back to contents

The Desire to Teach: The Hurdles You Have to Jump

On November 8, 1998, the following article by Haverford Senior Liz Greenspan was published in The Washington Post. (We thank Liz for permission to reprint the article.) Greenspan's article inspired a spirited debate on Haverford's online alumni discussion group, with alumni both supporting and contesting her views. Following her article are two e-mail responses to the article representing the variety of views expressed.

I never appreciated the anxiety of finding a job until I returned to college in September for my senior year. Many nightly conversations with fellow students, which always used to be about current classes or upcoming vacations, have turned into brainstorming sessions about life after graduation.

Since working with people is important to many of us, as well as finding a job that is intellectually challenging, teaching often comes up as a possibility. The more we talk about it though, the clearer it becomes that very few of us will go into teaching, and those who do probably won't end up in public schools.

Salary may steer some of us clear of the profession, but money is not the overwhelming factor in our discussions. More relevant are the limited and confining paths into the teaching field and the strong stigma that has become associated with schools of education and, therefore, with teaching itself.

Teaching in a public school requires certification, through either a master's or an undergraduate degree in education. That certification qualifies you to teach in one state and may or may not be accepted elsewhere. Some states, like New York, also require teachers to undergo additional training every five years. While certification sounds like a good way to insure that our schools have qualified teachers, I feel the current system is keeping away many good potential teachers.

My friend Seth Pollack '99 has decided he wants to teach, but because he is not now certified, his options are limited. He knows he could go to an education school for a master's degree, but, like many other students here, he believes these programs are "a waste of time," and he thinks the recent failure of aspiring teachers in Massachusetts to pass basic math and literacy exams simply proves his point.

It is the road to certification, then, rather than a lack of interest, that steers us away from teaching. Education programs&emdash;and this is particularly true of undergraduate courses&emdash;tend to focus on teaching theory and leave the graduates I've talked to unprepared to stand in front of a class of 12-year-olds every day, trying to guide them through diagramming a sentence. My friend Carrie Van Wyk, who recently graduated from Penn State's education program, told me that not only did she contend with four years of badgering for choosing an "easy" major, but that she'd had only one opportunity to student teach.

Haverford, like many other liberal arts schools, has a certification program that provides students with both a teaching certificate and a liberal arts degree in their chosen discipline. In order to complete this program within four years, students have to commit to it by the end of their sophomore year. Aimee Brown '99, who's majoring in English, did complete the concentration, but she says she knew before she came to college that she wanted to teach in public schools. And, even for someone as focused as she is, fulfilling the concentration's requirements was difficult; she had to organize her own independent classes in the department, she said, and spend summers completing course work.

Not surprisingly, then, the majority of my friends who want to teach will do so in private schools, even though the pay tends to be lower still. That seems to be the general pattern for Haverford graduates, according to Marjorie Merklin, who is the program administrator and adviser of the college's education program. Private schools don't require their teachers to be certified, and they conduct aggressive on-campus recruiting sessions to find would-be teachers. It is almost too easy to find a job at a private or independent school, Merklin told me: "As a result, even certified students go to private schools."

But for some of my uncertified friends, like Seth, private schools do not offer enough challenge or diversity. They find alternative teaching programs more appealing, because they are a back-door route into the public schools. The national Teach for America (TFA) program is one of the most popular. Funded partly through AmeriCorps and partly through corporate donations, TFA places newly graduated college students in some of the most understaffed school districts in the country for a two-year period. Started in 1990 by a Princeton University graduate, TFA chooses 500 liberal arts students from 3,000 applicants each year&emdash;most from elite colleges and universities. The summer before entering the classroom, all participants go through a five-week education program that covers teaching techniques and lesson plans.

TFA has been successful in attracting liberal arts students into the teaching field. Last year it accepted six seniors from Haverford, and this year many of my friends are applying. It's not just that they would rather spend just five weeks instead of a full two years preparing to teach; several students have told me that they are drawn to the recognition that the highly competitive program brings, as well as the continuing support and respect the institution provides to young teachers when they are in the classroom.

That support has meant a lot to Rishi Bhandari, a graduate of Vassar College who has completed his first year teaching in a Baltimore public school under TFA. For the new teachers in many public schools, older teachers or administrators offer little help, he said, but from TFA, "we can expect support." In addition, those who participate in TFA feel they have achieved something just by being accepted. And while Rishi admitted to me that the summer training in Houston did not prepare him well for the classroom, leaving him "blindsided" by his seventh-graders, he told me that he didn't think he was at any more of a disadvantage than some of his fellow teachers who had come through a traditional education program.

