We were recently asked to write an essay for college English professors in which we consider why not all incoming students are advanced readers and writers.
Professors often blame high school teachers, who blame middle school teachers, who blame elementary teachers, who blame parents for lack of school readiness. And professors get blamed in the workforce when college graduates don’t measure up in some regard, while education professors get blamed when teachers don’t raise students’ test scores so that everyone is above average.
Our focus here is on how teaching in elementary, middle and high schools has a lot of hidden demands that make teaching for college preparation a challenge. Professors, politicians, and public, lend us your ears.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Too many classes, too any students, too many responsibilities
Class size in high schools often approaches or exceeds 30 students, with a total of 150-200 spread over 5 classes. Teachers often spend their “free” period supervising the cafeteria, or patrolling the halls, restrooms, parking lots and entries where they conduct “weapons checks.” After school you might find them making sure kids board the right bus, or coaching a sport, or leading an extracurricular activity, or heading off to their second job. They do these things instead of preparing for class, grading papers, holding conferences with students, calling parents, etc.
Alternative paths to certification
Increasingly, the conditions of teaching discourage people from entering the profession. Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshman has fallen 48% since the 1990s, according to research. Since the 1990s, high school students and first-year college students aspiring to teach have declined by 48% in expressing an interest in teaching. Georgia employs about 21,000 teachers who aren’t certified to teach their subject, another study found, even with 41 Georgia colleges and universities offering teacher education programs. Among employed teachers in Georgia, over 30% said in 2023 that they were likely to get out of teaching within five years. These rates are accompanied by increasingly high turnover rates in school administration. Vacancies are now often filled through alternative routes to the teaching profession.
Not all students go to college
In 2023, just over 60% of high school graduates attended college. Schools thus serve many students who never continue their education after high school, along with the 5-7% who never graduate from high school at all. Teachers tend not to see themselves strictly as college prep instructors, but as teachers who provide both college-bound and workforce-bound students with worthwhile learning. As a result, many of them teach in ways that are personal, relevant, and pop-culture oriented, while university English classes tend to exclusively value canonical literature, abstract thinking, and a detached stance rather than personal one.
Standardization in testing and assessment
Schools routinely administer standardized tests, which provide the endpoint for much instruction. Teacher job security often depends on their students’ test scores, leading them to focus on test preparation more than stimulating students’ thinking and creativity. Standardized tests rely on students’ ability to answer multiple-choice questions in response to passages of a few paragraphs. Literature anthologies simultaneously rely on excerpts rather than longer stories and essays. Consequently, high school English teachers are less likely to require students to read novels than they used to, and they might find that students wouldn’t read them anyhow, given the number of bypasses now provided by technology. High-stakes writing tests often use a rubric designed for five-paragraph themes rather than the extensive, thoughtful writing required in universities. Instruction, then, often becomes reduced to what can be most easily measured.
Multiple competing forces
Both schools and universities include competing beliefs. Factors well beyond the control of any teacher shape school instruction, including federal policies, state and local funding that may or may not provide sufficient resources, the dispositions of students toward schoolwork, interventions from parents, and other influences and demands. Universities have their own contradictions. In education, some faculty are practical, some are theoretical. Teacher candidates also take English classes with their disciplinary disputes. Emerging from these contradictory experiences with a coherent approach to teaching can be a challenge.
Digital literacies
Since the 1990s, writing instruction has had to share time with the emerging technologies on digital devices; literary reading has been expanded to include film, graphic novels, and other media. And then came COVID-19. Since the return to in-person learning, teachers have continued to rely heavily on digital technologies in their teaching and learning, at times by state fiat. In Virginia, one of the standards in 10th grade English, “Communication and Multimodal Literacies,” requires that students make use of digital devices to create media messages. The displacement of writing in schools with nonverbal forms may not prepare students for the expectations of college writing.
Our task must be to shift away from blame, and toward understanding. Teaching is difficult work, complicated by the contradictory environments that surround schooling. If you doubt our account of the challenges, they are easy to verify. Just ask a teacher.
Lindy L. Johnson is an associate professor of English education and chair of the Curriculum & Instruction department in the William & Mary School of Education. Peter Smagorinsky is a professor emeritus in the department of Language & Literacy Education at the University of Georgia.
If you have any thoughts about this item, or if you’re interested in writing an op-ed for the AJC’s education page, drop us a note ateducation@ajc.com.
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