Public school teachers in the United States

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

The following is from:

Thomas Sowell. Inside American Education. The Decline, The Deception, The dogmas. Chapter 2. Impaired Facilities.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Impaired Facilities

NO DISCUSSION of American education can be realistic without considering the calibre of the people who teach in the nation's schools. By all indicators—whether objective data or first-hand observations—the intellectual calibre of public school teachers in the United States is shockingly low. While there have been, and continue to be, many schemes designed to raise the qualifications and performance of the teaching profession, the intellectual level of this occupation has, if anything, declined in recent times, just as the performance of the students they teach has declined. To understand why innumerable efforts to improve teachers and teaching have failed, it is necessary to understand something about the occupation itself, about the education which prepares people for that occupation, about the kind of people who become teachers, and about the institutions which attempt to educate American children.

The Occupation

There are well over 2 million school teachers in the United States—more than all the doctors, lawyers, and engineers combined. Their sheer numbers alone mean that there will inevitably be many exceptions to any generalizations made about teachers. However, a number of important generalizations do apply to the great majority of these teachers. For example, public school teaching is an overwhelmingly unionized occupation, an occupation with virtually iron-clad job security, an occupation in which virtually everyone has a degree or degrees, and yet an occupation whose lack of substantive intellectual qualifications is painfully demonstrable.

The National Education Association (NEA) alone has approximately one and a half million members and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has more than 600,000 members. Together, they represent the great majority of teachers. Both organizations are highly effective lobbying groups at both the federal and state levels, and both aim much advertising at the general public, both to generate a favorable image of teachers and to get the public used to seeing education issues in a certain framework, favorable to the profession—for example, to equate more money for the public school establishment with "an investment in better education." Everything from television commercials to bumper stickers promote their cause, unopposed by any comparably organized counter-propaganda. Moreover, huge political campaign contributions assure teachers' unions favorable access to the seats of power in Washington and in the state capitals.

Given the political realities, it can hardly be surprising that public school teachers are among the most difficult of all employees to fire—regardless of the level of their competence or incompetence. Rates of pay likewise bear virtually no relationship to competence or incompetence, but are largely determined by longevity and college credits. A teacher who ruins the education of generation after generation of students will be rewarded by continually rising pay levels.

Just how incompetent a teacher can be and still keep the job was illustrated by an extreme case in South Carolina, where a school tried to get rid of a teacher who had been warned repeatedly about her poor teaching and poor English. At a hearing where she was given a ten-word vocabulary test, she could neither pronounce nor define the word "agrarian." She could pronounce the word "suffrage" but defined it as "people suffering from some reason or other." The word "ratify" she defined as "to get rid of something." In her own defense, she said: "I'm not saying I was the best, but I don't think I did more harm than anyone else." A judge ordered her reinstated.

To complete the tightly controlled monopoly, both the supply of customers and the supply of labor are almost totally under the control of the education establishment. Compulsory attendance laws guarantee a captive audience, except for about 13 percent of American youngsters who attend private schools, and official requirements of education courses for permanent tenure keep out the unwanted competition of potential teachers from outside the existing establishment. These multiple monopolies serve the interests of two narrow constituencies: (1) public school teachers and administrators, and (2) those college professors who teach education courses—courses notoriously unattractive in themselves, but representing the toll gates through which aspirants must pass in order to acquire tenure in public school teaching. "Emergency" or "provisional" credentials can be obtained to enter the classroom, but education courses are officially required to stay there permanently as a teacher.

Intellectual Levels

The extremes to which job security for the individual and job barriers for the profession are carried suggest a desperate need to avoid competition. This fear of competition is by no means paranoid. It is very solidly based on the low levels of substantive intellectual ability among public school teachers and administrators, and among the professors of education who taught them.

Consistently, for decades, those college students who have majored in education have been among the least qualified of all college students, and the professors who taught them have been among the least respected by their colleagues elsewhere in the college or university. The word "contempt" appears repeatedly in discussions of the way most academic students and professors view their counterparts in the field of education. At Columbia Teachers College, 120th Street is said to be "the widest street in the world" because it separates that institution from the rest of Columbia University.

Nor is Columbia at all unique in this respect. "In many universities," according to a study by Martin Mayer, "there is little if any contact between the members of the department of education and the members of other departments in the school." When the president of Harvard University retired in 1933, he told the institution's overseers that Harvard's Graduate School of Education was a "kitten that ought to be drowned."More recently, a knowledgeable academic declared, "the educationists have set the lowest possible standards and require the least amount of hard work." Education schools and education departments have been called "the intellectual slums" of the university.

