Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 13, 1990 TAG: 9006130047
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
During the last 20 years, the average age of the nation's 2.3 million public-school teachers rose from 36 to 41, according to statistics from the National Education Association.
Educators have usually invoked such statistics as evidence that mass teacher retirements lie ahead - with no certainty that the profession is attractive enough to draw young recruits.
Half to 54 percent of the nation's teachers will be eligible for retirement by the year 2000, said Jewell Gould, research director of the American Federation of Teachers.
This "graying" of the profession contains other worrisome messages, several reformers believe. Age statistics suggest that a decade of school reform has been at least partly misdirected.
"School reformers haven't looked a lot at the fact that in a decade, many of the teachers who will be in the schools are not there now," said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Columbia Teachers College and an authority on the teaching profession.
Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, said the numbers mean the nation had better pay more heed to improving the training of the next generation of teachers. He said this group will carry on the burden of reform for years to come.
He said it was a mistake to focus almost exclusively on present teachers.
"Both older and younger teachers have to be considered, but if I were to draw a conclusion, I'd say we have been far too neglectful of educating the new generation of teachers who will be determining where schools will be going in the first quarter of the 21st century," said Boyer in a recent interview.
The rise in the average age of teachers during the last two decades mirrors declining student enrollments and tight state school budgets.
The age statistics lend urgency to the need to update the skills of veteran teachers and create more collegial environments in public schools, said Darling-Hammond.
"By and large, teacher effectiveness increases during the first five to seven years of a career, then levels off and may even decline. Whether that happens depends on the school environment. Collegial environments that have lots of opportunities to develop and learn help foster professional growth. But that's not typical," she said.
Educators believe that school improvement is most likely to take root in schools with a balanced mix of young and old teachers.
by CNB