Education: Who’s Teaching Our Children?

WANTED

Men and women with the patience of Job, wisdom of Solomon and ability to prepare the next generation for productive citizenship under highly adverse and sometimes dangerous conditions. Applicant must be willing to fill gaps left by unfit, absent or working parents, satisfy demands of state politicians and local bureaucrats, impart healthy cultural and moral values and — oh, yes — teach the three Rs. Hours: 50-60 a week. Pay: fair (getting better). Rewards: mostly intangible.

With a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a double master’s in literature and education from the University of Virginia, New Yorker Carol Jackson Cashion seemed a natural for a high-powered career in publishing or the arts. So last summer when cocktail chatter turned to the inevitable “What do you do?” question, Cashion was prepared for the shocked reaction. She told her companions that in the fall she would begin teaching at Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School. Reports Cashion: “They looked at me as if I had just flown in from Mars.”

Americans want their children to have good teachers, it seems, but they are not sure they want them to become teachers. And perhaps with good reason. Since 1983, when the federally sponsored report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in U.S. schools, the country’s 2.3 million public school teachers have come in for stinging criticism — some of it no doubt justified.

After all, how else to explain the fact that an estimated 13% of 17-year- olds and perhaps 40% of minority youth are considered functionally illiterate? . That less than one-third know when the Civil War occurred? That in a recent ABC-TV-sponsored survey of 200 teenagers, less than half could identify Daniel Ortega (President of Nicaragua) and two-thirds were ignorant of Chernobyl (one guessed it was Cher’s real name). Five years after A Nation at Risk prompted a flurry of reform, average scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) have risen 11 points. Still, as recently as last spring, former Secretary of Education William Bennett gave U.S. schools an overall grade of no better than a C or a C-plus. To the teaching establishment, and teachers’ unions in particular, he issued a sharp rebuke: “You’re standing in the doorways. You’re blocking up the halls of education reform.”

Teachers, of course, are unhappy about the assessment, though it was nothing new. “Over the years, you’re constantly bashed,” says Kathy Daniels, a Chicago English teacher. “You get it from the principal; you get it from the press. Bennett just topped it all.” What particularly rankles is that while accusations are flying, policies debated and remedies proposed, no one has consulted the real experts: those who do daily battle to improve the minds of students. Says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: “Whatever is wrong with America’s public schools cannot be fixed without the help of those inside the classroom.”

In their own defense, teachers point out that their job has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. Increasingly, they are asked not only to provide a good education but also to address ever more complex and diverse social problems. Drugs, sex, violence, broken homes, poverty: today’s classroom is a mirror of the crises that afflict the U.S. as a whole. Even the children of two-earner, middle-class couples can suffer from lack of attention, if only because neither Mom nor Dad has the time or energy to help with homework or attend PTA meetings.

Add to that the burgeoning population of students from non-English-speaking households, and the teacher’s primary task — to convey knowledge — can become nearly impossible. “Society has taken the position that teachers ought to succeed with everybody: the economically disadvantaged, racial minorities, the handicapped,” says P. Michael Timpane, president of Teachers College at Columbia University. “No one took those issues seriously a generation ago.”

While responsibilities and demands have multiplied, teachers have seen little increase in the financial or moral support they need to do the job. Overcrowded classes, inadequate or outdated equipment and long hours are common. At the same time, in a panicked effort to improve their schools, many states and localities have added new and often burdensome course requirements, typically without input from teachers. “Traditionally, teachers have been treated like very tall children,” observes Mary Futrell, president of the National Education Association (NEA), which represents 1.6 million schoolteachers. “We are not perfect,” concedes Baltimore elementary school teacher Kathlynn Jacobs. “But people need to walk in our shoes before they criticize.”

“It sounds a little bit like English but there are too many ‘hochs,’ ” notes a junior at Chicago’s Farragut Career Academy High School.