Despite some attempts to depict such attitudes as mere snobbery, hard data on education student qualifications have consistently shown their mental test scores to be at or near the bottom among all categories of students. This was as true of studies done in the 1920s and 1930s as of studies in the 1980s. Whether measured by Scholastic Aptitude Tests, ACT tests, vocabulary tests, reading comprehension tests, or Graduate Record Examinations, students majoring in education have consistently scored below the national average. When the U.S. Army had college students tested in 1951 for draft deferments during the Korean War, more than half the students passed in the humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences and mathematics, but only 27 percent of those majoring in education passed.

In 1980-81, students majoring in education scored lower on both verbal and quantitative SATs than students majoring in art, music, theatre, the behavioral sciences, physical sciences, or biological sciences, business or commerce, engineering, mathematics, the humanities, or health occupations. Undergraduate business and commercial majors have long been regarded as being of low quality, but they still edged out education majors on both parts of the SAT. Engineering students tend to be lopsidedly better mathematically than verbally, but nevertheless their verbal scores exceeded those of education majors, just as art and theatre majors had higher mathematics scores than education majors. Not only have education students' test scores been low, they have also been declining over time. As of academic year 1972-73, the average verbal SAT score for high school students choosing education as their intended college major was 418—and by academic year 1979-80, this had declined to 389.

At the graduate level, it is very much the same story, with students in numerous other fields outscoring education students on the Graduate Record Examination — by from 91 points composite to 259 points, depending on the field. The pool of graduate students in education supplies not only teachers, counselors, and administrators, but also professors of education and other "leaders" and spokesmen for the education establishment. In short, educators are drawing disproportionately from the dregs of the college-educated population. As William H. Whyte said back in the 1950s, "the facts are too critical for euphemism."

Professors of education rank as low among college and university faculty members as education students do among other students. After listing a number of professors "of great personal and intellectual distinction" teaching in the field of education, Martin Mayer nevertheless concluded:

On the average, however, it is true to say that the academic professors, with many exceptions in the applied sciences and some in the social sciences, are educated men, and the professors of education are not.

Given low-quality students and low-quality professors, it can hardly be surprising to discover, as Mayer did, that "most education courses are not intellectually respectable, because their teachers and the textbooks are not intellectually respectable." In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers. There are severe limits to how intellectual their teaching could be, even if they wanted it to be. Their susceptibility to fads, and especially to non-intellectual and anti-intellectual fads, is understandable—but very damaging to American education. What is less understandable is why parents and the public allow themselves to be intimidated by such educators' pretensions of "expertise."

The futility of attempting to upgrade the teaching profession by paying higher salaries is obvious, so long as legal barriers keep out all those who refuse to take education courses. These courses are negative barriers, in the sense that they keep out the competent. It is Darwinism stood on its head, with the unfittest being most likely to survive as public school teachers.

The weeding out process begins early and continues long, eliminating more and more of the best qualified people. Among high school seniors, only 7 percent of those with SAT scores in the top 20 percent, and 13 percent of those in the next quintile, expressed a desire to go into teaching, while nearly half of those in the bottom 40 percent chose teaching. Moreover, with the passage of time, completion of a college education, and actual work in a teaching career, attrition is far higher in the top ability groups — 85 percent of those in the top 20 percent leave teaching after relatively brief careers — while low-ability people tend to remain teachers. This too is a long-standing pattern. A 1959 study of World War II veterans who had entered the teaching profession concluded that "those who are academically more capable and talented tended to drop out of teaching and those who remained as classroom teachers in the elementary and secondary schools were the less intellectually able members of the original group." The results in this male sample were very similar to the results in a female sample in 1964 which found that the "attrition rate from teaching as an occupation was highest among the high ability group ." Other studies have had very similar results. Sometimes the more able people simply leave for greener pastures, but the greater seniority of the least able can also force schools to lay off the newer and better teachers whenever jobs are reduced.

The dry statistics of these studies translate into a painful human reality captured by a parent's letter:

Over the years, as a parent, I have repeatedly felt frustrated, angry and helpless when each spring teachers—who were the ones the students hoped anxiously to get, who had students visiting their classrooms after school, who had lively looking classrooms—would receive their lay-off notices. Meanwhile, left behind to teach our children, would be the mediocre teachers who appeared to have precious little creative inspiration for teaching and very little interest in children.

