few years, but I tend to support decades or more before changes of any meaning are seen (if then).
Let me add yet another brick on the heavy load carried by public school educators and staff. The outlook on the immediate horizon isn’t too optimistic for several reasons. Oddly enough, it may be a gender thing and we males may be to blame. We took off the employment shackles of women!
Several years ago, women tended to gravitate in large numbers toward one of four career paths. Many stayed at home and raised the children. The rest pursued employment outside of the home in one of three major categories: secretary, nurse, or teacher. While there were several notable examples of women working in other careers, these fields got the "lion’s share" of the female gender.
Home Secretary Nurse Teacher
Personnel departments easily picked over the applicants as each of these career paths offered plenty of quality individuals who could perform whatever tasks the job required. Most women who attended college did so to earn a teaching certificate. In fact, history will show many states had entire institutions devoted to the development of female teachers. Male colleges offered teaching degree programs, but they represented a much smaller number of students than liberal arts, engineering, etc. Education was (and is) dominated by female educators. A male in elementary school is still somewhat of a novelty.
Fast forward to today. Women in engineering, law, medicine, etc. are plentiful. Note that these same excellent individuals would have been in public school classrooms a few decades ago. The schools of education still have numbers, but what kind of numbers? To a degree, many of the quality individuals that previously had been pursuing educational careers are distributing themselves into more diverse paths of employment. This has not helped the personnel situation in the three predominantly female occupations of secretary, nurse, and education. To illustrate the point, consider a hypothetical sample of 100 females in 1950 each planning a career outside the home. Roughly 30-30-30 might be headed to a career path of secretary-nurse-educator with 10 to all other fields. Of the 30 headed to education, let’s say that 20 are really top-notch individuals. Each has the people skills needed in education. Each is filled with creativity and has a super work ethic. Only 10 of the 30 prospective educators are average or marginal. All 30 educators receive a degree and each is employed for 30 years producing the best students they can. Almost 50 years later, these ladies have retired from teaching, but their legacy is the education they imparted to all of us today.
Today consider that same sample of 100 women. Education is lucky if it can attract 20 with the remaining 80 going to the other career fields. Do you believe that the 20 pursuing educational careers will look like the top 20 educators a few years back? I hardly think any reasonable prediction would conclude the overall quality of the personnel pool has maintained at its previous high 50 years ago. Education’s loss has been the gain of other professions. This observation is not meant to imply that the current crop of educators doesn’t have individuals every bit as strong as previous generations. It does...just not in the quantities previously enjoyed. Unfortunately, a student is more likely to have a few weaker prospects in the assembly line of education from K – 12 just because there are fewer quality individuals in that list of teachers for a single child. (There is some evidence that a child will not recover from two successive weak teachers!)
The situation is made more acute as states have moved to decrease the pupil/teacher ratio. While smaller classes have been a good step for education, it puts more stress on personnel departments to find an even larger quantity of quality educators. A few decades ago the classes were larger, but there were more people equipped to provide a good education in the larger classes. Also, the challenges facing a teacher today are much different today. Gum and tardiness have been replaced with drugs and weapons. The stress is significantly greater today and we have fewer educators well equipped to be successful than before.
If these observations don’t give you "cause to pause", consider the continued and more insidious effect of the loss of a proportion of quality employees on leadership. Where do you think the future leaders in education come from? Obviously, the leadership is selected from the talent pool of classroom teachers. While the general principle of leadership selection being filled from the best and brightest, there is more room to select some leaders from the less capable. The institution of education is more likely to be damaged by a single weak leader than a single weak teacher. A child can recover from a single weak teacher if a strong teacher follows that teacher. But how will the children recover from a weak principal? How does the teaching staff recover from a weak principal? How does the school district recover from a weak superintendent? The legacy of a weak leader can last for years if the weakness happens to be in the financial arena. If the leader’s weakness shows up in personnel selection, the ill effects may last for over thirty years! 
