How Teaching has Changed in America

The profession of teaching has been altered much more over the past 20 years than that of most other public sector professions. Stakeholders in public education—teachers and administrators, students, parents, and school boards—have been forced to adjust to change at a faster and faster pace. Let’s look at a few examples since I graduated high school in a California suburb in the late 1970s.

NCLB

Unlike a unitary government, such as France, our country was set up as a federalist system, giving state and local governments power to pick what to teach and how to teach it. The passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation has, for the first time, given our central government in Washington, D.C. real power over the teaching stakeholders. NCLB demands that schools perform, as measured over time by a non-stop increase in state test scores. Non-performing schools lose their autonomy and are then managed by someone else. None of the traditional (local) stakeholders have a say when this loss of autonomy happens.

High stakes testing, the only assessment that evaluates whether a school passes muster, has assumed much more importance for administrators and board members. (As an aside, I found the state accreditation process to be much fairer then NCLB in judging the effectiveness and accountability of schools, since accreditation does not assume that we all live in the same neighborhoods.) Therefore, high stakes testing drives the curriculum mapping of my department. We ensure that students have learned about the Cold War, for example, before the April testing. Some teachers would prefer to teach about the Cold War in May, allowing them to spend more time earlier on WWI or the Great Depression. I won’t allow it. I demand, not always successfully, that my department follows an agreed-upon curriculum map, so all students will learn the state-mandated curriculum by the April deadline. Teachers, rugged individualists on the high school level, did not consistently follow a curriculum map when I was in high school. One history teacher might get caught up in the election of 1948 and never quite emerge from the 1950s while another teacher would save her fire for the 1968 political conventions.

Now that the Federal Government is up to its waist in the teaching business, school boards and administrators may be replaced if kids don’t learn the state standards. They will be held accountable to higher levels of student proficiency than was previously demanded. Boards and administrators find themselves lost in a logical dilemma: if they support the tough standards of NCLB, they must continuously improve instruction and risk failing. They take the side of the public, against the side of the entrenched interests--usually veteran teachers and their supporters--risking strife in the internal district organization such as an administration versus teachers internecine struggle. On the other hand, if boards and administrators take the side of the entrenched interests against NCLB, they risk alienating the voters that elected them and incurring the vicious wrath of Uncle Sam.

Traditional Teaching Methods Don’t Work Like Before

At the same time that the Feds demand increased accountability, the students no longer respond the same way to traditional methods of teaching. My generation of suburban high school kids differed little from my parents’ bobby socks generation before it. We used the same educational tools and much of the same technology. Today’s high school students grew up with personal computers and computer games, email, instant messenger, cell phones, and video. I had a pen pal from France and mailed her letters, which took a couple of weeks each way. I played chess and monopoly with people I could see, smell (unfortunately) and touch, and I tried to avoid fist fights after the game. I couldn’t play tournament chess after the Berkeley chess club closed its doors at midnight. I can play tournament chess all day and all night on Yahoo games now. I don’t even need to be near a computer and can play on a cell phone. High school technology academies base instruction on technological platforms.

Television has also changed. Kids play violent video games with interactive controls on the TV. After they get tired of that they may then choose programming from hundreds of cable stations. As a high school senior, I could choose from nine television stations. (Outside of the San Francisco Bay Area consumers had even less choice.) Every ten-year-old in my community watched Mr. Ed or Hogan’s Heroes—no other programming but network and local television was available.

The media of my youth, network television, movies, books, newspapers, and magazines, has taken a back seat to mostly free video and internet. Outside of school, kids read less and engage in little formal writing. Email and texting have taken over these communicating tasks. Both the skills of academic writing and the levels of cultural literacy have declined. Indeed, the overly casual and rushed manic messages in the typical teen’s email, the phoneticism of texting, and the glorification of ignorant thugs as pop culture heroes have shaped many students into semi-literates.

Change in parent-teacher relationships--from teacher’s helper to partisan advocate

Parent-teacher relationships have changed too, though not as radically as the new technology has transformed students. I believe the role of middle class parents has changed in response to increased competitiveness in college entry. When all must contend for increasingly difficult college entrance, the competition changes normal reticent middle class parents into sharks at a feeding frenzy.

Despite the global decline in student academic performance, the elite still perform very well, and there are more of them as our population has expanded. I was accepted into the University of California, Berkeley, but my A minus high school GPA and skills in music and chess were unexceptional by today’s standards. Today that high school record would, at best, gain entry into a second tier school in the University of California system. My alma mater, Berkeley, currently accepts high school seniors with an average GPA of 4.3!