With teachers as with their students, merely throwing more money at the educational establishment means having more expensive incompetents. Ordinarily, more money attracts better people, but the protective barriers of the teaching profession keep out better-qualified people, who are the least likely to have wasted their time in college on education courses, and the least likely to undergo a long ordeal of such Mickey Mouse courses later on. Nor is it realistic to expect reforms by existing education schools or to expect teachers' unions to remedy the situation. As a well-known Brookings Institution study put it, "existing institutions cannot solve the problem, because they are the problem."

Teachers' unions do not represent teachers in the abstract. They represent such teachers as actually exist in today's public schools. These teachers have every reason to fear the competition of other college graduates for jobs, to fear any weakening of iron-clad tenure rules, and to fear any form of competition between schools that would allow parents to choose where to send their children to school. Competition means winners and losers—based on performance, rather than seniority or credentials. Professors of education are even more vulnerable, because they are supplying a product widely held in disrepute, even by many of those who enroll in their courses, and a product whose demand is due almost solely to laws and policies which compel individuals to enroll, in order to gain tenure and receive pay raises.

As for the value of education courses and degrees in the actual teaching of school children, there is no persuasive evidence that such studies have any pay-off whatever in the class-room. Postgraduate degree holders became much more common among teachers during the period of declining student test scores. Back in the early 1960s, when student SAT scores peaked, fewer than one-fourth of all public school teachers had postgraduate degrees and almost 15 percent lacked even a Bachelor's degree. But by 1981, when the test score decline hit bottom, just over half of all teachers had Master's degrees and less than one percent lacked a Bachelor's.

Despite the questionable value of education courses and degrees as a means of improving teaching, and their role as barriers keeping out competition, defenders of the education schools have referred to proposals to reduce or eliminate such requirements as "dilutions" of teacher quality. Conversely, to require additional years of education courses is equated with a move "to improve standards for teachers ." Such Orwellian Newspeak turns reality upside down, defying all evidence.

It should not be surprising that education degrees produce no demonstrable benefit to teaching. The shallow and stultifying courses behind such degrees are one obvious reason. However, even when the education school curriculum is "beefed up" with more intellectually challenging courses at some elite institutions, those challenging courses are likely to be in subjects imported from other disciplines — statistics or economics, for example — rather than courses on how to teach children. Moreover, such substantive courses are more likely to be useful for research purposes than for actual classroom teaching. When Stanford University's school of education added an honors program, it was specifically stated that this was not a program designed for people who intended to become classroom teachers .

The whole history of schools and departments of education has been one of desperate, but largely futile, attempts to gain the respect of other academics—usually by becoming theoretical and research-oriented, rather than by improving the classroom skills of teachers. But both theoretical and practical work in education are inherently limited by the low intellectual level of the students and professors attracted to this field.

Where education degrees are not mandated by law as a requirement for teaching in private schools, those schools themselves often operate without any such requirement of their own. The net result is that they can draw upon a much wider pool of better-educated people for their teachers. The fact that these private schools often pay salaries not as high as those paid to public school teachers further reveals the true role of education degrees as protective tariffs, which allow teachers' unions to charge higher pay for their members, who are insulated from competition.

Schools and departments of education thus serve the narrow financial interests of public school teachers and professors of education—and disserve the educational interests of more than 40 million American school children.

Institutional Problems

While the low—and declining—intellectual calibre of public school teachers limits the quality of American education, there are also institutional reasons why even these modest limits are often not reached. There are, after all, better and worse teachers, so that greater selectivity in hiring and a weeding out of the incompetent could, in theory at least, get the best performance out of the existing pool of people. However, the policies, practices, and legal constraints placed on educational institutions often prevent such rational maximization of teaching performance.

Even the bleak picture of the ability level among people who major in education leaves out institutional possibilities of better teaching, for it leaves out those people whose college majors were not in education but in other, more solid subjects, and who simply took education courses as well (either contemporaneously or later), in order to become teachers. Such people with non-education majors are in fact a majority among high school teachers. Nevertheless, the attrition of the able and the institutional protection of the incompetent make American educational quality lower than it has to be, even with the existing pool of potential teachers.

Many of the constraints within which schools, school districts, and boards of education operate originate within the education establishment—with teachers unions, and schools of education, for example—but other constraints are imposed from outside. Legislators, for example, may mandate that new, non-academic subjects like driver education be taught in the public schools and judge's may interpret laws and contracts in such a way as to make it an ordeal to get rid of either incompetent teachers or disruptive and violent students.

