THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 24, 1996 TAG: 9610240009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: By THOMAS P. WALLACE
LENGTH: 95 lines
The first sentence of a recent Virginian-Pilot editorial stated that ``Schools won't improve until teachers do.'' The editorial then addressed and blamed the quality of teacher training and recruitment, schools of education, lack of practice teaching, superficial curricula, low entering student and teacher standards and teacher retention standards, all of which are legitimate and serious issues.
The editorial and similar viewpoints from around the country are not asking the key questions: Who are the people who desire teaching as a profession today and what is the academic profile of this group? Is this academic profile adequate and acceptable for the important profession of molding our young minds and, if not, what do we do to rectify the situation?
The answers today are dramatically different from those of 20 and 30 years ago. Prior to the 1960s and into the 1970s, this country had a captive group of bright and accomplished high-school graduates who eagerly prepared for elementary- and secondary-school teaching, as that was about their only route financially to a college education. American public higher education in most states was in its embryonic stage, consisting mainly of teacher colleges. Thus, men and women from lower- and middle-income families, who looked to higher education for their post-secondary opportunity, found teacher education as their only alternative but enthusiastically adopted teaching as their profession.
The woman's post-high-school choices were limited by societal expectation and college costs to nursing, teaching, dental hygiene and other such female opportunities of the times. The man's choices were limited by virtue of state schools offering the teaching profession but generally not having degree programs in engineering, accounting, pre-med and other professions of higher prestige and compensation. It was common for many top high-school graduates to enter the teaching profession via a teacher's college. Thus, a significant number of the best and the brightest men and women from this era went on to college to become teachers.
During the 1970s and through most of the 1980s, business, industry, government and not-for-profits provided employment for college graduates in new areas of computer science, information systems, management, finance, the technologies, engineering sub-disciplines, material science, to name just a few. The public universities responded to the new economy with new degree programs and expanded enrollments. In 1960, the nation's higher-education enrollment was 1.7 million full-time equivalent (FTE) students and grew to 7.0 million FTE students by 1990. During this period, business schools, engineering schools, schools of technology and computer science offered degree programs leading to new professional careers offering high salaries but also established high admission standards because of the high student demand for these programs. It was not uncommon for freshman and sophomore undergraduates to be required to have accumulated better than a B average during their first or first two years in order to be admitted in these limited enrollment programs. The options left for the student with less than a B average included schools of education.
The evolution of public higher education reached the point by the 1990s in every state where almost every four-year college was now called a university and offered about any program that a high- school graduate might wish. This proliferation of degree programs now allows anyone to pursue any degree in existence at a public institution. While this was a great societal accomplishment which generally benefited lower- and middle- income families that had formally been excluded from such degree paths, it was particularly helpful in removing the shackles from female high-school graduates by offering enormous new opportunities in all academic areas and the professions. In the minds of young people today, particularly the best female minds who in the 1960s would have become teachers, the teaching profession is simply not competitive with their other opportunities.
Students, reflecting the values of their parents and society, do not view becoming a teacher as a good career choice. Discussions with parents relative to aspirations for their children, especially for males and for high-achieving females, are quite revealing. Teaching is quite often not viewed as an appropriate or desirable choice for the most able child in the family, especially the male, but is often considered appropriate for lower academic achievers.
What person in business doesn't understand that the quality and success of their business begins with being able to acquire and retain the most talented employees with the best possible compensation package and work environment? For some reason in this country, this logic has not been transferred to the teaching profession.
Until American society is ready to create an environment where more of our best and brightest high-school graduates view teaching as a real profession offering them incentives and rewards closer to the other professions, schools won't measurably improve. The Virginian-Pilot editorial's ``list of blame'' and its issues of the creation of student and teacher performance standards, teacher certification, school accreditation, teaching licenses and curricular matters will continue to be interesting secondary topics for university, state and national study groups to periodically debate among themselves - once again. From a national perspective, there is little basis for having the slightest optimism that the current system is capable of producing even a marginal improvement on what is delivered to our classrooms. MEMO: Thomas Wallace, a Virginia Beach resident, is a former president
of Illinois State University and a former chancellor of Indiana
University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. by CNB