It's Good to Believe in Fridays Again

We had an interesting discussion in class this morning, where I surprised myself by being anti-teacher. The topic was public schooling versus private schooling, and the debate was over school voucher programs and the concept of controlled choice in schooling. Controlled choice is basically when parents are able to list the schools in order of preference for their child. When this takes place in traditional school districts, and it usually involves inter-district choice. When there happens to be more than one high/middle/elementary school in a district is where it starts to get interesting. And when you add in the increasing (and increasingly laudable) charter/magnet school population, then you start to really have a system where market forces can actually do some good--unlike the traditional voucher examples, where the market would probably destroy some neighborhood schools while shifting the problem to others.

Anyway, that's all background. The meat of the issue is that I don't think overhauling the system is the answer. Or that I don't think it's enough of the answer to justify spending billions of taxpayer dollars on those kind of reforms, yet. I think the real problem is teachers. Not all of them, and certainly not just them, but the state of the teaching corps in the country is in desperate need of some reform. Teaching should be one of the most sought-after postitions in the economy. Teachers should be well-rewarded, rigorously trained, and held to exactingly high standards. Even more crucially, teachers should love their job, and I mean eat, sleep, and breathe teaching. They should be happy, enthusiastic, knowledgable, and completely backed up by all the resources the government has to offer.

The public image (especially among recent college graduates) of teaching as a profession needs to be revamped so that the best and brightest among us will see teaching not as résumé-padding or a ticket out of student loan debt, but as a field in which they can be happy, proud, successful, and motivated to succeed, not to mention focused on preparing the next generation of minds for intellectual and civic engagement. Trying to change the nature of public education without changing the recruitment, retention, and infrastructure of the teacher corps is a kind of big-picture myopia.