The subject is the epic poem Beowulf, which English teacher Daniels has tried to bring to life with a recording in Old English. But the school’s tape recorder has an ill-fitting plug, and Daniels cannot get it to start. After several attempts, she asks a visitor to hold the plug in the socket. “This is one of the worst things about teaching in the city,” she says. “Nothing ever works.”

When the guttural words begin to emerge, Daniels, 50, passes around a paper with lines from the poem on one side and the modern English translation on the other. Since there is just one sheet, only a few students see it before the recording ends. An overhead projector would have helped, but the one assigned to the English department is as unreliable as the tape recorder.

Each day teachers cope with working environments that would never be tolerated by lawyers, doctors and other professionals. Copiers, ditto machines, lab glassware and even books, the basic tools of the trade, are battered or nonexistent in many school systems. Teachers are frequently left to fill the gap from their own pockets. Some pay for photocopies; others pick up the tab for educational extras. Every month, for example, Patrice Bertha, a sixth-grade teacher on Chicago’s seedy West Side, piles her charges onto a city bus, often paying the fare and admission fee so they can visit a museum or see a play. Many of the children, who are black, would never visit downtown Chicago otherwise. “Their whole world is where they live,” she says.

The lack of essentials is symptomatic of a larger problem: inequities in school financing. In most states, schools are supported by a combination of property taxes and state and federal grants. The formula ensures gleaming beakers and well-stocked libraries for schools in wealthier states and neighborhoods but leaves many rural and inner-city schools with peeling paint and leaky pipes. Connecticut, for example, with its tony suburbs, spent an average of $5,900 on each public school student in the state last year; Alabama spent just $2,600.

The physical signs of underfunding are not limited to the inner cities. The roof of one building on the grounds of Tunica Junior High School in Tunica, Miss., collapsed years ago, but the school district — abandoned by whites in the wake of integration — does not have money for repairs. Inside, the wooden desks and textbooks remain, split and rotting. Outside, there is no playground equipment. “The world sends messages to our kids about the importance it places on education,” says Robin Gostin, a tenth-grade math teacher in Los Angeles. “Go to shopping malls and see how nice they are. Then look at the desks in our classrooms, and you see nails coming through the bottom of the seats.”

Most weekdays, Juan Rodriguez, 46, roars up to Hartford’s Thomas J. Quirk Middle School in his red pickup truck at 7 a.m. and leaves by 3 p.m. In between, he teaches five science classes, grades papers, prepares lesson plans, has two rounds of hall duty, grabs a sandwich at his desk and calls parents to discuss discipline problems or schoolwork. The daytime schedule — which is often followed by two hours of work at home — sounds hectic, and it is. When the last-period bell rang on a recent afternoon, Rodriguez had not yet had an opportunity to go to the bathroom.

Coffee breaks. A lunch hour. A moment to chat with colleagues. Most workers take these things for granted. But teachers cannot operate that way. Their workweek easily stretches up to 60 hours, including back-to-back classes, lunchroom duty, daily lesson planning, coaching, club sponsorship and conferences.

The frantic pace can take a toll. For 17 years Sue Capie and her husband Ken, of Cupertino, Calif., had a two-teacher marriage. Then in 1981 she fled to a job as a recruiter for Hewlett-Packard. “I had been onstage a long time,” she says. “Now I can sit at my desk sometimes and say to myself, ‘O.K., you don’t have to think about anything for a few minutes.’ I have a lot more freedom.”

Perched on a stool at the front of the room, Rochester teacher Michael Pugliese, 30, looks down on a clamorous gaggle of third-graders sitting cross- legged on the floor. After quieting them, he begins reading Joey, a book about a Puerto Rican boy whose family moves to New York City. The book’s hero has just found needles on the street. Pugliese asks his listeners if they know what kinds of needles the story means. Many of the children do. One boy says he saw two drug addicts in front of his apartment building just the day before. “You all know about aids,” Pugliese says. They nod in agreement. “Well, that’s one way you can get aids. So if you see a needle on the street, don’t even pick it up.”

