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According to a study by the University of Chicago, the typical Chicago public school loses more than half of all its teachers within five years — and about two-thirds of its new ones.  Chicago Schools CEO Ron Huberman said Chicago’s overall teacher turnover rate is around the national average.

Teacher churning is especially severe in high-poverty, heavily African-American schools – where half of all teachers disappear after only three years, the study found.

Smaller schools suffered higher teacher turnover than bigger ones, perhaps because “small schools put enormous demands on teachers and can potentially ‘burn out’ even the most enthusiastic new teacher,” the study warned.

Teachers who left low-scoring high schools, meanwhile, often traded up to better-scoring CPS schools, the study found.  A new recent trend is that teachers are more likely to leave CPS than to transfer inside it.

Schools suffering higher turnover were low-scoring, heavily black, high-poverty, or located in high-crime areas.  One teacher who spent her first two years at two high-poverty, heavily black, West Side elementary schools said she struggled with kids who picked up chairs, who screamed in class and threw crayons, who didn’t know how to deal with anger — and parents who didn’t return phone calls. She is looking for another job.

Although Chicago’s Clemente High had its share of fights and gangs, that wasn’t why teacher Dana Limberg left last year for Oak Park-River Forest High School. Limberg was disappointed in her principal’s leadership — another factor the consortium tied to teacher turnover.

How can schools mentor new teachers when one-third of their present staff will not be around next year? The sad truth is that teachers are leaving the field faster than colleges can train them — and few seems to notice.

Despite what the conservative governors of Nebraska, Ohio, Wisconsin and New Jersey believe, the public believes that teachers are underpaid and over  worked.  So says the report, “Closing The Talent Gap” from a study by McKinsey and Company.

The public wants to reward teachers “” 57% say they are paid too little, with just 7% believing they are overpaid and most of the rest saying they’re paid about right.

Half say that teachers’ salaries should be based on their students’ performance on statewide tests and on the evaluations they receive from local school officials. About 1 in 4 say pay should be determined solely by school administrators’ ratings, while under 1 in 5 say salaries should be based only on how well students do on statewide testing.

According to Nicholas, D. Kristof writing in the New York Times, March 13, 2011), “In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer…. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher.”

In the past, it was easier to find teachers.  Most teachers were women who became teachers because better jobs weren’t opened to them.  Today women have the opportunity to become lawyers, doctors and investment bankers.  The talk and actions taken by these conservative governors is encouraging those in the field to consider taking retirement or leaving those states where the executive leadership is making life difficult.  It is also making the already difficult job more difficult.  The politicians who falsely accuse teachers as greedy are making it difficult to recruit the “best qualified people” to a job where in the next few years we will need 2 million more people to replace retirees.

According to the latest Census Bureau figures, the number of Hispanics surpassed the 50 million mark, growing 43% and accounting for mare than half the national growth since 2000.  Hispanics now make up 16% of the country’s 308.7 million people.  The Hispanic population growth was faster than blacks and whites in the South.  Hispanics doubled in South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas.

Rural counties in the United States continued their decline.  In more than one third of the rural counties, more people died than were born.  Asians were the fastest growing race, growing by 43% since the year 2000.  Minorities now make up 36% of the population.

African-Americans are abandoning cities like Detroit, Chicago and New York and migrating to the suburbs.  They also joined the migration to the West and the South moving to places like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston.

Ten states now have more minority children than Non-Hispanic Whites. The minority-majority states are  Mississippi, Georgia, Maryland, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, California, New Mexico and Hawaii.

What are the implications for education? First, minority children generally have more difficulty in dealing with school so that schools will need to increase the size of their remediation services.  There will be a need for greater ESL and ELL classes and teachers.  Funding formulas will need to be adjusted in order to provide for these additional school needs.

On December 22, 2010, President Barack Obama signed legislation that allows states to classify teaching interns as “highly qualified” teachers and regularly assign them to schools with mostly poor, minority students.

