The single most important influence on learning.
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Community
business
Lined with
houses and gardens, the Dutch town of Almere hardly looks like a place where teacher
shortage might be an issue. And yet, it’s more acute here than anywhere else in the
country. “Between last Christmas and the summer, at any given time, three or four
schools were forced to lock their doors for one or two days a week,” says Netty Tiemersma,
head of the local education board.
Almere has arisen in less than 25 years on the outskirts of Amsterdam, growing rapidly
into a middle-class town of 160,000 people, with a majority of young families. Against
the backdrop of a national shortage, teachers have been hard to come by. Instead,
Almere has come up with other solutions, such as team teaching. Primary schools have
hired assistants from different walks of life and bumped up class sizes to 40 or
50 pupils. Teachers divide them into sub-groups and rely on their assistants for
learning activities. In the longer run, assistants may receive teaching qualifications.
The strategy, now being tried out in other towns, is winning support, with retired
teachers and part-time bankers knocking on Almere’s school doors. The board stands
ready to “interview anyone interested in working in education.”
Wybo Algra,
journalist for the Dutch daily Trouw
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“There’s
a palpable sense that governments no longer look towards teachers as people who are
creative, but as programme executors” |
In
the industrialized world, teaching is a greying profession and burnout rates run
high. Attracting a new generation starts with tackling some deep-rooted grievances,
which go well beyond better pay
Like religion, a calling
often sets students on the path to teaching, but today, the fervour of times past
is waning, leaving schools across the developed world scurrying for teachers.
Countries are scouting far from home to fill vacancies, turning the profession into
a global marketplace, with recruiting grounds stretching from Russia to South Africa
and New Zealand. Some have even relaxed immigration rules to attract candidates.
Governments have also taken to investing in television advertising campaigns, with
such slogans as “Everybody remembers a good teacher” (England), “Be a teacher, be
a hero” (U.S.) or the more cryptic “Teacher. What if the future was you?” (France).
Advertising may not suffice for raising the beleaguered status of teachers. Once
they’ve scratched the surface, many novices put the key under the door. In the United
States, up to 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within the first three
to five years, a trend echoed in several other industrialized countries. At the present
rate, the gaping hole left by an ageing population of teachers is unlikely to be
filled naturally. In most OECD countries, the majority of primary and secondary school
teachers are above 40. The U.S. has to renew two-thirds of its teaching force in
the next decade. In France, also faced with a steady retirement of staff, enrollment
on teacher training courses is down 20 percent.
Ageing aside, similar patterns prevail in most countries, with economic growth fuelling
the “brain drain.” Scientific disciplines are the hardest hit, as university graduates
are lured to private business by more attractive salaries. Even in the public sector,
the OECD has found that other professions tend to be better off than primary school
teachers. In Canada, the latter earn less than a draughtsman or social worker.
Rising
expectations
While
front-page stories about children being sent home or schools switching to four-day
weeks are common because of staff shortages, the real issue, says the OECD’s Paulo
Santiago, is about declining quality. As he underlines, research shows that teachers
are by far the single most important influence on student achievement. If this is
true, it does not augur well for many pupils, especially those worst-off.
In the U.S., up to 60 percent of teachers who work in poor neighbourhoods are not
certified. More than half the country’s physics teachers don’t have a major or minor
degree in the subject; for math teachers the proportion is 33 percent.
In country after country, a paradox is in the making. On the one hand, standards
are being raised and new curricula introduced in the name of the knowledge economy.
“Things that you used to see in senior high school now appear in younger classes,
because we’re trying to cram in more and more,” says the general secretary of the
Canadian Teachers’ Federation.
On the other, teachers continue to be faced with large classes, mounting expectations
and poor professional training. “We frequently have to update our knowledge, especially
in the sciences, and this is not taken into account by institutions,” says a representative
of the French secondary teachers’ union (SNES). In Britain, the government lowered
national targets in math for 14-year-olds after schools complained that the demands
were unrealistic.
Demands
for a greater say
What tends to exasperate the profession is that these targets often rhyme with stricter
checks on teachers. In the UK, for example, teachers are expected to prepare detailed
lesson plans for inspections and monitoring. “You have to prove that you’re doing
what the government has set down,” says Jeff Holman of the British National Association
of Head Teachers. “There is a sense that someone is always looking over your shoulder.”
His concern is shared by his peers in other countries. “Leading politicians say we
should leave schools in the hands of professionals, then they turn around the next
week and say that students need more training in history or again in maths because
we’re lagging behind the rest of Europe,” says Alf Lindberg, of the Swedish Teachers’
Union. “There’s a palpable sense,” according to SNES’ Denis Paget, that “governments
no longer look towards teachers as people who are creative, but as executors of a
programme.”
For the OECD’s Santiago, “the main problem is that teachers don’t have enough autonomy
and decision-making power. They don’t have much of a say about the curriculum and
teaching methods. For any activity, the most important thing is motivation, and that
comes from incentives.”
Incentives, however, are an explosive issue. So far, governments have mostly opted
for “soft” ones. Sweden is offering training for unqualified teachers. Britain has
introduced bursaries for trainee teachers and offered to pay off their student loans
over their first ten years on the job. In certain short-staffed subjects, potential
candidates are lured by “golden hellos,” while affordable housing has also been promised
in the country’s prosperous southeast.
Incentives become a much thornier issue when sacrosanct salary structures are touched.
Teachers’ wages are traditionally based on education level and years of service.
Arguably, the snail’s pace of pay rises adds to some of the profession’s gripes.
The alternative of tying wages to student achievement and teachers’ performance in
the classroom is political dynamite. Timid experiments with performance pay are being
carried out in a handful of U.S. school districts, while in Saxony (Germany) the
education minister stepped down over an attempt to introduce this system.
For now, there are less politically risky options. “Strategies are really crucial,”
says Mildred Hudson, head of Recruiting New Teachers, a U.S. non-profit organization.
“We’ve known this was going to be a problem, but we didn’t plan properly.” Coaching
for apprentice teachers, scholarship support, fielding students at the high school
level and scouting for talent in community colleges have all enjoyed modest success.
Many in the profession also admit that it’s high time to “recognize that adults can
go through two, three or four careers in their lifetime,” says Hudson “We don’t know
how to bring those adults into the classroom and there’s definitely a pool out there.”
Governments might have woken up late to the crisis, but shortages are now climbing
high up on the political agenda. Education was a bone of contention in recent elections
in Britain and the U.S., while in Sweden, a country heading for the polls, a recent
Gallup survey revealed that 78 percent of those interviewed put education ahead of
health care and unemployment as a leading concern. In France, also gearing up for
elections in 2002, schools have so far not been cited as a hot campaign topic. “Public
debate is very weak,” laments Monique Vuaillat, the former head of SNES. Then again,
the shadow of an economic slowdown might lure some talents toward a profession they’d
once have shunned—at least until the going gets better. |