Pugliese is not shocked at the students’ familiarity with drugs. In fact, their experiences seem innocent compared with those of the emotionally troubled kids he used to teach in special-education classes. One boy was left alone for days at a time while his mother disappeared into crack houses. A ten-year-old girl had been sexually abused by both her natural and foster parents.

The prim, bespectacled schoolmarm, standing at the head of a well-scrubbed, disciplined class, is a stereotype from a bygone era. Today most high school students have had more experience with alcohol, drugs and sex than she ever could have imagined. Pregnant girls are seen in school corridors; others deposit their babies in school day-care centers. Violence is a regular visitor to the schoolyard. Last year in New York City there were more than 300 instances in which students punched, stabbed or otherwise assaulted public school teachers. Against such corrosive influences, it is increasingly teachers — not parents — who are called upon to function as society’s first line of defense. Says Carolee Bogue, dean of students at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles: “Most kids today look to the teachers for the support that they don’t get at home.”

In urban schools the outcroppings of neglect and despair abound. When Chicago’s Kathy Daniels asked her students to write an essay about something that made them angry, one boy described the time his brother was gunned down and died on the front steps of his house. Soon afterward, the boy himself was fatally shot. In poor rural areas, the deprivation can be even more elemental. “I’ve got kids that have never held a pencil before,” says a Mississippi kindergarten teacher. “And last year I had one that had never held silverware.” Trying to convey the majesty of Shakespeare or even basic | addition and subtraction to such children can be a near impossibility.

Nor is lack of parental involvement limited to inner-city tenements or rural tar-paper shacks.

Kathlynn Jacobs, a 24-year veteran of the Baltimore public schools, vividly remembers one gangly, precocious first-grader, who had been in day care since she was a baby. Both her parents worked, and her life had been rigidly scheduled to accommodate them. “She was the smartest one in the class,” says Jacobs, “and she was having a hard day.” Jacobs asked her what was wrong. “I’m tired of school,” replied the world-weary seven-year-old. “I’ve been to school all my life.”

Home and family life — even in middle-class suburbia — is not what it used to be. With divorce commonplace, youngsters frequently careen back and forth between parents like shuttlecocks. “We used to send one report card home with each student and deal with one set of parents,” recalls Kay Grady, a counselor at Hillview Elementary School in affluent Menlo Park, Calif. “Now we send two to two households and sometimes arrange for separate conferences.” That is, if the parents have time. Single parents and two- earner couples are often just too fatigued at the end of the day to show much interest in open-house night or Johnny’s science project. Students often reflect their parents’ indifference. Says Hillview science teacher Ken Capie: “It’s like they’re always asking themselves, ‘Why am I here?’ They don’t see the need to learn.”

“Expectorate — to spit.” Barry Smolin points to one of 20 vocabulary words he has written on the blackboard. The class titters.

“I had a student last year who used to call his spit ‘luggies,’ ” he tells his tenth-graders. “He could lean out my classroom window and gather enough spit to reach down to the ground and then suck it up again.”

“Gross, Mr. Smolin!”

He perseveres, pointing to another word. “Ubiquitous. Sometimes when you are walking around downtown L.A., the police are ubiquitous.” Polite laughter. “Resonant. Many opera singers have a resonant quality to their voice.” He breaks into a baritone, singing scales with a mock gravity.

Smolin, 27, graduated from Fairfax High himself in 1978. But his classroom reflects a taste for the cultural artifacts of earlier eras. Jimi Hendrix posters keep company with theater reviews from West Side Story. His unusual methods — using song lyrics to teach literary themes, for instance — are popular with students. But he fears he may soon wilt under the pressure to entertain. “My first year I used to come home hoarse,” he says. “I can’t keep up five shows a day and not get burned out.”

Burnout. It can happen as easily at the blackboard as in the boardroom. “There are days when I go home with a migraine,” says Chicago’s Bertha. “It’s a stressful job.” Especially for those who work with learning- disabled or troubled children. Last spring, after three years of teaching special ed, Michael Pugliese asked to be reassigned to a regular classroom. “When you give your all, and there’s no hope — that’s too much,” he says.