The very aspects that make this program appealing to students like Rishi provoke criticism from some education experts. "The notion of throwing people into teaching is foolish," says Bil Johnson, a professor of education at Brown University. "It is a rare individual [who] knows how to teach." He labels TFA "hideously elitist." Others argue that TFA teachers use the program as a two- or three-year respite before moving on to other careers. So far, the data suggests otherwise. In the eight years of TFA's existence, 56 percent of its participants have stayed in teaching after their two years are up.

In addition to TFA and some citywide projects, there are a few state programs that allow liberal arts students to teach in public schools. New Jersey created an alternative teaching certification program in 1984. It places liberal arts grads in schools as long as they pass a test on the subject they plan to teach. Each student is trained by a veteran teacher throughout the first year and attends after-hours classes on teaching theory to catch up with new teachers who went through certification programs.

When I spoke with Ellen Schechter, who was hired to run the program for the Division of Academic and Career Standards at the New Jersey Board of Education, she said that these "alternate routers" do well in the classroom and do not seem to suffer from inadequate preparation.

The number of liberal arts students who have joined the New Jersey program has nearly doubled&emdash;713 are entering schools this fall. "If you only allowed education majors to be teachers," Schechter points out, "it is a very narrow pool." Unlike many other states, where the lack of available teachers has even prompted emergency placements in recent months, New Jersey is not facing any teacher shortages&emdash;a fact that Schechter directly attributes to their program. The alternate routers have a significantly lower attrition rate than traditional routers during the first year of teaching, she said, and over time have proven to be just as likely to stay in the field.

I'm convinced that if more states had programs like New Jersey's, and if universities offered stronger curriculums, more students&emdash;including many of my friends at Haverford&emdash;would become teachers in public schools. If that were the case, my friends and I would be staying up late talking about where and what we plan to teach.

J. Russel King '76:

I don't disagree with Liz Greenspan's thoughts, entirely, but this strikes me as a good point for discussion here. There is a strong sentiment abroad in the land, particularly among people like us, that indeed education programs&emdash;that is, the teaching of people how to teach teachers&emdash;are a "waste of time," that education majors are choosing an easy way to get through college, and that, ultimately, the only requirement for being a public school teacher should be a desire and willingness to do so and a mastery of an academic subject appropriate to the high-school setting. That seems pretty dangerous to me. It may be that many or most of the education programs are not good, and don't really do an effective job of teaching people the skills needed to be a teacher. I must admit that I don't recall learning a lot that proved to be useful when I was one of the tiny handful of students who completed the requirements for Pennsylvania public school certification in HC-BMC's class of 1976.

But the idea that any smart person can be a good teacher is quickly controverted by gaining a little experience on the other side of the teacher's lectern. It's a terrifically difficult art (and science), and a lot of it can be taught and learned. It reminds me of the situation I find now in the newspaper industry, where most organizations, including my own, are woefully ill-managed because they are run by a class of people who belittle the notion that "management" is something that needs to be studied and learned, rather than something that simply comes naturally to anyone who is intelligent and energetic and has good reporting skills.

I agree wholeheartedly that we need to be getting more of our best young people into the field of public school teaching. And I don't doubt that the hurdles to certification need to be looked at and perhaps worked around in creative ways. But I can't help detecting an elitist note in the implicit argument that a reasonably accomplished liberal arts graduate of Haverford or Bryn Mawr, or Harvard or Oberlin, is naturally going to be a better public school teacher than a graduate of Slippery Rock or Southeastern Oklahoma State who has devoted a good deal of his or her time studying and learning the techniques of teaching, the psychology of children and adolescents, the range of curricular materials and how best to use them, the successes and failures of others in field, etc.

It's not nearly that simple. I was a better teacher than I would have been because of the work I did in Bryn Mawr's department of education and child development; I would have been a better teacher still if the program had been stronger. And I wasn't a very good teacher&emdash;despite my desire to be one, and despite my intellectual and academic gifts. I needed more that than that, and I didn't really have it. I might well have developed the ability to be a good teacher if I had stuck with it, but it would have required work and study. It's tempting to think that our public school problems would be easily solved by simply putting more smart 22-year-olds in rooms with 20 teenagers and letting them do what comes naturally. But it requires more than that.

Rusty is deputy news editor for The New York Times.

Lawrence Davis '66:

"For those of us in big state universities with a large college of education, the issue is whether one can go be a teacher without identifiable mastery of a particular body of knowledge usually defined by a major in some subject. At least that is for sure true in the sciences. To teach science you need to know how science works. That means doing real laboratory courses and probably some individual research project or undergraduate thesis. That is what we find most lacking in Kansas, and regional, secondary science teachers. The rest is politics."

Lawrence is a professor in the biochemistry department at Kansas State University.