Teachers are integral to the future of the country. But do we really value the the teaching profession?

During lunch with a friend the other day, the conversation drifted to a documentary my friend saw on teachers in China. He said when the teacher was introduced to a grouping of business professionals and government officials, he was greeted with much admiration and respect. Wow, how different things are there. Here, whenever I run into a teacher,that individual is usually someone who was glad to get the hell out of the public school system.

Lately, stories in the news media, including newspapers, mags, and NPR, all seem to focus on this one thing, this unusually strange notion regarding the retention of school teachers and the improvement of the U.S. educational system. And that one thing seems to be: pay teachers more and (ok, maybe its two things) get rid of teachers who don't perform. "Perform", of course, seems to be defined as getting the academic achievement of pupils in a classroom, as measured by testing scores, to rise.

To those who believe such garbage, I recall the wise and venerable words of Bugs Bunny. "What a maroon". No, throwing money at the system will not fix the educational system. It will not result in more engineers and technicians and research scientists produced. It will also not create an environment in which school systems are able to attract the best, or even better, candidates for teaching.

What would do that? Creating an environment in which teachers are not powerless to control their classrooms, where students have an implicit understanding that the teacher is in charge and that both school administrators and parents will "have the teacher's back". It's really that simple.

During lunch, my friend recalled the experience of a young woman who is now a human resources professional within his company. She got her degree in education and went into teaching after exiting college. She lasted less than two years. Her reflections on the experience were that teaching, in the current system, amounted to being forced to "deal with "a small number of problematic classroom children" to the extent that it made it practically impossible to even attempt to teach the rest. As she reported, the routine and predictable handful of kids were often those who had special behavioral difficulties. Very often, they were significantly behind grade-level in comparison to their peers. Often, as well, the degree to which they monopolized the teacher's time, at the great expense of the remaining pupils, had a lot to do with whether or not they had had their medication that day.

Throwing money at the educational system is not the real answer to getting that system in the right shape to produce the types of citizens and workers that the nation will need in coming years to satisfactorily compete in the new world order. Having said that, it wouldn't hurt to have higher salaries for an occupation that should have our highest respect. But, consider this: Police patrolmen typically earn low salaries for performing work that can potentially end their lives each and every day on the job. Despite the many gripes against police, they tend to have our respect. Firefighters, who usually earn even less than Police Officers, garner even greater respect (not writing costly tickets may have something to do with this).

The point being: getting good teachers is not about how much you pay them. It's about how much you respect the important work that they do. And there's no more effective way to do that other than to allow them the dignity of being able to control what happens within their classrooms.






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