Source: Harold J. Noah, "'Goodbye, Mr. Chips':
A proposal for the abolition of the lifetime
classroom teacher," Teachers College Record
68 (1967): 663-668. Reprinted by permission.
'GOODBYE MR. CHIPS': A PROPOSAL FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE LIFETIME CLASSROOM TEACHER
The American high school has received a great deal of expert attention in the past ten years. Commissions and individuals have reported on virtually every aspect of curriculum, staffing, administration, finance, guidance, counselling, equipment, race balance, student age structure, and so on ad infinitum. Nor does the flood of diagnosis, prescription and prognosis show sign of early abatement. Yet it is the contention of this author that much of this writing has simply missed the point. To see what is wrong with American (and foreign) high schools and, in fact, with our total concept of education for adolescents, all we need to do is to take a close look at what goes on in the classrooms day after day during the school year. What is it like to be a classroom teacher in a typical junior or senior high school? The ineffaceable memory carried away by a serious observer who stays for more than the usual fleeting, casual visit is the crashing boredom which afflicts both the teachers and the taught for most of the school day. Now and again, but all too rarely, the teacher is caught by the essential nobility of the job he is trying to do: the opening of young minds to great ideas. But more often than not, all is gray routine, in which the dead hand of monotony and repetition muffles any spark of originality in teaching and of interest in the minds of listeners. The teacher is trapped in a system which almost seems designed to ensure that creativity will be killed. Minds are great in proportion to the company they keep.
The company which an American high school teacher is condemned to keep year after year during working hours in the classroom is well-nigh guaranteed to drag down the most exalted intellect into mediocre performance.
Escaping the Classroom
One of the most striking things about the classroom teacher is the avidity with which he will grasp at any opportunity to escape from it, if only for an hour or so. Let there be the chance to spend a little time during the week in a quiet office completing students' records, interviewing parents, doing school accounts, counselling individual students, counting lunch money, or simply checking on tardy students, and the average teacher goes to it with unconcealed and justified relief. At least here, for a precious space of time, he is relieved of the gruelling pressures of the classroom, where he is always on view, always in demand, always asking and answering questions, cajoling, threatening, jollying along, giving and taking in endless and multifarious personal contact. There are a few teachers of genius to whom this does not apply but they are rare beings and do not characterize the mass. How else can one explain the fact that teachers have not risen up in their collective wrath and struck down a system which requires them to act from time to time as clerical help, janitors, warders, feeding supervisors, and accountants? Some teachers, of course, justify their participation in these auxiliary activities as being essentially part of the good teacher's job, as if there were some special virtue in having a highly trained teacher watch over Johnny's table habits, or record and track down his occasional tardiness. But none of this really rings true, and the real answer is that teachers know that the alternative to hall-patrol, lunch-room supervision, and clerical duties is, horribile dictu, more classroom work per day, and almost anything is preferable to that fate.
The Energy Drain
What is it about the work of the professional teacher which is so gruesome, and which so enervates and drains of pedagogical merit the work of the undeniably well-meaning and hard-working men and women staffing our high school classrooms? The answer is crystal clear to anybody who has done the job himself: after 45 minutes on the mountain top of pedagogical effort, the teacher is drained of energy. A master teacher can repeat a first-rate performance in the period immediately following, but ask him to do it the third, fourth and fifth periods that day, and flesh and mind simply fail. Teaching at top flight is even more demanding than acting, for good teaching is almost wholly an extempore performance, in which the teacher is continuously reacting with and to the class, and in which he must be, by turns, didact, preacher, disciplinarian, model, audience, dramatist, producer, director, and adviser, all the while the cynosure of 30 pairs of eyes. Even more important than the effect of a lifetime sentence of school-teaching upon the minds of the teachers are the consequences for the minds of the students in high school. It does not matter if our automobiles are repaired by bored mechanics: the automobiles will not resent it, nor will their functioning be impaired. But, let young students be taught by indifferent, bored, and routinizing teachers, and we are condemning their minds to struggle for development in the most unfavorable soil. We are setting up obstacles which a well-motivated few will surmount, but which will surely defeat the majority. Even those who do win through will only do so at a price in psychic development which we would be unwilling to let them pay if we knew the full score; and we are squandering in profligate manner the most precious resource we possess.
