Improving the status of the teaching profession seems to be an idea who time has come. For instance, I finally found an afternoon to read through the back issues of Education Week that had piled up and clipped several articles about issues related to the deplorable lack of respect for teachers in America.

James Starkey, a retired teacher, tells the story of being at a dinner party with other professionals having a wonderful time until someone asked him what he did for a job. Starkey writes, “Their reaction to the news that we were teachers couldn’t have been more immediate. No one gasped audibly. No one ran shrieking from the room. No one laughed. But what they did do was change the way they looked at us…They started falling all over themselves to tell us what a noble calling we were pursuing…I could see one bejeweled lady barely restrain an impulse to pat me on the head. To this day, I consider that dinner party and the condescension with which we were treated to be the worst social experience of my life.” (Education Week, 5/14/08).

The April 30th edition of Education Week reports on a program in Massachusetts designed to involve teachers in policy discussions and education leadership, mainly as a way of retaining new teachers who, as we know, often leave the profession after just two or three years. The program seems to be a step in the direction that Anthony Cody recommends in his recent two-part piece at Edutopia. He writes,

If you really want to improve teaching, start empowering teachers to build strong and vibrant learning communities at their schools. Give them the time and resources to collaborate with one another. Give them several weeks together in the summer to prepare for the school year. Support them administratively so they feel that the school is handling discipline issues well, which allows them to focus on teaching. Engage the community so that parents are behind the school and support their children in the hard work we ask them to do.

I’ll sum it up: if we want teachers to be more professional, we have to treat them more professionally. I’ll go a step further than Cody in terms of giving teachers time. We not only need to give teachers time in the summer to prepare, we need to give them time throughout the school year to continue their own development both individually and as part of professional learning communities. That’s one of the practices we see in other countries that seems to be effective. Teachers teach for about half the day and then have the rest of the time for preparation and learning. The teachers I’ve talked to lately are lucky if they get 45 minutes of prep time each day and that is often taken up with meetings and phone calls. Is it any wonder that they might be unwilling to try out new practices, including or especially the use of technology?

John Hendron makes a contribution to this conversation in his This I Believe post. John covers several topics but his comments about teachers are particularly relevant to my own thinking right now:

Second, we really need to raise the status of teaching in America. We need to do it socially, granting educators more respect, through compensation, and through professional practices that raise expectations for utilizing the latest research, tools, and information we have to teach.

John mentions the high status of teachers in Finland, something I’ve written about in an earlier post:

Being a teacher in Finland is the equivalent of being a doctor or lawyer here in the states. Only one in eight applicants gets into schools of education and teachers are widely respected. They are given high levels of autonomy in their classrooms where the pedagogy is very much student-centered.

So, I very much agree with John’s recommendation that we must raise the status of teaching. He makes three recommendations: better pay, higher expectations, and listening to their voices. Certainly compensation is an important part of treating teachers professionally. Another article in the April 30th Education Week describes the “teaching penalty.” Mishel, Allegretto and Corcoran studied professional compensation for occupations with similar and educational requirements to teaching including accountants, reporters, and clergy. They found, not surprisingly, that teachers earn on average about 14 percent less. While the percentage varies from state to state, nowhere do teachers earn more. They describe several new reforms for changing teacher compensation including bonuses for teaching in disadvantaged schools or for high achieving teachers. I completely support the former, but I worry about the latter because it might lead to defining high achieving teachers as those whose students do well on standardized tests, a poor indicator in my opinion. There are many potential solutions to this problem, a variety of which are outlined in this article from Time Magazine. But the bottom line is that they are going to cost money, and they are absolutely necessary. The writers conclude,

If we deliberately set out to design a plan to discourage the best-qualified people from becoming teachers and to drive away the most experienced teachers, the pay penalty teachers now face would be the perfect way to do it…We need to raise teacher pay across the board, and we need to do it now.

But, this is about more than compensation. The Time Magazine article features a young teacher who left a higher paying job in the public schools for a position at a private school where he received more support from mentors, had more autonomy in his classroom and experienced fewer discipline problems. In short, he was treated as a professional. He was supported and trusted. He was part of the professional conversation. Every article and blog article I’ve read mention that in some way: teachers have to be included. And, after years of being talked about, they are going to need support and encouragement to lift their voices.

It is happening, although not in the most positive way and not with the support I’m envisioning. Cody gives the example of Carl Chew, a Washington state teacher who refused to administer the state test. In his answer to my question about increasing the status of teachers, Andrew Rotherham gave the example of the kindergarten teacher who walked out of professional development, declaring that while she taught kindergarten, she didn’t need to be treated like a kindergartner. Here are two teachers who are speaking up, but they have had to do it in disruptive and personally negative ways. How can we bring teachers into the conversation in more positive ways?

What am I doing? Something simple, I think. I’m focusing my research on teachers and their planning practices. And rather than just sending out a survey, I’m interviewing them extensively and spending time with them in their classrooms. It’s been tough: teachers aren’t used to being part of research and I’ve had to put some of this off until the fall when the threats of the tests aren’t so palpable. But it’s a small step towards making teachers’ voices heard.