Some new teachers don’t have the smarts

By Bart Elmore

Baby boomers looking back fondly on the “good old golden rule days” of their youth suggest that the problem with modern-day public schools is that the kids aren’t as well behaved as they used to be. Americans are quick to point to the high dropout rate, arguing that students have become lazy and complacent.

President Barack Obama’s recent speech to schoolchildren confirmed this myth that children today are somehow less teachable than they were 10, 20 or 50 years ago. Even though the president began his speech by talking about the structural changes that teachers and administrators must enact to make public school reform effective, many listeners missed that part of the message, instead nodding at their TVs and saying, “Yep, kids just aren’t the same these days. What’s wrong with this generation of students?”

As a member of Generation X, I couldn’t help but think, “Here we go again.”

Focusing on children as the prime agents in public school reform goes against the age-old wisdom that kids are kids. It’s a very American idea to call on children to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but shouldn’t we show them how to tie their boots before we ask them to do the heavy lifting?

The real problem with Obama’s speech is not that it pushes a Democratic agenda as critics claim (Let’s get over the partisan bickering that’s tearing this nation apart, please). Rather, the major flaw is that the speech gives new fodder to those who would blame our school woes on the children, not on the adults who have the power to make key structural changes that might improve our system.

Our problems have a lot to do with the kinds of people we are recruiting to teach.

This year, the Teach for America program boasts placements of over 4,000 new teachers in public schools across the country, an all-time high. These new teachers are the cream of America’s universities. Teach for America says about 11 percent of seniors at Ivy League universities applied this year. Among accepted students, the average SAT score was 1344, the average grade-point average, 3.6.

At first glance, this may not seem like a problem since we need intelligent teachers and we need them in the areas that organizations such as Teach for America serve. But while we should celebrate a flood of fresh blood into the public school system, we have to ask ourselves whether we are sending the right people into the trenches.

The classroom experiences of most of these new teachers has not prepared them for what they will face in America’s rural and low-income public schools.

I know because I was one of those recent Ivy League graduates who felt completely lost when I began my teaching career in an underprivileged high school in Savannah. My Dartmouth education taught me how to digest poetry, but it did not teach me how to deal with children who were abused by their parents.

The problem with flooding our system with green teachers like me is that they often quit because they are not prepared to deal with the challenges they face. According to a 2006 study, roughly a third of all new teachers leave the profession within three years and over half do so within five years. It seems our “be cool, stay in school” mantras might be better directed toward our teachers, not our students.

So, Mr. Obama, please continue to reach out to the next generation of Americans, but don’t forget about the teaching force. Kids will be kids — we can’t choose what children we admit into our public school system.

We can, however, choose what teachers we let in. Perhaps we should start there.

Bart Elmore of Atlanta is a doctoral student at the University of Virginia and a former Savannah high school teacher.