This article was written by Love Teach for We Are Teachers
This is what teachers need if we want to save public education.
1. A living wage and competitive health care.
Since so few people are willing to teach under the current conditions, every state in the US is currently experiencing a teacher shortage.States are responding to these shortages not by improving conditions for teachers but often by lowering the qualifications to become a teacher. I don’t know how I can say this any more clearly: We will no longer have talented teachers if we do not take steps to make teaching an attractive profession.Period.
Read “How Close Are Teachers to Receiving Poverty Benefits?”
2. Smaller class sizes.
In addition to challenges with discipline, behavior, and building relationships, large classes force teachers to deliver less effective instruction. A student in a class of 35 will not receive the same quality of education as a student in a class of 20. However, it’s important to know that smaller class sizes cannot be a solution in itself. If we don’t take steps to make teaching an attractive profession, the educators coming in to teach those small classes won’t have the experience they need.
3. Shared accountability with parents and students.
In the past several decades, what used to be a shared accountability between teachers, parents, and students has now shifted—largely thanks to education reform based on the whims of legislators instead of actual research—to an expectation that the teacher alone should deliver results. Borrowing wording from professor Jason Read, teachers have become “the solution, scapegoat, and sacrificial lamb rolled into one.”
I’m not suggesting we head back to a time when teachers were the unquestionable authority. I’m saying that we can’t do this alone. We need parents to support us in and out of the classroom by following up with homework, discipline, and in modeling—especially in their conversations at home about school and teachers—that education matters.
4. Support and respect from the public.
There’s an old proverb I teach to my students every year: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” In the same way, we will only fix the problems in education if people decide to do what’s right for education even if:
- They no longer have (or never had) kids in public schools.
- They feel they aren’t connected to education (they are, but that’s another article).
- For some reason they harbor a bizarre, decades-long resentment of teachers and troll Facebook posts about education with their misspelled outrage.
For the full story click on the link below because … Knowledge IS POWER!
Terri Goldson 