Education Reform Starts with Teachers

The Iowa Task Force on Teacher Leadership and Compensation released a $150 million school improvement proposal Thursday. It’s an easy twenty-six page read which includes this prelude to the task force’s six goals:

“If we effectively compensate teachers; recruit and promote excellent teachers and provide support as they collaborate reflectively to refine their practice; create the political will and understanding necessary to remake the status of the teaching profession; give highly effective teachers opportunities to grow, refine, and share their expertise; and develop a clear system with quality implementation, then… student learning will increase, student outcomes will improve, and students will be prepared to succeed in a globally competitive environment.”

One might take issue with the statement’s structure, but it is hard to argue with its premise. Paying teachers more, recruiting high achievers, and improving collaboration and mentoring are worthwhile endeavors. They are hardly groundbreaking concepts. Teachers and non-teachers alike have been advocating these since about the time the first school was built.

The task force’s proposal should be supported, but let’s recognize the document for what it is. It is the latest in a long line of political manifestos written to give politicians an air of being concerned about education. And, it is substantially less than a blueprint for meaningful reform.

Most teachers do not get paid enough. However, it is important to address one undeniable fact before going further. The recruitment and retention of the best and the brightest into the field of education has less to do with salaries than it does with how teachers are treated. For starters, school districts have been firing teachers by the truckload in recent years to balance budgets. We lack the political will to keep education from the chopping block. Many of the very brilliant young people the task force says it seeks became trained educators in recent years only to be severed from the teaching profession by a blunt yet ruthless budget ax.

While the Task Force’s proposals have some merits, Iowa could make significant and more immediate gains if it took the $150 million proposed by this commission and used it to begin restoring the hundreds of teaching positions lost in recent years. Raising the starting pay of teachers is the right thing to do, but it will mean nothing if school districts have to fire teachers a few years down the road because coffers again run empty. We must restore schools and commit to innovation simultaneously.

Collaboration, mentoring, support and continuing education are as important to educators as they are in any profession. However, as long as activities meant to improve education result in teachers spending less time with students, they will bear insufficient fruit. In Des Moines the demand for teacher collaboration has resulted in a silly calendar structure that releases students from class ninety minutes early every Wednesday. These shortened days have an atmosphere of something much less than an actual learning day even before the dismissal bell rings, which leads many kids to call them ‘do-nothing-Wednesdays.’

The 180 day school calendar drives decisions. This has to stop. The better way to get teachers time for collaboration, mentoring and support is to start treating and paying teachers like the professionals we want them to be. Teaching is not a clock punching, do-the-time job. It is the craft of gifted people. Before we begin talk about lengthening the school year, which has merit, we need to lengthen the teacher contract year. A school day should mean students are in class learning. Do-nothing-Wednesdays and frequent teacher days need to end. This change in thinking has to start with teachers themselves and the unions representing them.

OK, I sense I have raised the ire of many teachers with my last comments. Let me clarify, teachers are among the hardest working people I know. They spend long hours at school and many more after grading and preparing lessons. I do not mean to diminish their effort in any conceivable way. On the contrary, teachers need to be paid and treated in a manner that will compel them to cease nitpicking about the calendar and the clock.

Recommendations from any and every education task force will only serve as talking points unless we recognize education reform means committing to spending money to provide teachers the tools, resources, support and ongoing training they need to do the job. This will require more than a onetime expenditure – it means a long-time ironclad commitment to spending.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com 
This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register online essay.