In association with The California Report, produced by KQED FM. For an audio report by Kathryn Baron on January 15, 2009, go to The California Report.
President-Elect Barack Obama has pledged
to raise an army to wage a domestic battle arguably as challenging as the
military campaign he about to ramp up against the Taliban in Afghanistan: an “army of teachers” to boost the
educational performance of millions of young people who lag behind their peers
in the United States and most industrialized countries.
Overshadowed
by high profile issues like the Iraq war and the economic meltdown, the Obama proposals (downloadable here) for a range teacher recruitment and
training programs costing $6 billion received very little attention during the presidential
campaign.
"No
matter how many choices we're giving our parents or how much technology we're
using in our schools or how tough our classes are, none of it will make much
difference if we don't also recruit, prepare and retain outstanding
teachers," he declared in a speech on education in Dayton, Ohio on
September 8, 2008.
Aid
to teachers is likely to feature prominently in the stimulus package being
considered by Congress, as teachers in California and across the nation brace
for a flood of pink slips. With over 300,000 teachers — the largest teaching corps in the nation — what Congress does will matter to California. Los Angeles has already announced that it will send layoff
notices to 2,300 teachers.
Support
for at least a portion of Obama’s campaign pledges are likely to be included in the stimulus program being considered by Congress.
The pledges include:
* $2 billion for Teacher Service
Scholarships providing 40,000 scholarships of $25,000 each to attract
"high ability candidates" to enter the teaching profession — in
exchange for a pledging to work in high need schools or districts.
*
A Teacher Residency program which will prepare existing teachers to work in
high-need districts and subject areas, especially in math and science.
* A $1 billion Career Ladder Initiative
to reward veteran teachers for mentoring newer ones, and a range of other
mentoring programs.
A
teacher-centric program on this scale has not been attempted in the United
States since the 1960s, said Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford Education
professor who is head of Obama’s education policy transition team. After Sputnik, she said, “we placed a
big emphasis on bringing people into teaching through programs like the
National Defense and Education Act and the Urban Teacher Corps.”
Those
programs actually succeeded in eliminating a national shortage of teachers. But
by the 1980 the programs were themselves eliminated. "We have not had an infrastructure for recruiting
and training teachers for almost a quarter of a century," said
Darling-Hammond, who was a leading contender to be Secretary of Education in Obama's cabinet.
Obama’s
campaign platform for teachers is intended, in part, to deal with a depressing
statistic: 30 percent of new
teachers leave the profession within five years.
"We need to stop this
revolving door at the beginning end of the profession if we are going to keep
enough teachers in our schools," said Darling-Hammond. If
enacted, Obama’s proposals could radically change the tone of the national
debate about teachers. For the last eight years, teachers have received much of
the blame for failing schools. The thrust of President Bush’s No Child Left
Behind legislation was to punish teachers for students’ poor performance rather
than reward success.
Teachers are likely to benefit from the stimulus package
being considered by Congress to help prevent teacher layoffs. Several times in recent weeks, Obama placed teachers in the same category as other essential workers like police
and firefighters. "Our plan will be to save the jobs of teachers, cops and firefighter," he said on January 9.
Ironically, several of Obama's teacher and retention
proposals were pioneered in California but no longer exist because of
perennial budget cuts here. Elements of these programs have found their way
back into Obama's education platform — in part because Darling-Hammond wrote
much of the platform, and is intimately familiar with what California's efforts
to recruit teachers over the past 25 years.
"We have had almost every conceivable good program
imaginable, but we zeroed them out," she said.
For example, the CalTeach (California Centers for
Teaching Careers) program was initiated in 1997 "to recruit qualified and
capable individuals into the teaching profession." A glowing evaluation in March 2003 concluded that during its first five years CalTeach had "built a solid
foundation for a sustainable program… that helps meet a critical statewide
need."
In a cost-saving move, then Governor Gray Davis eliminated it from the budget the very same year the positive reviews came in.
The same fate befell the Governor's Teaching Fellowships
Program. Began in 2000, the program awarded $20,000 in tuition and living
expenses to 1,000 would-be teachers who agreed to work for a minimum of four
years in a low performing school. Obama's proposed "teaching service
scholarships" are almost identical to those offered through this now-defunded California
program.
Another victim was California's Cal Grants T program, which provided one year scholarships to students seeking teaching credentials — begun in 2002, and zeroed out in 2007 as part of yet another cost-cutting move.
Darling-Hammond said that if Obama's teaching proposals
for teachers are implemented, "we should be able to ensure that every child
in this country has a teacher who is really well prepared, and really well
supported to do a good job in the classroom."
"This is the most important thing we can do,"
she said. "To close the achievement gap we have to close the teaching
gap."
LOUIS FREEDBERG
For video excerpts of Linda Darling Hammond interview, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP5FbKnFiNg
This report is part of a larger project on teacher recruitment and retention supported by the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, with additional funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