Lengthening Days
When education was typically a voluntary matter between the parent and the school, both acting on behalf of the child, there was some partial check to the system. The school year was much shorter than it is now; the school day was shorter; and school-keeping had not yet in most places become the life-long calling of professionals. Moreover, the child's total school career was shorter, so that what the child may conceivably be able to tolerate (if not overly profit from) in his early years to the age of 12 or 13, was not prolonged as it is nowadays into the years of relative maturity which follow. But, now, the State makes the most grandiose claims on the time and energies of young people, commandeering the child from his third or fourth year of life until his early twenties, 38 to 40 weeks a year, 5 dys a week, 6 or 7 hours a day, placing him in the charge of professionals who will be spending most of their working lives similarly "cribb'd, cabin'd and confin'd."
In the proportion that the State claims the right so to preempt the time of young people, it must assume the responsibility for ensuring that what goes on inside the schools is the very best that society can provide. Anything else is not merely hypocrisy of the first order, it is also surpassing stupidity in the formulation of social policy. One of the earliest and most enduring justifications for State support and provision of education and for extending the operation of compulsory schooling legislation was the contention that more schooling meant less juvenile delinquency, less crime, and less hooliganism among young people. "Open a school and close a prison," went the slogan. Education was worth paying for communally, it was argued, because the benefits went in important measure to the community. How sure can we be now that this relationship between extended schooling and greater civic peace holds good in the vastly changed circumstances of the second half of the twentieth century? For now we have extended compulsory schooling well into the years of physiological and psychological maturity, and if the education which our schools afford serves more to bore than to excite and more to alienate than to attract, then additional schooling may conceivably contribute more to the creation than to the alleviation of juvenile unrest. The crux of this discussion is, then, that what is wrong with the American public schools is not that we don't have enough children in school for long enough; it is not that our schools are too big (or too small); it is not that the buildings are too grandiose or too squalid; or that the textbooks are inadequate, the administration inept, or the teachers poorly trained. What is wrong is that most people engaged in the classroom are simply bored to tears with what they are doing. We now turn to a way to remedy this, and thereby to make possible at last the realization in public education of what Lawrence A. Cremin has termed "the authentic vision of American progressivism."
Two Categories of Teachers
The twin principles must be firmly adopted and acted upon that children need far fewer hours of conventional classroom instruction than we have usually provided, but that each of these hours must be under the instruction of none but the very best practitioners that our society can supply. To accomplish this requires that appointment as a high school teacher becomes one of the most honored (and best remunerated) positions that a man or woman can occupy in our society. The proposals which follow are designed to serve that end. There would be two broad categories of teachers. The first would be composed of young people who have very recently graduated from college and who are entering teaching as their first serious job. The second category would be made up of mature practitioners of a profession or vocation outside the high schools, who are invited to work in them under specific conditions which will shortly be described.
Entrants into teaching directly from college will be offered initially one-year contracts, renewable thereafter for a further maximum period of three years. Contracts will definitely not be renewed for a fifth consecutive year of teaching, on the ground that even if the young teacher is still teaching at the top of his form, he needs to get out into the wider world of society, if only for the sake of the quality of the experience he conveys to his students. These young teachers must find another job, outside of classroom teaching (and even outside of formal education), perhaps in an occupation which uses the subject in which they instruct, but not necessarily so. After two years outside the classroom, they may be invited back for a further maximum of two years teaching. But no contract would be available for a third consecutive year of teaching, and they would be asked to go back to work outside the schools for a minimum of two years, before being considered for return to the schools. Thus, after the initial four year period, the 'professional' teacher would alternate two years of classroom teaching with two 'refresher' years of work outside the classroom. A great deal of thought would have to be given to the kind of jobs the two-year in, two-year out teachers could do. But there are increasing opportunities in government service (at home and abroad), business, industry, the entertainment and advertising industries, and in the rapidly growing 'education industry' itself for the regularly alternated employment of teachers in two-year periods.
