Inside American Education (5 page)

Given low-quality students and low-quality professors, it can hardly be surprising to discover, as Mayer did, that “most education courses are
not
intellectually respectable, because their teachers and the textbooks are not intellectually respectable.”
¹⁷
In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers. There are severe limits to how intellectual their teaching could be, even if they wanted it to be. Their susceptibility to fads, and especially to non-intellectual and anti-intellectual fads, is understandable—but very damaging to American education. What is less understandable is why parents and the public allow themselves to be intimidated by such educators’ pretensions of “expertise.”

The futility of attempting to upgrade the teaching profession
by paying higher salaries is obvious, so long as legal barriers keep out all those who refuse to take education courses. These courses are negative barriers, in the sense that they
keep out the competent
. It is Darwinism stood on its head, with the
unfittest
being most likely to survive as public school teachers.

The weeding out process begins early and continues long, eliminating more and more of the best qualified people. Among high school seniors, only 7 percent of those with SAT scores in the top 20 percent, and 13 percent of those in the next quintile, expressed a desire to go into teaching, while nearly half of those in the bottom 40 percent chose teaching. Moreover, with the passage of time, completion of a college education, and actual work in a teaching career, attrition is far higher in the top ability groups—85 percent of those in the top 20 percent leave teaching after relatively brief careers—while low-ability people tend to remain teachers.
¹⁸
This too is a long-standing pattern. A 1959 study of World War II veterans who had entered the teaching profession concluded that “those who are academically more capable and talented tended to drop out of teaching and those who remained as classroom teachers in the elementary and secondary schools were the less intellectually able members of the original group.”
¹⁹
The results in this male sample were very similar to the results in a female sample in 1964 which found that the “attrition rate from teaching as an occupation was highest among the high ability group.”
²⁰
Other studies have had very similar results.
²¹
Sometimes the more able people simply leave for greener pastures, but the greater seniority of the least able can also force schools to lay off the newer and better teachers whenever jobs are reduced.

The dry statistics of these studies translate into a painful human reality captured by a parent’s letter:

Over the years, as a parent, I have repeatedly felt frustrated, angry and helpless when each spring teachers—who were the ones the students hoped anxiously to get, who had students visiting their classrooms after school, who had lively looking classrooms—would receive their lay-off notices. Meanwhile, left behind to teach our children, would be the mediocre teachers who appeared to have precious little creative inspiration for teaching and very little interest in children.
²²

With teachers as with their students, merely throwing more money at the educational establishment means having more expensive incompetents. Ordinarily, more money attracts better people, but the protective barriers of the teaching profession keep out better-qualified people, who are the least likely to have wasted their time in college on education courses, and the least likely to undergo a long ordeal of such Mickey Mouse courses later on. Nor is it realistic to expect reforms by existing education schools or to expect teachers’ unions to remedy the situation. As a well-known Brookings Institution study put it, “existing institutions cannot solve the problem, because they
are
the problem.”
²³

Teachers’ unions do not represent teachers in the abstract. They represent such teachers as actually exist in today’s public schools. These teachers have every reason to fear the competition of other college graduates for jobs, to fear any weakening of iron-clad tenure rules, and to fear any form of competition between schools that would allow parents to choose where to send their children to school. Competition means winners and losers—based on performance, rather than seniority or credentials. Professors of education are even more vulnerable, because they are supplying a product widely held in disrepute, even by many of those who enroll in their courses, and a product whose demand is due almost solely to laws and policies which compel individuals to enroll, in order to gain tenure and receive pay raises.

As for the value of education courses and degrees in the actual teaching of school children, there is no persuasive evidence that such studies have any pay-off whatever in the classroom. Postgraduate degree holders became much more common among teachers during the period of declining student test scores. Back in the early 1960s, when student SAT scores peaked, fewer than one-fourth of all public school teachers had postgraduate degrees and almost 15 percent lacked even a Bachelor’s degree. But by 1981, when the test score decline hit bottom, just over half of all teachers had Master’s degrees and less than one percent lacked a Bachelor’s.
²⁴

Despite the questionable value of education courses and degrees as a means of improving teaching, and their role as barriers keeping out competition, defenders of the education
schools have referred to proposals to reduce or eliminate such requirements as “dilutions” of teacher quality.
²⁵
Conversely, to require additional years of education courses is equated with a move “to improve standards for teachers.”
²⁶
Such Orwellian Newspeak turns reality upside down, defying all evidence.

It should not be surprising that education degrees produce no demonstrable benefit to teaching. The shallow and stultifying courses behind such degrees are one obvious reason. However, even when the education school curriculum is “beefed up” with more intellectually challenging courses at some elite institutions, those challenging courses are likely to be in subjects imported from other disciplines—statistics or economics, for example—rather than courses on how to teach children. Moreover, such substantive courses are more likely to be useful for research purposes than for actual classroom teaching. When Stanford University’s school of education added an honors program, it was specifically stated that this was
not
a program designed for people who intended to become classroom teachers.
²⁷

The whole history of schools and departments of education has been one of desperate, but largely futile, attempts to gain the respect of other academics—usually by becoming theoretical and research-oriented, rather than by improving the classroom skills of teachers.
²⁸
But both theoretical and practical work in education are inherently limited by the low intellectual level of the students and professors attracted to this field.

