To teach or not?
ARRICALE, FRANK C.
TO TEACH OR NOT? INCENTIVES & DISINCENTIVES The fifties saw an unseemly rush by teachers' colleges, especially in the Northeast, to become liberal arts institutions. At that time, many education...
...The persistent sexist bias against choosing women supervisors, especially for junior and senior high school principalships and for superintendencies in general, has contributed to feminist prejudice against teaching...
...Despite attempts by state authorities to demand a consistent and coherent cycle of professional training as a prerequisite for teacher certification, entrance into the profession too often occurs through courses taken smorgasbord-style from a variety of institutions...
...Others who attended public schools have had such negative experiences there that they, too, feel no particular loyalty to the system...
...Perhaps direct grants to dis-tricts or categorical funds in state aid formulae are needed because unions tend to bargain for higher salaries for their already tenured members, rather than for beginning staff...
...At that time, many education courses were little more than dehy-drated versions of applied psychology and in-fantile schemas of school-and-society sociology...
...While Southern American and West Indian blacks have traditionally v iewed the teacher as next to the parson in prestige, they balk at the prospect that their children-were they to become teachers-would be subjected to shabby treatment in schools failing to insist upon good manners and discipline...
...Recently, a few states have increased starting salaries...
...Previous mistakes warn against making professional courses trivial, without standards, or irrelevant to the classroom or school building experience...
...Teaching was once among the very few professional avenues on which to travel away from the pushcarts, the docks, the ditches, the sweatshops, or the serving pantries...
...Schools without sufficient and adequately trained staff will never begin to fulfill American expectations...
...Low entry-level pay coupled with "war stories" (exaggerated in the telling) have discouraged potential recruits and have made parents determined to discourage their children from becoming teachers...
...Far from the period in which teaching, along with nursing, was one of the very few professions deemed popularly acceptable for women, we have now entered a period in which teaching is often viewed as an atavistic remnant of female servitude...
...State governments must insure a sufficiently high entry-level salary to make teaching competitive...
...Very high housing costs make relocation economically impossible even for surplus teachers laid-off from suburban or rural systems...
...In fact, the closer teachers' colleges resemble medical schools in establishing an organic relationship to actual students (and not to some sanitized "campus school" pupiled by the children of the faculty), the more our school systems will benefit...
...Too many baccalaureates with a few pedagogical patches are standing nervously in front of students...
...So far, I have been discussing the problem of recruiting adequate teachers in general...
...If their sons and daughters insist on teaching, parents steer them to safe private or religious schools...
...Of course, too few people are seeking to become teachers today by any route...
...Ethnic succession in teaching is further retarded today by the fact that a high percentage of black college graduates are products of Catholic schools and, therefore, have little commit-ment to the public school system...
...The more successful affirmative action programs become, the fewer black and Hispanic degree-holders consider teaching, especially in a place like New York City where banks and investment houses, publishers, media, small and large research firms, and retail establishments actively solicit minority college graduates...
...Worse, they may become the cause of an irreversible national decline...
...As a result, too few trained professionals are entering the classroom...
...classroom master-teachers and expert school supervisors can serve as adjunct college professors to insure concrete, clinical, and problem-solving approaches...
...Classroom management, applied psychology of learning, and teaching techniques are at least as important as the accumulation of facts...
...As a bureaucrat who must keep a public school system afloat, I cannot allow myself to become as pessimistic as'the facts seem to demand...
...Were I to become specific and bemoan the disastrous situation in mathematics and the physi-cal sciences, I would sound like a prophet of doom for public education...
...Under the influence of feminism, teaching is almost taboo for liberated women...
...Out-of-town teacher recruitment for an urban school system, like New York, is difficult...
...A decline in anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism has further reduced the potential pool of pedagogues, as Jewish and Catholic college graduates now enter professions and industries once closed to their parents and grandparents...
...I still must believe American public schools can be saved by immediate and direct public action before teacher attrition forces either the closing of schools or the formation of overly large class sizes...
...Added to the dissuasive influence of parents, low pay, and low prestige is discouragement from math and science professors, who steer their students toward industry and re-search and away from teaching...
...Research-oriented, full-time faculty must demand university level performance from their peers as well as their students...
...Ironically, a number of otherwise positive developments- from feminism to affirmative action-have contributed to the decline in the national pool of potential teachers...
...These institutions must learn from past errors to emphasize both methodology and content...
...FRANK c. ARRICALE...
...Because so much of this discrimina-tion against women is practiced not by any professional elite or clique, but by parent associations and popularly elected school boards, the legal struggle to eliminate such unconstitutional behavior has been less successful than drives to erase racial and religious bias in the schools...
...The current national critique of our schools must produce practical reforms...
...Revival of teachers' colleges or, at least, strong education departments at universities, must give teaching its own training institutions, its own authoritative research centers, and its own rallying points for continuing professional leadership...
...However, the supposed corrective-the notion that teaching doesn't need its own professional training centers-has left us a bankrupt legacy which now makes teacher preparation more difficult than before...
...Blacks who are second- and third-generation college graduates very, often are pushed away from teaching by their families toward the "higher" professions of law, medicine, and engineering...
...A dear friend, during one of my deep personal crises, once advised me, "Frank, you are too poor to be depressed...
Vol. 116 • March 1989 • No. 6