The legislation nullifies a Sept. 27 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that California illegally classified thousands of teachers in training as “highly qualified” in violation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Under that law, all students are supposed to be taught by “highly qualified” teachers who have earned state teaching credentials, but a 2004 Bush administration policy allowed states to give that status to interns working toward certification.

A California lawsuit claims that more than 10,000 interns were teaching in California public schools in 2007. About 62 percent of interns taught in the poorest half of California schools, and more than half were assigned to schools with at least 90 percent students of color.  The number of teaching interns has dropped to about 8,000 because state budget cuts have led to fewer teaching positions and fewer people are entering the teacher credentialing programs.

Nationwide, more than 100,000 intern teachers are classified as “highly qualified,” according to the lawsuit.

A number of educational reformers, including yours truly, have questioned how the nation was going to replace teachers who are leaving the field more quickly than colleges are preparing them.  Here is one of the answers; instead of raising the requirements we are lowering the standards. Obviously it makes sense to someone.

Conservative critics of education and some liberals have had a field day criticizing teachers, and their profession.  Critics range from the governors of Wisconsin and New Jersey and the Obama Secretary of Education, Arnie Duncan.

Two reports have focused on raising the status and pay of teachers.  Today, I will focus on the international report.

According to Andreas Schleicher, who works for the Organization of Co-operation and Development (OECD) the United States should raise the status of the teaching profession  by recruiting move qualified candidates, training them better and paying them more.  Mr. Schleicher oversee the international achievement test (PISA) states that top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring, and take steps to raise respect and salaries for the profession.

“Despite the charcterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership” stated Mr Schleicher.

The new report, “What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts” states that the five things U.S. education can learn from the high performing countries include adopting common academic standards, developing better tests for use by teachers in diagnosing students’ day-to-day learning needs, training more effective school leaders and raising the status of the teaching profession (the top recommendation).

According to O,E.C.D. data, the average salary of a veteran elementary teacher in the U.S. was $44,172 in 2008, higher than the average of #39,426 across all O.E.C.D. countries (the figures were converted to compare the purchasing power of each currency.  But that salary was 40 percent below the average salary of other American college graduates.  In Finland, by comparison, the veteran teacher’s salary was 13 percent less than that of the average college graduate’s.

So the next time you read the criticism of America’s schools and educators, pull out this blog and show it to the critics. And remember, the governors who criticize the schools will be up for election or recall soon enough.  Educators do vote!

The Huffington Post has just published my  latest posting,

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/who-will-teach-the-childr_b_847778.html

The following is a blog posting on the Huffington Post.

“Waiting for Superman ” Doesn’t Have Any Magic Bullets

Franklin P. Schargel

The release of the DVD of “Waiting for Superman” means that many more people will see this excellently made propaganda film extolling the virtues of charter schools.

There isn’t any argument that education in America needs to be improved. Politicians on all sides of the spectrum agree. The discussion is not about whether it should happen but how it should happen. President Obama’s Race for the Top demands that states raise the cap on how many charter schools they have. Charter schools, the filmmakers insist, are the ultimate answer to all that ails education today.  There are excellent charter schools and not so excellent charter schools.  Just as there are excellent public schools and not so excellent public schools.  Not once in the film do the producers show any successful public schools.  But they do state, that only one in five charter schools is performing at a high level.

Charter schools were supposed to be educational learning laboratories which were benchmarked for best practices. To envision them as the sole universal answer to the ills of American education is as foolish as believing that high stakes tests would, by themselves, raise America’s achievement level. All that the testing achieved was to confirm what we already knew ““ that children of low-income families do worse on examinations than children of high-income families. It then rewards high-achieving schools and punished low-achieving schools.

If we wish to improve America’s schools, we need to systemically improve all aspects of America’s schooling. We need to improve early childhood education and make it available to every student. We need to level the playing field of school spending so that schools in affluent areas get as much funding as those in the inner cities. If children do not learn the way teachers teach, then teachers need to teach the way students learn.

