On the best and brightest

The paradoxes of teaching workforce strategy

Bogomil Mihaylov (@bogomi) | Unsplash Photo Community

Robert Pondiscio is the kind of educator who consistently makes me sit up and listen — and even occasionally change my mind. His article on therapeutic education has been formative for me, helping me articulate something that has been niggling at me about student wellbeing approaches for some time. He recently did an ‘exit interview’ with the Massachusetts secretary of education, James Peyser, upon his resignation.

The best writers borrow from others, so here, I’m going to steal an approach that I enjoy reading from Marty at Bad Mathematics. He likes to annotate key policy announcements and speeches as though he has a ringside seat from which to heckle. I won’t be using it to throw shade, but rather comment on how aspects of this piece translate to an Australian context.

I’m going to focus here on just one observation — that trying to attract the ‘best and brightest’ into education may be contributing to a kind of ‘overpromise’ on education reform and the inevitable sense of failure that will result. The interview¹ with my commentary is below, with the original material in block quotes:

Pondiscio: The idea of predicating reform on attracting the cognitive elite into our classrooms feels to me like something that, in retrospect, we would do differently.

Peyser: Directionally, it still makes sense to try to get the best people we can into the field. I mean, why would you do otherwise?

I will start by saying that several years ago, I had unquestioned assumptions about the benefits of having the ‘cognitive elite’ enrolling en masse into teaching. It seemed like an ideal to me, something I would want my own children to experience — a genius at the front of every classroom. I conveniently ignored several of my own experiences in arriving at this view.

The first notable blind spot was that had I enrolled in teaching after high school, I would not have been one of the said cognitive elite. My high school career was lacklustre. And even if I was one of the high performers, my EQ and life experience was such that I probably wouldn’t have had much success as a teacher. Life has led me through several non-teaching careers and by the time I retrained, I was well placed with excellent people-management skills, experience in ‘getting things done,’ and a hunger for learning that was not remotely a feature of my youth.

Of course we want bright young people with the capacity to be continuous learners, people who have incredible content knowledge, and people who are able to stretch our most capable students. But this as a key feature of reform efforts that relies on far too many assumptions about workplace aptitude, persistence and, I hate to say it, soft skills. All this is before we consider that we are trying to attract (almost) children to teach children. Workplace and soft skills can be learned of course, but this emphasis on high performing entrants into teaching may come with a hidden cost.

Professor Nicole Mockler’s work on teaching and media representation speaks to the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) impacts of the ways that we as a society talk about teachers. When we think in binaries, then the implication of incentives for ‘elite minds’ is that we have a non-elite currently dragging down our teaching workforce. The paradox here is that prospective teachers see there’s a need for fewer dummies in teaching. Who wants to work with dummies? It’s no surprise teaching is perceived then to be poorly paid.

But even if you love the work, it may not always be a rewarding career. It seems to me that one of the problems is the sense that many teachers have when they enter a school, especially teachers with other career options, that they don’t have enough control over their destiny in their own classroom, that they’re not succeeding with their students, or the work environment is just sort of oppressively bureaucratic. You can only stand that for so long.

If you’re someone who’s got options, you’re going to move on to something else. If you see yourself as a cog in a great wheel, you can very quickly lose your enthusiasm, even if you love the children. But there’s no enterprise that will succeed for very long without a strong human capital pipeline. We need to constantly be working on that.

My view here is that Australian teachers experience a slightly different version of bureaucracy, one of risk and compliance rather than restriction in the classroom. My unpopular (in some circles) view is that teacher autonomy, especially when it comes to science of reading, learning and mathematics, is overrated. As an aside, autonomy has no impact on outcomes. We could do with a bit more bureaucracy inside our classrooms and less outside.

The same study as linked above shows that very low autonomy can lead to low job satisfaction (and by extension perhaps teacher attrition). I’ve (half) joked several times that I would leave a school before registration² rolled around again. In Australia, I don’t think it’s bureaucracy in the classroom that causes attrition, but perhaps a sense of powerlessness. In New South Wales for example, the public school system has been run — until recently — by bureaucrats. Responsibility for administrivia has been devolved to Principals under the guise of local decision-making, but important decisions about staffing are limited.

One of the practical problems with attracting the elite is that they are media-aware. They hear about issues like this; the alternatives to teaching involve a more attractive mid-late career pay scale, flexible work, and having weekends full of leisure activities. Don’t get me wrong - I love teaching, but the lifestyle is a commitment. The term consists of sprints, the year is a marathon and the holidays are often just a quick break before the next leg. I despair for teachers who are also single parents. It’s very rewarding but a logistical challenge that many young people just aren’t up for.

So, yes, we can’t say that we’ll fail unless we get only the brightest, smartest people in the world, but I think we should probably be setting our sights higher than we are, while at the same time providing better support for the educators we have.

Intuitively, it makes sense to attract clever people to teaching, and I realise this is not the only strategy being tabled by policy-makers. But the final paradox here is that as educators, we expect that all students can learn and improve, but we don’t put as much emphasis on this for our teaching workforce. Similarly, there has been no real reform concerning the breadth of what teachers do. In fact, this looks set to expand into an even greater emphasis on wellbeing measures.

Workforce planning is as much about retention as recruitment. The recent ‘Strong Beginnings’ report and the (hopefully!) resulting changes to ITE will go some way to ensuring the teachers we do attract stay for the long haul.

1. Full article here

2. like OFSTED but less oppressive