Many teachers do not bother to request transfers; they just quit. Fully half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years. The trend is more pronounced among minorities, who frequently work in schools with the most complex social and academic problems. Given attractive options in private industry, blacks — as well as women — no longer feel forced to endure jobs they consider unsatisfying. “The old days were different,” says Chester Finn, former Assistant Secretary of Education. “A lot of our finest teachers were women and minorities who had no other place to earn a living.”

Earnings, or the lack thereof, have much to do with the exodus. During the 1970s, while salaries in other fields soared, teachers’ pay fell 15% in real dollars. In some states starting salaries remain as low as $13,000. In Mississippi social-studies teacher Jewelie Brown makes only $22,200 after 31 years in the classroom. Californian Ken Capie does better: $41,000 after 30 years, but that is still $3,000 less than his 25-year-old son’s starting salary as an engineer.

Belatedly, many districts are rushing to fatten teachers’ paychecks. Since 1980 the average teacher’s salary has risen 61.7%, from $17,364 to $28,085. The improvement does not dazzle many teachers, who say the increase has yet to make up the losses of the past. But some districts are finding that better pay is a magnet for fresh teaching talent. Since last summer, when it approved a three-year contract providing for salaries of up to $64,000, Dade County, Fla., has received nine applications for every teaching vacancy. “We really have the pick of the crop,” exults assistant superintendent Gerald Dreyfuss.

In addition to raising pay, some districts are experimenting with career ladders that allow teachers the opportunity to move up in status without having to abandon the classroom for administrative posts. Others have created “mentor” programs, which help novice teachers by pairing them with talented and experienced ones. Some wealthier schools provide workout centers and time off for stressed-out teachers. New Trier Township High School in suburban Chicago has a wellness program that allows faculty members to exercise on school time, receive personal and career counseling and even reduce their teaching loads without penalty. But such tender loving care is rare. “I don’t think burnout is caused by the children,” says Tracy Bridgers, a math teacher at Alexander Graham Junior High in Charlotte, N.C. “Usually it is the administration. No one strokes you enough.”

At 9:30 a.m. Lillie Rayborn, 43, is already damp with sweat, trying to keep up with her rambunctious first-graders at Tunica’s Rosa Fort Elementary School. “All right,” she says firmly. “Yesterday we learned the letter l. Today we will learn the letter d.” She hands out construction paper “bones.” If the word on the “bone” begins with d, the child gets to “feed the dog” — a large construction-paper hound with a hole for a mouth. The kids love it.

Off to one side are about ten “Chapter 1” children — kids who need special attention. Because the district usually requires that everyone complete first grade before being evaluated as learning disabled, kids who have serious problems often limp through the first two years of school behind their more advanced peers.

Eric, for example, has learned to draw a capital E, but cannot write his own name. He is far from the worst case that Rayborn has seen. Once, a child with Down syndrome was enrolled in her class. He was still in diapers and required frequent changing. “I had to run out and buy Pampers,” she recalls. “He had never been disciplined. He acted like an animal in the zoo.”

If education officials had consulted Lillie Rayborn, a policy requiring learning-disabled children to share classrooms with other kids might never have been written. But decisions affecting schools are still mostly top-down. In Chicago administrators make it clear that students should be held back only once and then promoted to the next grade, regardless of performance. Other kids languish in unsupervised classrooms because the school board underestimates the number of teachers a school needs and will not provide substitutes in the interim. “You can lose total track of the students by the & time a board-authorized sub shows up,” says English teacher Daniels.

Asked to cope with the consequences of these bureaucratic snafus, teachers feel impotent and bitter. The flurry of educational reforms of the past five years has also been largely imposed from on high. Take, for example, the effort to upgrade the quality and qualifications of teachers. Concerned about an alleged epidemic of incompetency, legislatures in 46 states have enacted tougher training requirements for teachers, including minimum college grade- point averages. While many teachers applaud these changes and hope they will attract higher-caliber people, veteran educators generally give low marks to standardized competency tests such as the National Teachers Examination, now required in 30 states. No multiple-choice exam, they say, can predict success in the classroom.