Incompetent Teachers

While mediocrity and incompetence among teachers limit the quality of work possible in public schools, institutional rules and practices often protect teachers whose performances fall far short of those limits. An academic scholar studying the problem of incompetent teachers during the 1980s discovered that several of the administrators he interviewed set aside $50,000 to cover procedural costs for every teacher they found to be a likely candidate for dismissal. Nor was this sum always adequate. One successful dismissal in California cost more than $166,000 in internal and external procedural costs, including more than $71,000 in legal fees to fight the teacher's court challenge. Had the school district lost in court, they would have had to pay the teacher's legal fees as well. Moreover, only truly egregious cases are likely to lead to attempts at dismissal. More common responses include (1) ignoring the problem, (2) transferring the teacher, if parental pressures become irresistible, and (3) buying out an older teacher near retirement age.

At the heart of this pattern of evasion of responsibility for firing an incompetent teacher is the iron-clad tenure system and its accompanying elaborate (and costly) "due process" procedures for dismissal. Although tenured teachers are 80 percent of all California teachers, they were less than 6 percent of those involved in dismissals. Meanwhile, temporary teachers, who were only 7 percent of all California teachers, were involved in nearly 70 percent of all dismissals. These statistics are especially striking because the research scholar discovered what data on test scores already suggest—that "incompetent teachers are much more likely to appear among the most senior segment of the teaching force than among the least senior." In other words, where the problem is the worst, less can be done about it. The most senior teachers simply have too much job protection for an administrator to attempt dismissal, except in the most desperate cases. The teacher must not only be incompetent (or worse), but must also be recognized as such by many complaining parents, and these parents in turn must be people who know how to push a complaint through the system and exert influence.

Low-income and minority parents are less likely to complain and less likely to know how to make their complaints effective. Administrators are well aware of this and respond (or do not respond) accordingly. In any kind of neighborhood, however, the mere fact that the teacher is incompetent and known by the authorities to be incompetent is unlikely, by itself, to lead to any action without parental complaints. As one school district administrator put it: Principals are apprehensive about moving against a teacher. They need a reason to act other than the teacher is incompetent because it can be very difficult to prove.

Another administrator: Without parent complaints, we leave the teacher alone.

Still another administrator: You need a lot of external complaints to move on a teacher. The administrator is not willing to make tough decisions until he has to; that time comes when there are complaints.

Even when a chorus of parental complaints forces an administrator into action, that action is unlikely to be dismissal. Transferring the teacher to a different school is far more common. This buys time, if nothing else. If and when the parents at the new school begin to complain about the same teacher, then another transfer may be arranged, and yet another. These multiple transfers are so common that they even have nick-names, such as "the turkey trot" or "the dance of the lemons." From the administrator's point of view, the problem is not that the teacher is incompetent but that the parents are complaining. If the teacher can be put in a low-income neighborhood school, where many students are transient or the parents unable to make effective complaints, then the problem has been solved, as far as the system is concerned, without the expensive and time-consuming process of attempting dismissal.

Non-Academic Orientations

The academic deficiencies of American teachers and administrators, and the institutional insulation of incompetence, are only part of the story. Such factors might go far toward explaining the academic shortcomings of American schools, but there is an equally pervasive phenomenon in American education — an ever-growing intrusion of non-academic materials, courses, and programs into schools across the country. These non-academic intrusions include everything from political ideologies to psychological-conditioning programs, and their sponsors range from ordinary commercial interests (such as automobile manufacturers pushing driver education) to zealots for a vast array of "causes."

That outside interests should see 40 million school children as a captive audience to be exploited is not so difficult to comprehend as the fact that educators themselves are not merely acquiescent, but are often enthusiastic apostles of these innumerable non-academic courses and programs. Throughout most of the twentieth century, public school educators have pressed—usually successfully—for the inclusion of ever more non-academic materials in the curriculum, while the counter-pressure for more academic rigor, "back to basics," and the like, has come primarily from laymen . As laymen have urged more emphasis on teaching mathematics, science, languages, and other traditional academic subjects, educators have promoted such personal concerns as nutrition, hygiene, and "life adjustment" in an earlier period, or sex education and death education more recently, along with such social crusades as environmentalism and the anti-nuclear movement, or such exotic topics as the occult. While the particular subjects that are fashionable change over time, what has been enduring is the non-academic thrust of the professional educators. As far back as 1928, John Dewey lamented the anti-intellectual tendencies of so-called "progressive education," though many educators had used his theories as a justification for abandoning or de-emphasizing traditional disciplines.