Part-time Practitioners
We now turn to the second category of teachers. In modern society a vast reservoir of potential teaching talent is locked up in the mature professionals presently working outside the schools. Many of these people simply cannot afford to take blocks of time out of their careers to work in the classrooms: school salaries are too low, and the ambitious man or woman knows that he dare not get off the ladder of promotion in his present career. Yet it is precisely these able, vigorous, highachieving practitioners in business, the professions, the arts, and industry whom we desperately need in the schools. To secure them, they should be invited to become teachers on a one-day-a-week basis. In this way, they will be devoting most of their time to what presumably interests them most, their regular jobs, but they will also have the opportunity to contribute to the work of education without harming their careers. Any who get bitten with the bug of teaching, could, of course, transfer to the two-year in, two-year out plan described above (just as two-year in, two-year out teachers could transfer to a one-day-a-week basis). Oneday-a-week teachers would be hired on a year-by-year, or even semester-by-semester basis.
There are certain practical problems to be faced in all this. They reduce to devising the incentives so that people will:
- accept a lifetime pattern of work divided between teaching and work outside the school;
- abandon the traditional claim of teachers to tenured positions;
- want to come into the schools from outside jobs, even though they are among the top practitioners in their fields.
And then there is the question: what will it all cost? Will it all be prohibitively expensive? Clearly some radical solutions are required. The most important follow.
Higher Pay and Shorter Hours
First, apart from beginners serving their initial four-year contracts, all who come back into the schools (either on the oneday-a-week, or on the two-year in, twoyear out, basis) will be paid at a rate equal to 50 percent more than their present salaries. This will generate the competition for jobs in the classrooms which is necessary if young people are to be released from a compulsory 12-year servitude under bored mediocrities. Classroom teaching then becomes not an empty honor, but one of the most desirable jobs in the community. Four-year beginners would not be paid much more than beginning teachers get now. Second, we stop asking teachers to try to do the impossible: teach in an inspiring, vigorous, and exemplary manner for more than 2 to 2½ hours a day. No teacher would be expected to give more than 3 normal periods of classroom instruction per day. But during that time he would be expected to teach: not supervise the written work of his students; not referee a classroom discussion or debate; not listen to students reading around the room from a textbook; not do clerical work; nor any of the other devices or excuses which would deprive the student of contact with the first-rate people whom the schools have so expensively employed. A further hour a day would be spent by the teachers in more informal, club-hobby-interest type situations. Here, even more than in formal classroom lessons, teachers who have been selected for employment in the schools precisely because they happen to have intellects and professional abilities of outstanding quality will demonstrate in their own personae exemplars of successful operation in the outside world. People warm to, and need, the example of success; and no one requires this more than the child from a poor, unsuccessful home. This daily hour, too, would provide the setting for the teacher to make use of resources drawn from work outside the school, to bring into the school others with whom he works, whose experience would be invaluable in developing students' social attitudes and view of the world. Third, teachers will be provided with the clerical, janitorial, and supervisory help needed to cover all the non-teaching chores associated with school-keeping.
Box and Cox
Fourth, teachers who enter the school on the initial four-year contract basis will be encouraged to form a two-man team with a colleague with similar academic training In this way a given employer and a given school board can hire the team on a Box & Cox system: one member of the team in school for two years, and the other member in a non-school job, then turnabout. Fifth, a few teachers will be invited to act as principals and assistant principals of schools, but no administrative position of this kind
will be tenured, and none will be held for more than two years at a time. Administrators will be expected to alternate classroom teaching with administrative work inside the schools, and with work entirely outside the school system. There seems to be no good reason why school administrators would have to be remunerated more highly than the already highly remunerated classroom teacher. Nor should school administrators be allowed to make out of principalship a lifetime career punctuated by one day a week
in the classroom. A school is a school, and good teachers (if they are to remain good) need a break from it. Sixth, there are obvious implications in the above proposals for sweeping away the jungle of regulations for certifying and qualifying teachers, which now hamper attempts to recruit into teaching highly trained and motivated people. An ax must be laid at the roots of this exotic bureaucratic growth, and teachers should be hired on the basis of what they demonstrate they can do in the classroom
with children, instead of according to meaningless accumulations of minima of semester-hours of study in specific pedagogical areas. 1 Last, we turn to what all this might cost, or rather, how much more it might cost than the present bill, which averages about 53 cents per student per hour in public schools.2