As "proof" of this educational leadership situation, let me reflect on a staffing situation in my own school district. When I was first hired, there were three female principals and no assistant principals. I can remember when strong female teachers were given career guidance not to seek administrative degrees since they would not be considered for administrative positions. This advice was not meant in a mean-spirited way…they would not be considered! During the 3-4 years after the "ban" on female administrators was lifted, a male need not apply unless he was "superman" with a cape. There was such a backlog of quality females waiting in line, super capable females filled all available leadership posts. These were the females that might have been successful CEO’s had they been in another profession. Today, many of these potential educational female leaders are choosing other career fields and will move to the leadership in those fields rather than education. Also note that many of these outstanding female leaders are nearing retirement and will be replaced from the talent pool that is available as vacancies occur.
Occasionally you will hear one politician at a local, state or national level rant and rave about raising teacher standards. They will accurately point to the average SAT scores of people entering the teaching profession lagging behind other professions. They will cite some poor individual teacher somewhere who sent a letter home with spelling errors. The solutions they propose usually get around to some way to "raise the bar" to be a teacher. These suggestions play well on TV and make great sound bites for campaign speeches. Does anyone really think that school personnel departments intentionally pass over the highly skilled, super qualified applicants just to find a warm body? The truth is the pool of applicants is small and not equally deep in all certification areas. I'm not advocating opening the doors to let the unemployed have a job. Society seems to want someone to be standing behind the desk when the bell rings and school personnel departments are expected to manufacture those people.
A suggestion is offered with tongue in cheek. Why don’t we be more like the medical profession in handling our clients, the students. We only hire quality people to teach. If we don’t have enough qualified teachers, we simply tell the prospective clients they will have to seek services in another place where there are ample supply of qualified teachers. We send the students home if we can't find a good teacher!
If your town doesn’t have a brain surgeon, the patient is advised to go to another hospital where a brain surgeon practices. I remember taking high school physics from a chemistry teacher who obviously was a day or two ahead of the class. I was not advised to attend the high school down the road where they had a qualified physics teacher. How would you feel about having open-heart surgery from a podiatrist? Several years ago you were considered "legal" if you taught the majority of the day in your field of certification. I remember trying to help several social studies teachers understand the math they were expected to teach for only one of their five classes. Would you want your child in a math class staffed by a well-trained social studies teacher? I am old enough to remember when school districts came onto college campuses in America and offered teaching contracts to sophomores in mathematics. This was considered a better alternative than sending students home. 
We would not consider calling off a class for lack of a teacher. The prevailing thinking is that it is better for the student to have a teacher who is trying than not to have a class at all. In recent years the teacher shortage has gotten into areas previously not thought to be difficulty to fill. We have come to expect serious difficulty in finding mathematics, science, media specialists, foreign languages, and selected areas of special education. Several school districts have difficulty finding a certified 5rd grade teacher! No discussion is made of finding a "quality" individual, just someone who has the proper certification without a criminal record.
Some districts are so desperate for certified individuals, they will pay the tuition of potential teachers if the prospective teacher will agree to teach in that district for a number of years. Several school districts offer "signing bonuses" and provide moving expenses. States have instituted "college loans" which are paid off by teaching a number of years. If you remember the thesis of the popular TV show Northern Exposure a few years ago, you will understand the thought process behind financial enticement for filling significant careers that might not be filled. Perhaps education is getting desperate enough to look at differentiated pay for teachers based on availability. Perhaps a "signing bonus" similar to the military's option for medical personnel is in order. Perhaps education will feel compelled to treat difficult-to-fill positions like the military treats medical doctors in service.
Increased salaries for teachers will "fix" things, but not quickly. Salary increases wouldn't produce instructional benefits in most of the classrooms of today. The reason to increase salaries today is so our children’s children will see a career in education as a viable alternative to a career in engineering, medicine, law, business, etc. Be honest; do you really think you would double your effectiveness with students if your salary was doubled today? I have talked with many, many young people who seemed to possess all of the people skills and academic skills to be an outstanding teacher. Many have indicated that they would like to be a teacher, they just can’t afford to make that career choice. Should we consider education more like the ministry with a requirement of a "calling" to that career.
In my view, the problem with education is the personnel. The solution to education, therefore, is the personnel. I can’t see a return to the three career paths for women as a solution. Who would want to go back? Creative individuals need to come together to look for solutions. Today, not enough individuals are desperate enough to come together to make the effort to produce some of the solutions that might work.
