Senior Community

Where Are All the Good Teachers?

If you don’t have time to watch this disturbing video, let me try to briefly sum up the situation for you. Akian, a 10 year old autistic boy was having violent outbursts at school and hitting his teachers. His father, Stuart, could not figure out what was causing his normally peaceful child to have these outbursts. After having behaviorists tell him that his son was showing no signs of violent behavior, and months of meetings with his son’s teachers, Stuart decided that he needed to know what was going on inside the classroom. So Stuart put a wire tap on his son hoping to find out what was setting him off.

The resulting recordings are shocking.

Akian is repeatedly, verbally abused by his teachers (they call him a bastard) and one teacher even admits, in front of the whole class, to having had so much wine on the previous evening that it made her throw up. Certainly not the kind of things we’ve come to expect from our nations teachers.

Needless to say, in the above video, Stuart is outraged. He’s not just outraged because of what happened to his son, but because only one of the two offending teachers was fired when he turned in the audio to the district. The other was simply moved to another classroom.

I share in Stuart’s outrage here. If you watch the video you’ll hear various samples of the audio that was recorded, and it becomes apparent that the woman teaching is simply out of patience, and does not care about her job anymore. Now, I’m certainly not trying to make the claim that being a teacher in a special needs classroom is an easy task. I have no doubt that if I were put in charge of a classroom of children with the needs Akian has, I’d be at my wits end. I don’t think I’d go so far as to start calling young children bastards, but I’d certainly be at the end of my rope. Of course, that is exactly why I am not the teacher in a special needs classroom. In fact, that’s why I’m not a teacher at all. I’d imagine that’s why many of us aren’t teachers. We know we’re just not cut out for it. Teaching is a seriously tough gig.

But doesn’t that beg the question, “What on earth is that woman doing in a classroom? How did she even get the job?”

This is where it starts to get worse. If you read this article from The Huffington Post, you’ll see that this incident was hardly isolated. Since posting his video and reaching out to major news outlets, Stuart has been receiving emails from other parents in similar situations. One parent even recorded her daughter’s teacher taunting her about her weight. So what is going on here? Have the standards we set for being a teacher really dropped so low?

Well this report suggests that they have.

The report discusses the trend in American education to hire teachers from the lowest third of graduating classes. They say that about 47% of teachers come from the bottom 33% of their graduating class in terms of SAT/ACT scores. Another 29% come from the middle third, and only 23% of American teachers come from the top 33% of their graduating class. These statistics become even more distressing when compared to the worlds top-preforming education systems in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea, all of which recruit 100% of their teachers from the top 33% of their students. For a job as important as teaching our nations youth, you would think we would set our standards a little higher.

But the lack of quality we see in teachers doesn’t stem from low standards, rather, it seems to be an attitude imbedded in our culture. I’m sure you’ve heard the idiom, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” The fact that that statement is an idiom at all in our society speaks volumes about how we view our teachers. How could we possibly expect our top students to want to be teachers when, culturally, teachers are looked down on? On top of that, teachers are notoriously underpaid. Watch this performance by poet Taylor Mali for some great commentary on how teachers are seen by our nation.

It’s not that America isn’t looking for quality teachers, it’s that we’re having trouble finding them, and when we do find them, we can’t hold on to them. Here you can read about teacher shortages showing up in all sorts of places across America. And two different reports talk about how a big part of the problem is rampant teacher turnover, and that until those problems are addressed we wont see any change in the number and quality of our teachers.

Many of my close friends are teachers, and each one of them that I spoke with is a lot more frustrated by Akian & Stuart’s story than I am. My teacher friends feel embarrassed that parents have to worry about things like this when they send their children to school. They feel that in order to have a successful education system, we need to do more to make becoming a teacher an attractive option for our students. We’re already offering student loan forgiveness for certain teachers, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. Until we find a way to interest more quality teachers, I wish that kid’s like Akian could have some kind of panic button, something like a Medical Alert, so that they could let us know when they’re getting bullied by the people that are supposed to be protecting them.

What do you think? How do we attract more of the right kind of teachers?