Posted on: Tuesday, June 15, 2004
ISLAND VOICES
Teacher corps being ignored
By Kathleen Brindo
Fourth-grade teacher at Lana'i High and Elementary School
I'm a teacher with an earlier profession in advertising in Honolulu. I look on with amazement at the current dialogue on improving education. What I see is that education in general is on a downward trend in Hawai'i and nationwide, despite all the political rhetoric.
Why? If a survey were done, how many of the top 10 percent in any graduating class would be going into teaching? Twenty percent? How many valedictorians? How many good teachers have gone into other professions?
The teaching profession needs to become such an attractive one that it attracts and retains the best and brightest. As it stands, longtime teachers are retiring. Newer teachers are leaving the profession, despite receiving very specific education degrees.
Last year I met three young people who had teaching degrees. One quit to become a bartender, another to work in retail. One went into the tourist industry. They simply have choices and chose not to work in such a difficult system without the balance of an enticing paycheck.
Talk to any teacher. They all have a bureaucratic horror story. The increasing demands are overriding the time needed to simply teach and prepare to teach. The teaching profession has become so politicized, there is little empowerment among teachers.
It has also become a demoralized profession. It is very frustrating to be working nights, weekends, early morning, unpaid hours and be constantly reminded how poor a job you're doing when you're already giving your life and soul to the job. Don't remind me about getting summers off. Whatever you don't accomplish as a teacher in the summer comes back to bite you later in the year.
It is also demoralizing to see the inequity of bus drivers, sanitation workers, postal workers, laborers, military — so many of our friends and relatives without the years of education making more than we do. Hawai'i has the highest rate of teachers with master's degrees in the country. I have two degrees. My 23-year-old son-in-law, a Marine with housing allowance, full medical and commissary privileges, has more real expendable income than I do.
I think that the average citizen doesn't want to pay teachers well because he remembers bad teachers. Is keeping the salary low going to attract good ones?
If the teaching profession started new teachers at exemplary salaries, there would be competition for the jobs. More men would enter the profession. Areas of science and mathematics would be filled. Poor teachers would be weeded out because there would be a choice of whom to hire. There would be a much broader base from which to pull principals who are critical to a school's success. How many people aspire to be a school principal? The demands of that position are ones that not many are willing to undertake.
One thing I believe: States and counties will never pay teachers what they need to attract the best. Teacher salaries are simply too big a percentage of their budgets. In many states, education money comes from property tax. How many can afford to raise this tax? New homeowners with families? The elderly?
The federal government needs to get in the act, not with more regulations, but with unencumbered funds for teacher salaries. This is necessary to make education equitable across the nation from inner city to upper socioeconomic areas.
Education reform? Just talk. All the changes? Just changes. Ten years from now? I'm betting some politician will come up with a new catchy phrase and everyone will jump on the bandwagon. Teachers will be required to fill in more forms and will be told that the things they're doing now for No Child Left Behind were all wrong.
Nothing much will have changed. Our brightest young minds will still not be willing to become teachers. There will be a teacher shortage that will be filled by foreign workers, especially in the sciences, as is already happening. Maybe I'm wrong. This is one case where I'm hoping so. We'll see, won't we?
