Saving Miss Oliver’s

Everyone knows who Babe Ruth was. Millions watch the Jerry Rices of the world catch footballs and the Lance Armstrongs race through France. But how many people can name the winner of an award won by a teacher in their own community – if there is actually such an award?

As a person who taught and administrated in schools for years and then consulted with teachers, I offer a plan for the reform of American education: celebrate teachers. Put them on a pedestal and acknowledge the act of teaching for what it is: the most fundamental, critical activity in our society.

But that’s obvious, you might say. Everyone knows that you can’t get anywhere these days without a decent education and that the nation’s welfare depends on an educated populace. Well then, where’s the glory around teaching? Why aren’t teachers being interviwed on TV and radio? Why aren’t thousands of young people asking themselves, “Do you think I can get to be a teacher? Do I have what it takes?”

Perhaps the reason our culture doesn’t award hero’s stature to teachers is that most  people assume they could be good teachers. That’s a fantasy. We have never come to grips with how hard it is to excel in teaching, how rare the required native talent, how much there is to learn, how innovative and flexible one must be, and how self-motivated to improve each year and not go stale in a job where there is no external change, no ladder to climb from one position to a new one. When we understand enough to marvel at a well-taught class as we marvel at a successful heart surgery, we will see true reform. The best and the brightest will apply to be teachers. We’ll focus on training and supporting them, not just with good pay, but with respect. They will do the rest. People who see themselves as heroes perform accordingly.

We see ourselves as we are seen. Year after year, in an annual workshop for experienced teachers of merit, my co-facillitator and I heard teachers tell stories of the status they lost when they entered the profession; many confessed that in their own parents’ eyes, “they were only a teacher.” How hurtfull! Surely those parents were reflecting the culture’s opinion. All that parental love and care, all that money set aside for college, had been in service of a different expectation. We began to focus the workshops on celebrating the teaching profession, helping the teachers  to see themselves as highly skilled professionals providing a service without which every other enterprise would collapse. Some of them told us later that the workshop was one of the reasons they stayed in the profession.

We need to do that on a national scale. For every breathless article about some twenty-something’s performance in a game the outcome of which changes the world not one jot, for every platinum recording of a song that will very likely be forgotten in a year or two, we need to feature a teacher. Let’s put TV cameras into classrroms where star teachers work, with an expert commentator, the way we do for sports, and show what happens in a good classroom, the decisions, minute by minute, the teacher makes. Instead of inviting some famous person to speak at the college graduation ceremony, let’s invite a local public school teacher whose work has opened doors for kids that otherwise were closed – some of whom will be in the audience. (Besides, she’ll probably make a better speech; she’s been making herself clear for years.) Prizes for teachers, parades for teachers: whatever shows we know their value.

We’ll have reform when, instead of  athletes and rock stars smiling at us from advertisements, holding up  an underarm deoderant, a pill to make us thin, we see teachers holding books.