The Teacher Wars Read Free

about 2 percent of their workforce from firings, resignations, and layoffs combined. In short, teachers are more, not less, likely than many other workers to get fired.
    It may well be that we want teachers to be fired more often than other professionals because their work is so much more important. Still, the public conversation about teaching rarely offers a realistic sense of scale—of how many bad teachers there truly are, and what it would take to either improve their skills or replace them with people who are apt to perform at a higher level.
    It is often said that teachers ought to be as elite and high performing as attorneys or doctors. But teaching employs roughly five times as many people as either medicine or law. There are 3.3 million American public school teachers, compared to 691,000 doctors and 728,000 attorneys.Four percent of all civilian workers are teachers.
    In some recent years just as many new teachers were hired—over 200,000—as the total number of American college graduates minted by selective institutions, those that accept fewer than half of their applicants.The National Council on Teacher Quality estimates that high-poverty schools alone hire some 70,000 new teachers annually. Reformers sometimes claim that this huge demand for teachers is driven by overaggressive class-size limits, and they argue for decreasing the number of teachers while raising class sizes and recruiting a smaller, more elite group to the profession. In California and Florida, poorly designed class-size laws did lead to the overhiring of underqualified teachers.But the leading teacher demographer, Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania, has shown that the decrease in average elementary school class sizes since 1987, from 26 to 21 children, does not fully explain the “ballooning” of the teaching force. There are two other factors that together account for a larger part of the change: first, the explosionof high-needs special-education diagnoses for students, such as those with autism-spectrum disorders, and second, the increase in the number of high school students who enroll in math and science courses. Those trends are not likely ones we can or should reverse. While teacher prep programs in regions with an oversupply of teachers should raise their admission standards or shut down, calls for 100 percent of American teachers to hail from selective colleges are, frankly, absurd, especially if we also lay off the bottom, say, 2 to 15 percent of teachers each year—66,000 to 495,000 people—as many reformers would like. Currently, just 10 percent of teachers are graduates of selective colleges. Teach for America recruited 6,000 teachers in 2013. Another elite alternative certification program, The New Teacher Project, recruited about 1,800 teaching fellows. Urban teacher residencies, which are also highly competitive, produced some 500 teachers. These are tiny numbers relative to demand.
    Moreover, with the possible exception of high school—level math teachers, there is little evidence that better students make better teachers. Some nations, such as Finland, have been able to build a teaching force made up solely of star students. But other places, such as Shanghai, have made big strides in student achievement without drastically adjusting the demographics of who becomes a teacher. They do it by reshaping teachers’ working days so they spend less time alone in front of kids and more time planning lessons and observing other teachers at work, sharing best practices in pedagogy and classroom management.According to Andreas Schleicher, a statistician who researches schools around the world, Shanghai “is good at attracting average people and getting enormous productivity out of them.” The future of American education likely looks similar. As John Dewey noted in 1895, “Education is, and forever will be, in the hands of ordinary men and women.”
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