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I finally managed to get my hands on the summer issue of One Day, the Teach for America alumni magazine. (For some reason, they send it to my parents’ house, even though they have my current mailing address.) In this issue, alumni were asked how they would reinvent the profession of teaching (provided, of course, they ruled the world.) Whenever I think about teaching, I think about in three levels: job (as in, “Man, this job is ridiculous sometimes”), profession (as in, “Why are you still in this profession if you think ‘these kids’ can’t learn?”), and career (as in, “I really don’t know how you could sustain a career in teaching.”) One of the contributors to the article took these three levels and changed my thinking about them. This contributor is Kilian Betlach, a Bay Area ’02 corps member whom I observed when I first joined TFA. He writes:

As it stands today, teaching is not a profession. It is a never-ending entry-level vocation, divorced from foundational understandings of training, accountability, and advancement. If we are to enact meaningful reform, we must rescue teaching from its status as vocation and volunteerism, and recast it as a profession of rigor, creativity, and unlimited impact.

It’s so true, isn’t it? Just about all I ever hear when I explain to people that I am a Teach for America teacher, that yes, I teach in the inner-city, yes, my students are low-income English learners, and yes, I did do this on purpose, is “Wow. That’s so respectable. I could never do that.” Oh, you mean, you wouldn’t want to take a huge pay cut and work longer hours? Why ever not? Personally, I love my job, and all I want to do is become a better teacher. But Kilian is right. As long as teaching is perceived as a vocation, a short-term choice, the profession will never be professional. He continues:

It is not uncommon to hear teachers dismiss their credentialing programs as useless and ineffective. Doctors, pilots, and plumbers are not expected, as teachers are, to learn their profession on the run, by trial and error, by searching for ideas on the internet, or by attending disparate workshops.

This is all too close to home. My own credentialing program was a huge waste of my time. The only thing worth while I got out of it was getting my preliminary credential in one year instead of two. Otherwise, I can’t even count the number of things I learned from it, because they amount to exactly nothing.

Also, can you imagine visiting a doctor who was still in the middle of their training, but not being mentored by some form of expert in the field? I’d imagine it would look something like this: “OH, wow, I have never seen that color in nature before. Hang on just a sec…” (Doctor pulls out blackberry to Google for possible causes of your strangley-colored rash.) “Hmm. Well, here. Try this. If it doesn’t work, I can email my mentor. They probably won’t get back to me for a few days, since they have to mentor about 30 other doctors as well. But, I’m sure your condition isn’t life-threatening. Don’t worry.”

Yeah, right. Can you say, “law suit?” What is it about the profession of teaching that allows this sort of thing to happen? I can’t even count all the times I’ve spent hours scouring the internet for how to teach this or that, only to discover that the lesson was too easy or too hard for my own students. An expert teacher would have known that the lesson wouldn’t have worked and adjusted accordingly. But because I (and all other new teachers, TFA or not) don’t have that experience, we spend days, weeks, months, or even years experimenting on group after group of kids before we finally get it right.

Not to say that new teachers can’t be effective- they totally can. The difference is really just that new teachers have to work much harder and longer to find those effective lessons. Kilian proposes a new way of training teachers, one based on the medical residency model:

These resident teachers would work for an academic year with an attending teacher, immediately participating in all professional responsibilities and eventually owning complete units of study. This more authentic model rescues student-teaching from unaccountable contexts of summer school and end-of-year laxness and provides more comprehensive and accurate training. Perhaps most importantly, residents learn firsthand from proven attendings and see effective teaching applied in the exact context in which they will work.

I think this may be similar to some student-teaching programs out there already. The ones I know of already are a semester long, and require the trainee to work closely with the master teacher. However, the main drawback is that it’s only a semester, which in my personal experience, was just about enough time for me to realize what I was doing wrong. I needed that second semester to get on track, to teach effectively, and to make significant gains with my students. Also, the student-teacher is not necessarily learning in a place that is even remotely like the school they are eventually hired. So, a teacher could student-teach in a high-income district where teachers are given freedom to write their own units of study and then be hired in a low-income district where teachers are required to follow a curriculum word-for-word. I know that good teaching is good teaching where ever you are, but seriously, shouldn’t the training for our profession be about more than just classroom basics? So often I hear old-school veteran teachers say, “Oh, well, as long as you get your classroom management down, you’ll be fine.” Actually, no, you won’t. You could have a class full of perfect angels who sit in scholar position silently all day long, but if you don’t know how to teach them how to read, you aren’t doing your job. Which brings us to Kilian’s next point:

We must institute evaluation measures that value inputs over outputs. We must develop merit pay and accountability systems that make improvement a professional imperative rather than an act of personal pride. We must invest site administration with the power to hire the teachers they want and fire those they don’t. Until then, we will continue to function less like a profession and more like rec-league T-ball, where everyone gets to swing but no one keeps score.

This profession needs to be held accountable to more than just NCLB. Personally, I think tenure should be done away with. Job security is nice and all, but in any other profession, if you don’t perform to standards, you’re fired. That’s it. I don’t care how long you’ve been in this career, and frankly, it shouldn’t matter. What should matter is only, did your students make the growth they needed to make? If they didn’t, then there needs to be a truly collaborative, non-judgmental model about how to get your students where they need to be. Plenty of charter schools I’ve seen out there are already doing it this way. So, why can’t public schools do the same thing?

I’m not saying that these changes will instantly close the achievement gap. There are plenty of other problems to be dealt with. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and I really think it should be making the profession of teaching actually professional.