The news is replete with stories of worsening stresses on teachers and intimidating working conditions: for example, the increasing focus on teaching as test prep, and reading through the lines that standardized test cheating scandals could reflect wide patterns of administrators' creating conditions that foster cheating out of desperation. From Atlanta came a story that a teacher had to crawl under a table at a faculty meeting because her test scores were low: " . . . at Fain Elementary School, the principal forced a teacher to crawl under a table in a faculty meeting because that teacher’s students’ test scores were low."
Add the media trend of teacher-blaming, and more college students will recognize that teaching is a low-status profession, whose instability does not make it a reliable career path.
(Thanks to Chaz for the above cartoon.)So no surprise that we see these stories:
From Murfreesboro [Tennessee] Post, January 3, 2012: "Teacher evaluation system to be evaluated"
The evaluations are adding to teachers' already high stress level, [George] Fitzhugh [a member of the Tennessee House Education Committee] said, causing early retirement of some valued educators and possibly even turning away potential excellent teachers.
"I know from talking to administrators at colleges that they've had sort of a dip in their enrollment," he said. "One particular president indicated to me that he thought it had to do with some of those folks who wanted to go into the education field and were having second thoughts."
From the Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2011:
National University, a nonprofit, multi-campus school that offers mainly online credential classes, reports that enrollment in its teacher training courses has dropped about 30% since 2006. The school's monthlong class terms make it vulnerable to headlines; education dean Carl Beyer said he noticed a small uptick in enrollment in the fall, followed by a decline as word spread of state budget cutbacks.
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Right you are. One of the inconvenient truths about what the education reformers are doing is chasing away many future great teachers. Their mindset of constant test preparation, differential instruction, and the erosion of teacher due process rights is making teaching an unappealing profession.
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