Yet another issue with education is the span of students we try to educate. I can remember several classmates who struggled with me in elementary school that were not around to pick up a diploma. They dropped out along the way. When students were struggling and reached the age of 16, they were encouraged by society (and schools) to quit and pursue a vocational track immediately. Many heeded this advice and found employment doing something. Today, jobs to the less educated are not as plentiful, at least not jobs that pay much beyond minimum wage. In fact, some college graduates take initial positions barely above the minimum wage. In recent years schools have not been able to "push" unsuccessful students into society early. Society has "pushed" them right back. I can remember when the dropout rate wasn't ever computed much less used as one index of a school's success!
What does this mean to the typical educator? It means the extremes of the student body are likely to be in your class. Students who have not experienced much success (flunked) in a class of 25-30 find themselves in yet another class of the same size, sometimes with the same textbook or same teacher. Alternative schools are a recent phenomena, but most were developed to handle discipline issues rather than academic casualties. Society doesn't want an "unfinished" product. Schools do not receive funding to establish alternative programs in sufficient quantity to meet the challenges of a maturing crack baby, a child of parents who may not have the parenting skills to support an impressionable mind growing up in poverty, or any of the many, many reasons a child comes to school with inadequate resources. Many of the children in school today realize they are a liability to the family. They consume without producing. Work in the family business is almost impossible today. Children grow up without a feeling of real contribution and it shows in their outlook on life and school in particular. In my view, this is a "killer" that many never get over.
In case this writing is taking on a too pessimistic approach, let’s pursue some thoughts on a more positive note. Some of the same "negatives" are really a positive. The same politicians that are trying to produce a "quick-fix" to education are going to be part of the solution. While the specifics they propose are well intended but reflect some shallow reasoning, they are clear indicators of the importance education has in the minds of the political leadership. Until enough people see the value of something, it will never receive the lengthy focus of attention required to make a difference. Clearly, the business and political leaderships all over the country see the need for having a quality education for all students. That insight into the value of education is growing with each passing year.
State departments of education across the land have instituted several "alternative" certification processes designed to attract individuals from other career fields into education. Thankfully, there are many, many quality individuals who see education as their "calling" and would like to move into education. The efforts of the different states to smooth out some of the bumps in the process should increase the quantity of individuals of quality in the profession. I think we will see more activities like this in the future.The quality of the education profession is significantly better than it was from the influx of some of the minority races. We have already seen the educational benefits of an integrated school system in student performances. If we can continue to attract into education some of the best and brightest of the minorities, it is reasonable to expect the student populations will continue to improve in their educational achievement. Further, integration has opened the doors of colleges and universities to black students, many of which pursue degrees in education and filter into classrooms throughout the country. The impact is small, but real and continues to grow year after year.
The shift of women to other options as careers may be a 'blessing' in disguise. It may be that education has more people who choose to be in the field of education over other alternatives. While there may be some individuals whose career path led them to education because of lack of other choices, the vast majority of women do have many, many career paths open to them. Why would someone with so many choices for employment choose education? Perhaps it's because education is the career field of choice! Wouldn't you want to have a class with a teacher who had rather be ANY other place but in a classroom?
Finally, I have lived to see a significant increase in the technological skills of our teaching force. I can remember teaching the first eight computer teachers how to program a computer and teaching them to teach programming skills to students in the late 1970’s. At that time, there were only about a dozen educators counting me who knew anything about a computer out of approximately 2,000 teachers. I can remember establishing an educational electronic bulletin board system. Now, almost one generation later, roughly every new prospect has had his or her hands on a computer for significant telecommunications activities. Students and teachers alike are becoming proficient with educational uses of the Internet! The younger the teacher, the longer the individual has had personal access to a computer. There will be a time in the next 10-15 years when deaths and retirements will eliminate all educators without minimal computer experience. Further, the educational leadership chosen from the ranks will move into their positions of leadership from a richer and richer technological background. Within my lifetime I will see 100% of the educators, superintendent to new hire, doing whatever they do with a rich personal background in using technology. I have great faith in the potential of technology to transform education. I may live to see the personnel in every school having the skills and experiences to seize that potential and wring every drop of instructional value found therein to make education be what we would all like for it to be. That would be an excellent legacy to leave education in my school district.