Technology and Reorganization
The key to a realistic estimate of the costs of the proposed reorganization is to apply the guiding principle of these proposals: that high school students are, in fact, over-scheduled and undertaught by exposure to too many hours a day of what passes for classroom instruction, but which for too much of the time is an exercise in advanced boredom. Under the proposal advanced here it is no longer necessary to think in terms of organizing the high school day on the basis of about seven or eight "lesson
periods," in the conventional manner. We have to recognize that if a student receives two hourly lessons a day from first-rate, fresh and vigorous teachers, he is infinitely better off than under the existing system. Modern educational technology, in the form of a combination of improved textbooks, library resources, programmed texts, teaching machines, language laboratories, and film and video resources can take over much of the burden of routine instruction, practice, and enrichment. The student
can thus have a fully scheduled day "in school," but his day will be quite differently organized, around a "core" of attendance for a total of two hours a day with master teachers in formal instructional work, plus a further hour a day with them in more informal club-hobby-interest situations. The remainder of the day is then available for a variety of mainly individualized activities based on the use of advanced educational technology. It is these considerations which make the
proposals financially feasible, even though each teacher will teach much less than at present and be paid more. Because it is proposed to cut down severely the number of classroom instruction hours which students receive, it will not be necessary to replace each of the present teachers by a highly paid "master teacher." A rough calculation seems to run as follows: A school system at present employing 50 teachers for 1,250 high school students would have to find about 40 master teachers (full
time equivalents) to give an average class size of about 30 students, plus about another 20 auxiliaries, who would have a certain amount of pedagogical knowledge and an interest in working in schools, but who need not be as highly trained as many teachers are today. These auxiliaries would work a six or seven hour day, five days a week, and would be charged with much of the non-instructional duty at present falling on teachers. Without doubt, the salary bill to be met would be higher than at present, but
not outrageously and unacceptably so. Master teachers would probably receive about twice what teachers are earning today; auxiliaries would earn somewhat less than present teachers. Total salary costs might, on average, almost double. The average cost of public school education would go up from 53 cents to 86 cents per student per hour.3 For the entire country and its 44 million enrollment, the total extra bill would amount to about $15.7 billion a year.
This is no small sum,4but the returns are likely to be phenomenally high; and there are some potential economies which have not been discussed here, such as, possibilities of shortening the present twelve years of schooling and of attracting voluntary labor (especially mothers) into the schools as auxiliaries. Whatever the final extra bill, only a radical approach to expelling the boredom at present built in to schooling will suffice. To do less is to sell our high school youth short and to waste much of the money we are already spending. In education, as in business, you generally get what you pay for: we can no longer afford to fob off high school students with a cheap, boring, and essentially inefficient product.
NOTES
-
There is a political problem to be faced here. Our
traditional certification requirements and regulations were
originally intended as some guard against political favoritism
and nepotism in teaching appointments. Since teaching jobs have
become much less than desirable plums, certification requirements
no longer perform that particular function, but the problem of
favoritism in appointment will appear once again when the
schoolteacher's job reemerges as one worth having. There are no
easy solutions here, but the experience of Charles Brown,
Superintendent of Schools in Newton, Mass. is encouraging. Mr.
Brown is now almost free of entangling state certification
requirements in appointing teachers for his school system, yet
there are no charges of favoritism levelled at him, because there
are still qualifying examinations to be passed, and these provide
some objective standard of merit. [BACK]
-
$20 billion spent on running the public schools recently
(1964-1965) took care of 41.4 million children. This averages
$484 per student per year. A typical school year consists of
about 900 instructional hours, so that (on average) we spend just
53 cents per child per hour, or less than most people pay for
babysitting service. The average figures conceal a wide
dispersion for different school districts. While New York City
spends over $900 per student per year, Alabama gets by with less
than $300; and differences within states are as wide as
differences among states. [BACK]
-
Calculation based upon instructional salaries as 70 percent of
total current costs. [BACK]
-
But compare it with the total Gross National Product of $650-
$700 billion; the direct defense budget of $60-$70 billion; and
outlays on tobacco and alcoholic drink of $21 billion. Also,
perhaps one-fifth of the additional income to teachers will be
returned to public authorities through the tax system.
[BACK]