Joel Klein is at it again and we should probably listen to what he has to say about public education.
Klein has always been a controversial figure in the world of U.S. education and, although he is retired as chancellor of the New York public school system, his thinking is well worth Canadian consideration. He ran the largest school district in the world, with 1.1 million students in more than 1,600 schools.
It is worth noting that public education in Canada faces nowhere near the problems that some U.S. systems face, not in terms of student performance, not in terms of obsession with testing and not in terms of bizarre policies such as funding based on student attendance.
As an extreme example of the latter, during the 2009-10 term, public schools in San Diego County lost at least $102 million in state funding because of absences. That figure totalled $624 million over the past five years.
With lots of experience and with full-size controversial issues under his belt, Klein was never one to back away from a challenge about public education.
In his forthcoming book Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools, Klein zeroes in on, among other things, the difficulty public education in the U.S. has in attracting the best and brightest to teach in classrooms.
Klein identifies what he calls “the biggest factor in the education equation — teacher quality.”
It would be difficult to find a teacher truly worth his or her salt, here or anywhere, who would disagree with that.
That said, many might not agree with Klein’s blunt-instrument approach (he once fired a professor in a teacher-training program for his “political views”) but most would concur that teacher excellence and finding the right people to commit to a surprisingly difficult job is what educational success is really all about.
Perhaps too much has been said about public education in Finland and its excellent student results, but one problem Finland does not seem to have is finding the right people to become teachers.
In 2010, more than 6,600 applicants applied for 660 primary school teacher-training positions.
Teachers in Finland are exhaustively trained and all must hold master’s degrees. The teaching profession is highly respected and teachers enjoy genuine autonomy in their work.
Salary scales are roughly equivalent to here. In fact, in a straight across-the-board comparison that includes cost of living, Canadian teachers earn a little more than their Finnish counterparts.
Klein advocates raising the bar for entrance to teacher-training institutions and stresses the importance of teachers acquiring mastery of the subject matter they’re dealing with.
Unfortunately, at least in some B.C. secondary schools, it becomes necessary for teachers to “pick up a course” for which they are not trained, to fill out a full-time appointment or a school timetable.
Then there is the key question of how much classroom experience young teacher trainees have before they take on their first full-time teaching job.
In my experience as a supervisor of young teacher trainees, the opportunity to spend more time working in front of a class with an experienced teacher as mentor is where some teacher-training programs might reconsider their allocation of time in their pursuit of successful teacher preparation.
The availability of schools and experienced teachers willing to take on trainees without additional compensation might be a limiting factor.
Klein wanders into more controversial territory when he talks about differentiated pay scales for teachers teaching academic and non-academic subjects and the difficulties facing systems when teacher tenure creates problems for supervisors attempting to counsel unsuitable teachers to leave the profession.
Again, in my experience, that goes back to the advice I have always offered young teacher trainees: “Once you get a job, you will have five years to discover if you are a teacher. If you find you are not, please do yourself and thousands of kids a favour and take your university education to greener pastures.”
Teaching is not for everybody with an undergraduate or master’s degree, and a little honesty early on would save everybody a lot of heartache further down the line.
I hope Joel Klein would second that advice.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