We need to have colleges validate high school degrees by not accepting students who are not prepared to enter college and stop accepting and remediating those who are below college admission standards. We need to have schools of education train teachers with the skills they need and not what the schools of education want to teach. And politicians need to stop coming up with sound-bite solutions to highly complex educational problems.

The enemy in the film is not Lex Luther, but teacher unions.  If teacher unions were the evildoers than union-less states like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi would be high performing and we know they are not.  Finland, which is the top rated country on the Organization of Co-operation and Development’s) TIMSS examination, has a strong teacher union.  High performing countries of Finland, Korea and Japan operate schools as “state monopolies.”

Teacher tenure at the university level means life-long employment.  In the K-12 system it simply means due process. Teacher unions do not hire incompetent teachers ““ administrators do.  The same administrators have three years to get rid of poorly performing, non-tenured teachers.  If anyone should be blamed for poor teachers in classrooms, it should be school administrators.  No Child Left Behind calls for “highly qualified teachers” but we need teachers to be highly effective as well.  We have all had knowledgeable teachers who knew their material but lacked the capacity to teach it.

There are two kinds of errors – errors of omission and errors of commission and the filmmakers commit both.  The film emphasizes the failing of public schools and fails to show any of the successful public schools or teachers.

Charter schools don’t seem to be doing any better than regular public schools, and tend to be much more expensive to operate than regular schools.  One of the most successful charter schools is shown to achieve high results but the writer of the film fails to indicate that they spend $16,000 per student (more than the amount that New York City spends on its public school students). (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/education/13harlem.html)

I have visited a charter school in Florida (since closed) where the graduation rate was 17%.  Another charter school failed to invest that money in the classroom or to provide required financial disclosures. (https://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/content/ohio-lawsuit-alleges-white-hat-charter-school-company-failed-schools)

Are charter schools really supermen capable of sweeping needy students out of harm’s way?  Innovation is frequently confused with improvement.  Americans embrace whatever is believed to be “new” more readily than what already exists.

What makes charter schools so attractive to so many parents?  Most charter schools are operating at capacity and have waiting lists? And the film plays on the heartstrings by showing the disappointment when children are turned away because of lack of room in one high-performing charter school.  Obviously all parents want the best for their children and are willing to do whatever it takes to get the best education for their child.  They have been led to believe that charter schools provide the answer.  Maybe, like Superman, it really is fiction.

At the very least, the film has opened a dialogue about how to improve schools.

There is a disturbing trend among Native Americans – they tend to commit suicide at more than two times the rate of similarly aged whites.  In fact, among Native Americans, it is the second leading cause of death behind unintentional injuries according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

On the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana, five children killed themselves during the 2009-2010 school year at the Poplar Middle School – student population 160.  And 20 more 7th and 8th graders tried.

What is the cause of this problem?  There are many possible causes.  High unemployment – around 28 percent.  High poverty – 45 percent live below the poverty line, including over 50 percent of all children.  A Federal Health Team found that more than one third of the middle school students tested positive for sexually transmitted diseases, at least one-fifth of fifth graders drank alcohol weekly and 12 percent of high school girls are pregnant.  The dropout rate is 40 percent.  Mental health services are lacking, violent crime rages and people live in poor economic conditions in broken homes.

While these are societal problems, educators are forced to address them before learning can begin.  Because counselors are overwhelmed with paperwork and huge caseloads averaging 1/400, the City of  New York established a Coordinator of Student Activities in every high school.  I had the good fortune to have been selected as one of the COSA’s.  We saw our job as serving as a “third ear” to the students.  We felt that they needed to have an adult to listen (and not make value judgements) about their insecurities.  I would suggest that this concept be tried on Native American reservations.  The cost of saving a child’s life would be invaluable.