Last month, in response to such complaints, the Educational Testing Service unveiled plans for a far more sophisticated exam. The new test, which will be in use by 1992, will include two exams — one given during sophomore year in college and a second after teacher training — plus an evaluation of performance in the classroom. Says National Education Association spokeswoman Jane Usdan: “This is a step in the right direction.”

Another way of upgrading the quality of teachers, say many veterans, is through a strict peer-review process, in which teachers themselves would help screen and rehabilitate incompetents. “A teacher who is incompetent should have a conference with the principal; then she should get help from a support teacher,” says Baltimore’s Jacobs. “But if she’s still incompetent, then I’m sorry — she has to go.” Some take unions to task for protecting poor performers. Says science teacher Rodriguez: “They should not be so closed- minded when it comes to retraining and testing.”

In some parts of the country, teachers are being given more say in setting school policies. In Dade County, which includes Miami, 45 of the system’s 260 schools are experimenting with “school-based management,” which allows teachers and administrators to tackle problems free of the usual bureaucratic constraints. Schools can request waivers from union contracts and from local and state regulations. The result: a palpable boost in morale. At one school, teacher absenteeism is down 50%, saving $7,000 a year in substitute-teacher costs.

It is midmorning when Juan Rodriguez begins to talk about the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy. The ancients had no idea what the earth looked like, he tells his 24 seventh-graders. The kids cannot believe anyone could be so dumb. “Oh, my God,” says one, rolling her eyes.

But one boy is intrigued. “Are we positive that 1,000 years from now, people won’t look back and say that we got it all wrong?” he asks. Rodriguez is delighted. “That’s a beautiful question,” he says. “I love it when my students ask that.” Then he leads the class into a discussion of how scientific theories can and must evolve.

The moment the light bulb goes on — that, say teachers, is what they live for. That is why they are teachers and not plumbers or investment bankers. The look in a young person’s eye: I got it! I understand! In the average school year there may be only a handful of such moments, but to a teacher they are unforgettable.

The ultimate satisfaction comes from the occasional student who, given the right nurturing, suddenly blossoms. Barry Smolin twinkles at the very thought of his “victory student.” The Fairfax junior had a mother who was a junkie, a sister who was a prostitute and a father who had long ago abandoned the family. “I gave her a writing assignment, and she was brilliant,” says Smolin. “She still had trouble, but she got into college and now she wants to be a writer.” What keeps many teachers going is the conviction that somewhere out there, there are more victory students waiting to be discovered.

And there are the small rewards . . .

Carol Bowen, 46, ducks into the teachers’ lounge at Harrison Elementary School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at 8:40 a.m. for a quick gulp of coffee. Then she heads back to Room 208 to wait for her third-grade students, who have formed two lines outside the red brick building. This particular morning the girls’ line enters first. As they file past, one child, Heidi, stops and shyly hands Bowen a slender envelope. Inside is a bookmark. Its inscription: “To my teacher: thank you for taking the time to share what you have learned.”

Despite their frustrations, many teachers are still content with their choice of career. “I love my job,” says Rochester’s Pugliese. “In the classroom I can have an impact.” A Carnegie Foundation survey of 22,000 teachers found that 77% are satisfied with their jobs. “You can make $2 million a year working at some corporation,” says Hillview teacher Sue Krumbein. “But who really cares? When you teach, a lot of people care.”

Of course, not everyone can have the impact of math teacher Jaime Escalante, the inspiring subject of the movie Stand and Deliver. But in small towns and sprawling cities there surely are people like him, each a miracle worker in his or her own way. Teachers say the best of them are born, not made. Perhaps they are right. Several years ago, Patrice Bertha took a sabbatical to see whether she really wanted to spend the rest of her life in the classroom. She wound up tutoring at home instead. “I really missed it,” she says. “That’s when I told myself, ‘You’re a teacher forever.’ “