Where education degrees are not mandated by law as a requirement for teaching in private schools, those schools themselves often operate without any such requirement of their own. The net result is that they can draw upon a much wider pool of better-educated people for their teachers. The fact that these private schools often pay salaries not as high as those paid to public school teachers further reveals the true role of education degrees as protective tariffs, which allow teachers’ unions to charge higher pay for their members, who are insulated from competition.

Schools and departments of education thus serve the narrow financial interests of public school teachers and professors of education—and disserve the educational interests of more than 40 million American school children.

INSTITUTIONAL PROBLEMS

While the low—and declining—intellectual calibre of public school teachers limits the quality of American education, there are also institutional reasons why even these modest limits are often not reached. There are, after all, better and worse teachers, so that greater selectivity in hiring and a weeding out of the incompetent could, in theory at least, get the best performance out of the existing pool of people. However, the policies, practices, and legal constraints placed on educational institutions often prevent such rational maximization of teaching performance.

Even the bleak picture of the ability level among people who major in education leaves out institutional possibilities of better teaching, for it leaves out those people whose college majors were
not
in education but in other, more solid subjects, and who simply took education courses as well (either contemporaneously or later), in order to become teachers. Such people with
non
-education majors are in fact a majority among high school teachers.
²⁹
Nevertheless, the attrition of the able and the institutional protection of the incompetent make American educational quality lower than it has to be, even with the existing pool of potential teachers.

Many of the constraints within which schools, school districts, and boards of education operate originate within the education establishment—with teachers unions, and schools of education, for example—but other constraints are imposed from outside. Legislators, for example, may mandate that new, non-academic subjects like driver education be taught in the public schools and judges may interpret laws and contracts in such a way as to make it an ordeal to get rid of either incompetent teachers or disruptive and violent students.

Incompetent Teachers

While mediocrity and incompetence among teachers limit the quality of work possible in public schools, institutional rules and practices often protect teachers whose performances fall far short of those limits. An academic scholar studying the
problem of incompetent teachers during the 1980s discovered that several of the administrators he interviewed set aside $50,000 to cover procedural costs for every teacher they found to be a likely candidate for dismissal. Nor was this sum always adequate. One successful dismissal in California cost more than $166,000 in internal and external procedural costs, including more than $71,000 in legal fees to fight the teacher’s court challenge. Had the school district lost in court, they would have had to pay the teacher’s legal fees as well.
³⁰
Moreover, only truly egregious cases are likely to lead to attempts at dismissal. More common responses include (1) ignoring the problem, (2) transferring the teacher, if parental pressures become irresistible, and (3) buying out an older teacher near retirement age.

At the heart of this pattern of evasion of responsibility for firing an incompetent teacher is the iron-clad tenure system and its accompanying elaborate (and costly) “due process” procedures for dismissal. Although tenured teachers are 80 percent of all California teachers, they were less than 6 percent of those involved in dismissals. Meanwhile, temporary teachers, who were only 7 percent of all California teachers, were involved in nearly 70 percent of all dismissals.
³¹
These statistics are especially striking because the research scholar discovered what data on test scores already suggest—that “incompetent teachers are much more likely to appear among the most senior segment of the teaching force than among the least senior.”
³²
In other words, where the problem is the worst, less can be done about it. The most senior teachers simply have too much job protection for an administrator to attempt dismissal, except in the most desperate cases. The teacher must not only be incompetent (or worse), but must also be recognized as such by many complaining parents, and these parents in turn must be people who know how to push a complaint through the system and exert influence.

Low-income and minority parents are less likely to complain and less likely to know how to make their complaints effective. Administrators are well aware of this and respond (or do not respond) accordingly
³³
. In any kind of neighborhood, however, the mere fact that the teacher is incompetent and known by the authorities to be incompetent is unlikely, by itself, to lead to any action without parental complaints. As one school district administrator put it:

Principals are apprehensive about moving against a teacher. They need a reason to act other than the teacher is incompetent because it can be very difficult to prove.
³⁴

Another administrator:

Without parent complaints, we leave the teacher alone.
³⁵

Still another administrator:

You need a lot of external complaints to move on a teacher. The administrator is not willing to make tough decisions until he has to; that time comes when there are complaints.
³⁶

Even when a chorus of parental complaints forces an administrator into action, that action is unlikely to be dismissal. Transferring the teacher to a different school is far more common. This buys time, if nothing else. If and when the parents at the new school begin to complain about the same teacher, then another transfer may be arranged, and yet another. These multiple transfers are so common that they even have nicknames, such as “the turkey trot” or “the dance of the lemons.”
³⁷
From the administrator’s point of view, the problem is not that the teacher is incompetent but that the parents are complaining. If the teacher can be put in a low-income neighborhood school, where many students are transient or the parents unable to make effective complaints, then the problem has been solved, as far as the system is concerned, without the expensive and time-consuming process of attempting dismissal.