Strange as it may seem that people hired to teach academic subjects should be straining to do something else instead—for decades and even generations—this is far less strange in light of the academic backgrounds of the people who constitute the teaching and administrative staffs of the American educational system. It is not simply that they are academically deficient. They are not academically oriented. Nor is it reasonable to expect them to have a dedication to academic work, which brought them so little success when they were students in high school or college.

In addition to particular outside interest groups pushing to get their own interests and views represented in the school curriculum, there have been general theorists providing rationales for abandoning traditional academic education in favor of a wide variety of psycho-therapeutic activities known collectively as "affective education," designed to re-mold the emotions and values of students. Whether called by general names like "values clarification" or by more specific titles like "death education," "sex education," or "drug prevention," these psycho-therapeutic activities have flourished in the public schools—without any evidence of their effectiveness for their avowed purposes, and even despite accumulating evidence of their counterproductive effects (as will be seen in subsequent chapters). The theorists or gurus behind these ideas and movements have been very influential with educators highly susceptible to non-academic fashions and dogmas. The net result has been a deflection of public schools' efforts, interests, time, and resources from academic objectives toward what can only be called classroom brainwashing.

______________________________________________________________________________

It is my opinion that the source of a great deal of the foolishness in my society is the fields of psychology and psychiatry. And ideas from those fields have had an enormous impact on American education through their acceptance by the educational establishment and implementation in teacher’s training courses. From what Thomas Sowell has said above, it seems that he has the same opinion of the ideas of modern psychology and their implementation in schools as I.

Thomas Sowell has characterized teachers as having low IQ. I don’t believe in IQ and wouldn’t go along with him on that. I think the teachers I had were of normal intelligence. The problem is all the foolish ideas they have been taught in teacher’s college.

It seems to me that teaching would be a very difficult job if the ground rules are not right. If teachers are not allowed to discipline or eject unruly students it is not a job I would be willing to take.

If our schools are expected to have the double purpose of daycare, if providing child care service for parents who are working during the day is a main priority of most of our population, then it may not be possible for schools to have the kind of atmosphere required for teaching.

Teaching children who don’t know English could also be difficult.

I know that we live in a messed up world where nothing is ever what it should be. Consequently, I would be slow in criticizing anyone without being there and seeing for myself.

Much of the problem in our schools probably comes from unruly children of single welfare mothers — children who are just not much interested in learning. Our urban school problems may be mostly a consequence of an overly kind welfare system that encourages women to have children outside wedlock.

How much is enough education? Is high school important? Do most people need more than a good solid grade school education? I question the value of a high school education for most people. I think schooling after grade school should be directed at whatever kind of career the person wants to follow. If a student wants a career in mathematics, physics, chemistry, or engineering he needs to follow one kind of curriculum. If he wants to be a doctor he needs a different type curriculum. If he wishes to be a lawyer he needs yet another type.

I think the teacher that I owe the most to was the teacher that I had in the third to the sixth grade in the little one room country school that I attended. See Basic Principles of Teaching. She may have done some explaining but there were no lectures. She simply gave us homework each day and took the homework the next day and corrected it. Correcting all of that homework of all of the students must have been a lot of work for her but I think the teaching method was effective. It was probably similar to homeschooling.

I went to school in the 1950's. I think most of my teachers were quite good. I would not speak disparagingly of most of them. I think most were trying to do a good job and most did. I can’t speak about teachers after the 1950's since I have had no experience with them.

I was required to take three years of literature in high school. There are all kinds of literature and literature that I would have very strong moral objections to. In my opinion the most important book that one can read is the Bible. If I were a teacher the main book I would want a student to read would be the Bible. What one considers to be good literature depends very much on his moral outlooks. I suspect that a great many students today are being given reading assignments that I would strongly disapprove of. I would object to any literature that was not consistent with the moral outlooks and values of the Bible. I would be very skeptical of literature requirements set by a secular authority.

The simple idea of teaching people things needs examination. The mechanism by which people learn needs examination. Just the mechanism by which a child learns to speak is not well understood. Some children learn quickly and others very slowly. Learning to read is quite difficult for some children.

What a person can do in the way of teaching others is limited. Teaching is different from other skills. It is more art than science. Much depends on motivating the student. No one really knows how best to do it and everyone has his own ideas. Much of what is required depends on the pupil — on his seriousness and effort.

I would definitely support the idea of charter schools and giving students alternatives to the public school system. I think there needs to be competition in regard to schooling. If some people are able to inspire students better than others, they should be given a chance.

11 Mar 2024