Won't Someone Think of the Children?

Happy Independence Day everyone! And as much as I love this country, I was reminded today of the limits of my admiration for a country that claims to adore the miracle of the free market. During the local festivities my family attends, I ran into my old high school social studies teacher, Jeff, who now works at a local public school. After catching up a bit, I told him I’m interested in teaching, to which he reminded me of two huge problems with the public education system.

The first is the firing problem. Jeff pointed out that the public schools have bad teachers in them, preventing newbies like me positions to could fill. I have no idea how common they are but the real point is how hard they are to fire. Jeff referenced the old saying by Louisiana Governor Edwin Washington Edwards that they only way he’d lose a race (or in this case get fired) is if he was found in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy. (Though he later lost to Buddy Roemer in 1987.) I can think of two main reasons for this structural problem. The first is one that I hope Mike will provide more concrete evidence for as it is more of his area: teacher unions. From what he’s told me (and this doesn’t surprise me at all) is that the unions make it incredibly hard to fire teachers. The other obstacle is a supply problem. The fact of the matter is that there are few eligible teachers at the high school level, especially for disciplines including biology, economics, math, foreign languages, physics and so on. Schools don’t want to fire teachers if they don’t think they can replace them. (I wish I asked Jeff why he thought it was so hard to fire teachers and I hope that once I give him the address of LLL, he’ll lend support to one of these theories or provide a new insight best accessible to those with the local, tacit knowledge of a public school teacher.)

While the teacher shortage is a real problem and legitimate grounds for keeping less than good teachers, what defenders of our public school system tend to ignore is that they are an author of their own problem. The second obstacle I’d face is my lack of a teaching certificate. Because I decided to major in political science and economics, I didn’t have time to get a certificate, a perquisite to teach in any Iowa public school. I question that claim I need documentation to prove I can teach. I’ve tutored students at the college (with notable success), taught friends in my spare time (with their gratuitous thanks) and lead numerous undergraduate class discussions in the areas of my expertise. My mother teaches college-level math so I have an experienced resource to call upon if I ever run into a problem I don’t know how to solve. Next semester, I’ll be a TA to an undergraduate economics course, organizing study sessions and grading their tests and homework. And the bottom line is, I’m a personable person and have taught many people many different things with compliments all around, which is more than I can say for some teachers and professors I’d had in my educational career. Requiring a teaching certificate is not only insufficient insurance against poor teachers, it prevents good teachers without “proof” from having the opportunity to instruct.

The state of our public school system is the result of a vicious circle. Parents and other voters want to guarantee good teachers so they require a certificate, which puts a strain on available teachers. This shortage forces schools to keep the instructors that got the certificate despite being poor at their job, which only encourages more regulation. But if we were to remove the requirement (as Illinois schools are slowly doing), there would be potentially good teachers to replace the bad. Will it be enough? It’s hard to tell, but there will certainly be more than before, and, as the bad ones are rooted out, there will be better ones, too.