Some Feel-Good Education Stories Shouldn’t Make Us Feel so Good

Last month, comedian Steven Colbert made news when he announced plans to fund the projects then posted by teachers in South Carolina, his home state, on the crowd-funding site DonorsChoose, an astounding pledge worth $800,000. Another feel-good story came recently about teachers receiving monies, albeit on a less grand scale, via PhilaSoup, a teacher-led microgrant program in Philadelphia.

When education coverage seems to be only a startling array of bad news, these stories are a welcome relief, focusing as they do on a satisfying convergence of donor generosity and teacher ingenuity.

Behind these feel-good anecdotes, however, is the larger, painful story of American educational austerity.  Despite the increasingly healthy economy and the stock market’s robust performance, more than 60% of states have failed to restore education budgets to pre-Recession levels. In fact, many states—the largest source of education funding—are providing far fewer dollars per pupil than they were seven years ago. The budget “crisis” in Philadelphia, where PhilaSoup fills a need, may be more dramatic and complicated than most, but for the city’s teachers, the end result resembles that experienced by teachers in districts across the nation.

Because their schools are underfunded, America’s teachers have had to add fundraising to their long list of professional responsibilities. They can’t do much about some of the greatest damage done by budget cuts, such as smaller support staffs and larger class sizes. But in recent years teachers have stepped in, often despite salary freezes, to pull from their own pockets to pay for classroom materials and supplies, including pencils, paper, books, and other basics, even food for hungry students. In droves, they’ve used the internet to raise money for everything from shelving to iPads; America’s teachers have raised $329 million since 2000 via DonorsChoose alone.

In its coverage of PhilaSoup, Education Week explained that three dozen teachers spent two hours on a Sunday evening competing for four hundred dollars. Assuming each spent another hour preparing his or her pitch and traveling to and from the event, that’s 108 man-hours devoted to the task, valuing those teachers’ time at $3.70 an hour. Let’s consider how that time could have been better spent planning instruction, developing or grading assessments, and communicating with parents or—given that it was the weekend—devoting attention to their families and resting up to be their best selves in the classroom during the coming week.   

Raising money for schools shouldn’t be the job of teachers. It should be the job of our political leaders and government officials who invariably campaign on platforms of improving education. These leaders’ failure to lead—their failure to raise and allocate sufficient revenue to invest adequately in schools, their failure to finance some of their own education reform mandates, their failure to plan for and protect against economic swings, and their failure to establish systems to fund schools equitably—have put teachers in the position of scrambling for resources. Teachers are often remarkably successful at this extracurricular activity, but they shouldn’t have to be.

Colbert’s singular act is heroic; the ongoing work of DonorsChoose and PhilaSoup no less so. As a result of these and similar efforts, students in South Carolina, Philadelphia, and across the country will have access to books, technology, equipment, and supplies that their teachers know they very much need. And PhilaSoup doesn’t just facilitate funding; as Education Week pointed out, it has created a meaningful community of learners among teachers across a vast and fragmented district. If you can afford to support these groups, there’s no reason not to give them a call. But there’s good reason not to stop there. Call the governor’s office next—or maybe, call there first.

Anne Lutz Fernandez became a high school English teacher after a career on Wall Street.  She is the co-author of Schooled: Ordinary, Extraordinary Teaching in an Age of Change.

Why Don't We Listen to Teachers?

The national debate about education carries on, with politicians, pundits, and business leaders all having their say about what's wrong with America's schools and about how to fix them.  Largely missing are the voices of those who daily teach our children. 

When the cable news networks invite guests to discuss education, for example, only 9% are educators.  When perhaps the most important reform effort of recent years, the Common Core State Standards, was crafted, only a handful of those in the decision-making “work groups” were working K-12 teachers.  Perhaps if more teachers had been meaningfully involved from its inception, the Common Core rollout would have been less fraught with confusion and controversy than it has been.

So why don't we listen to our teachers?

A better question might be why would we—when teachers are so sharply seen as part of the problem, so dimly viewed as part of the solution. In recent decades, teachers have been marked as the problem of education.  Bad teachers are the problem, rather than, or in isolation from, distorted national and state spending priorities, the challenges students face at home or in their neighborhoods, or the insufficient rewards accorded educators.  Enormous resources have been devoted to the data-driven project of identifying and ensuring “teacher quality” and “teacher effectiveness.”    

The stereotype of the bad teacher includes not just incompetence but self-interestedness.  Skepticism about their motives has made it difficult for teachers to speak out against education policies that they see as harmful to students, policies such as excessive standardized testing and tying test scores to teacher evaluations and school funding.  Their views are too easily dismissed as motivated by a desire to avoid change, hard work, or accountability.

Even when they wish to speak out on less contentious education policies and programs, the underwhelming status of their profession hampers teachers’ credibility.  On the national level, teachers are held in lower esteem than they are in many other countries.  And they enjoy significantly lower occupational prestige than do American workers in most other traditional professions, including professors, doctors, and lawyers.

Seeking to explain why teachers don’t have the status they should, some analysts point to unionization—which makes teachers seem more like laborers than like professionals, they argue.  Plenty of pilots, however, belong to unions; this doesn’t stop CNN from calling upon them as experts in aviation when a plane goes down or goes missing.  And of course, fewer than half of American teachers belong to unions; whether unionized or not, whether working in public schools or independent ones, teachers are too infrequently called upon to share their expertise.

Alarmingly, a series of education reforms threaten to de-professionalize teachers, making them even less likely to be seen as experts in their field.  Increasingly standardized and scripted curricula and fast-track teacher test programs are among the trends that are damaging to teaching’s status as a profession.  Austerity, too, is have a devaluing effect.  Cuts to support staff means teachers have taken on work formerly done by paraprofessionals, secretaries, clerks, even crossing guards, important work but work that does not require their advanced degrees and professional knowledge.

However it can be explained, our failure to tap into the expertise of teachers is a tremendous missed opportunity.

Over the past two years, anthropologist Catherine Lutz and I traveled the country to listen to teachers for our forthcoming book, Schooled: Ordinary, Extraordinary Teaching in an Age of Change.  We met a wide range of them—in traditional public schools to charters to the homeschool; nearly new to the career and near retirement; in city, town, suburb, and country—on the frontlines of K-12 education.  

 It wasn’t hard to find teachers who are intelligent, skilled, motivated, and thoughtful about their work.  Eager to share their thoughts on the critical issues in teaching and learning today—rising income inequality and child poverty, rapidly changing technology, and increasing curricular standardization just a few of them—they provided valuable insights for anyone interested in education today.  Their goal and ours, in the book and on this blog, is to foster a discussion that values teachers’ perspectives. 

It’s time to listen to teachers.

Anne Lutz Fernandez became a high school English teacher after a career on Wall Street.  She is the co-author of Schooled: Ordinary, Extraordinary Teaching in an Age of Change.