Parents have responded to the challenge by advocating for their children. No longer is school the domain of the experts, the teachers and administrators, and if the parents would just get their kids to shut up and behave, all would be well. No, today many parents serve as their children’s assistants and paralegals, doing their homework for them, serving as counsel when they get in trouble or receive a poor grade, and taking their side in disputes with teachers and administrators. As a high school student, when I decided on a beautiful spring day to go to the beach instead of the classroom my parents refused to give me an excuse note even though it was “senior cut day.” My high school assistant principal told me to sign in with one of the secretaries the next day, and I ended up picking up litter on school grounds for a couple of hours. Let’s fast forward to today. This year, more than 90 percent of my students out for senior cut day were “out sick.” Almost every absent student received an excuse note from their parents. The parents’ new attitude has changed: “If we parents take an occasional day off, why not let the kids do the same?”

Changes in Student Health

Similarly, teachers fight on the front lines against disease and poor hygiene. When schools asked that children get their kids vaccinated, my parents lined me up with every other kid outside the grammar school to get a jab from a vaccine gun. Today a small number of parents are persuaded by non-scientific internet claims that vaccinations cause autism and other problems to children with healthy immune systems. These parents think they know more about the causes of autism and immunology than epidemiologists and the medical establishment and put everyone at risk.

Recently the New York Times caught the story about a Whooping Cough epidemic in my Marin County California (New York Times, July 11, 2010, Vaccination Rate Lags as anEpidemic Spreads, pp. 25-26.). See also an article on an outbreak of tuberculosis at Logan High School in the San Francisco Bay Area .The problem isn’t limited to a few anti-immunization fanatics that give an unwanted boost to pertussis bacterium. School boards and state and federal officials allow children of illegal immigrants in the classroom, children that have grown up in the third world and have not had the benefit of American preventive medicine. Not surprisingly, the American classroom has become a breeding ground for nasty varieties of influenza. In 2009 between a quarter and half of my students missed school because of the Swine Flu. I anxiously await the next needless epidemic. This is not a productive change. Teachers must do everything they can to keep themselves healthy—wash hands, get vaccinated, maintain a social support system, and eat right, sleep, and exercise.

Changes in Respect for Teachers’ Authority and Competence

My parents never challenged a teacher’s grading policy, curriculum, or discipline. Other parents would occasionally challenge disproportionate discipline, nebulous grading procedures, or unjustifiable teacher behavior in the classroom. Today my fellow teachers, sometimes rightly but usually not, suffer constant challenges to grading, curriculum, competency, and classroom management. Parents have berated me for disciplining too hard and for not disciplining enough, for not talking about certain historians, or for talking about other ones. After all, they have read a few books too and are not going to let their little Johnny get kept out of Harvard by this uninformed teacher who doesn’t know what to teach. This teacher couldn’t handle a career in the real world and is supported by the taxpayers, so why listen to him? I may have exaggerated the point, but many in the profession have suffered this type of humiliation. Don’t take it personally!

Only one thing may be worse than the over involvement of parents in middle class schools—the under involvement of parents in the inner city schools. I did my student teaching in a high school that served poor and working class families. If I was able to talk to a busy, stressed parent instead of a message machine, I was told that it was my job to fix the kid. That’s what I was paid for.

Changes in Students’ Respect for Teachers

Parental respect for teachers still exists but has declined, correlating with the decline or respect that students have for teachers. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously coined the term, “defining deviancy down.” The school that I teach is comparable to the high school that housed me for four years. Keeping socio-economic status constant, I have found adolescents over the years less supervised at home and exposed to a more violent and sexually explicit media that glorifies criminal behavior and immediate gratification. Some parents choose not to allow the toxic messages of television in their house and belong to religious and communal organizations that instill proper values, even respect for teachers. Good for them. When that doesn’t happen, teachers must socialize as well as instruct. No one ever said our job was easy. We work against strong cultural forces, but the rewards are worth the effort. Most veteran teachers can recall a surly 15-year-old that, through a teacher’s or coach’s mentoring and inspiration was turned into a respectable citizen three years later.

What to do right now: Mentoring is part of teaching. Create a relationship with a few of your at-risk kids, especially students that are young, freshmen or sophomores. Simply talking to these kids one-on-one for a few minutes each week may be the most positive and effective communication they receive at this time in their lives. I find these conversations most effective right before winter and summer vacations—I have developed trust, and they will have some time to reflect about our conversation. Bring up their academic goals and your academic goals for them; their extra curricular goals such as joining athletic teams and school clubs and your ideas; their summer plans and your plans for them; their goals for getting a job and your opinion on whether they should be working and where to look. I tend to self-disclose only if it will humanize me or give me more credibility in the discussion. For example, I talk about college life, what it’s like to work and go to school at the same time; and how hard graduates will have to work at their first serious job. I tend to leave the more entertaining self-disclosures, the name of my cat and how many children I have, to the general classroom, and I use these self-disclosures when I want to warm up the classroom atmosphere. Assume that all self-disclosures become public knowledge, so don’t tell the kids information that would scandalize their parents.