Unit II. British education reform
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Main topic: The key directions of the educational reform Additional topics:
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LIVING UP TO LABOUR VISION
(Anne Lee, The Independent, January 7, 1999)
Now that the issue of raising standards in schools has been made the Government’s top priority, has three ministers in charge of it and a professor to advise the Government on it, how can we ensure that these standards actually are raised?
With more than 25 per cent of the new Government having had teaching experience, we are entitled to expect some enlightenment, but not necessarily unanimity, on the subject.
Ministers must approach this thorny issue balancing both the economists’ and the psychologists’ points of view. In the classroom, we already know what creates good teaching and learning. The difficult part is working out how to make it happen. We know that in the Czech Republic, educational attainment at the age of 13 in mathematics and science is nearly at the top of the international league tables, even though the state spends less than half as much per pupil as we do. However, the culture in the Czech Republic is to value education above all. Can David Blunkett create this culture here among our disaffected, underachieving boys?
This is not an argument for budget cuts: there are too many familiar stones of insufficient supplies of out-of-date textbooks. I heard of one pupil who moved in the sixth form to an independent school from the state system. She earned herself some good-natured heckling when, at the end of the first lesson, she offered to collect up the photocopied worksheets: “You mean we are allowed to keep them?”
Resources in the classroom are vital. Teachers have learnt through years of parsimony to make a little go a long way, so a little more in the classroom and a little less on bureaucracy might go a very long way.
Good teaching is a skill that can be taught at training college, and ought to be reinforced through continuing professional education. Having been head teacher at a school where, as well as dealing with the very bright, we enabled students with mediocre abilities to attain respectable A-level grades, I know this can be done. It requires great dedication, good systems, prompt feedback to students and to other teachers. It requires both resources and a culture in which the head teacher and parents readily praise and value classroom achievement, yet do not shirk from problems.
It is easier to achieve high standards in schools where the size creates a sense of community (say, up to 650 pupils) and it is no accident that in the independent sector, it is the smallest schools (200-350 pupils) which serve the less academically able pupils the best. Perhaps new Labour will be bold enough to ask why parents are increasingly choosing the independent system if they can.
Sometimes it has just got too dire. Closing the failing schools, replacing a governing body or temporarily placing two head teachers in a post where one could not possibly win are all important last resort tools.
It has been suggested that the new head teachers’ qualification will become mandatory. Certainly the role of the head teacher is central to any attempt to raise standards. They must know how to use the disciplinary and competency procedures. They also need to know they will get reasonable backing from their governors and local education authorities.
Good teaching includes having clear objectives for each lesson. It includes using a combination of whole-class teaching and discovery learning. It means knowing how to handle questions, both the innocent and the disruptive sort, and handing back marked work promptly. We know that people learn in different ways, and learn most when they feel loved and esteemed. Computers can support, but they will never be able to replace the qualified teacher.
We must learn to recognise, reward and use those many teachers who are outstanding, rather than easing them out because they are too expensive. We need those whose classroom skills are constantly good, who take the trouble to update their expertise, who can coach and advise junior teachers and who make cultural or sporting contributions to school life which, shame on us, we have taken for granted for so long.
Though a general teaching council must regulate minimum standards, we should award the outstanding the status in our society that they deserve and call them “chartered teachers”.
But how will we know when standards are rising? We will know when we agree not to keep changing the goalposts and can monitor exam results. We will know by watching our country's results in the international educational studies. One day (please) employers may comment on our well skilled and flexible workforce.
ASSIGNMENTS:
I. Language
1. Explain in English and then translate the following words and expressions into Russian:
Underachieving, to collect up photocopied worksheets, head teacher, a sense of community, local educational authority, governor.
2. Translate the following expressions into Russian:
A thorny issue, educational attainment, parsimony, to make a little go a long way, to reinforce a skill through sth, to attain a grade, prompt feedback to sb, dedication, to shirk from problems, to use disciplinary and competence procedures, to have clear objectives for each lesson, whole-class teaching, discovery learning, disruptive questions, to recognise and reward good teachers, to ease a teacher out, classroom skills, to update one’s expertise, to coach and advise junior teachers, to make cultural or sporting distribution to school life, well-skilled and flexible workforce.
3. Explain how the author coined the term “chartered teachers” and what meaning she attached to it.
II. Contents
When carrying out the following assignments, please make use of the previously discussed words and expressions.
1. Single out the factors that may determine the improvement in the educational system and arrange them in order of importance. Discuss each of these factors individually, relying on your personal experience if necessary.
2. Discuss the various classroom teaching methods mentioned in the text. On the basis of your individual experience, speak of their advantages and disadvantages.
3. Identify problems that are common for the systems of education in both Russia and the UK and discuss the solutions. Use the previously discussed texts as well as other sources of information if necessary.
4. How does the author see the role of teacher in education reforms? Would her position influence your choice of career and why?
ADDITIONAL TEXTS
BALANCE AND FLEXIBILITY
(David Blunkett, The Times, September 9, 1999)
Yesterday I announced my decisions on the national curriculum for 2000. I believe that we have struck the right balance between prescription and flexibility.
Inevitably, there is controversy about what is included and what is left out. We made some adjustments to the initial proposals after consultation: strengthening the history framework to emphasise key events, dates and the importance of chronological understanding (and to ensure that 7 to 11-year-olds continue to study the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings in Britain); and extending in English the lists of classic authors and poets, and requiring that writers are chosen from those lists.
The new framework for personal, social and health education is clear about the importance of marriage and parenting and we are encouraging schools to adopt the Statement of Values drawn up with the churches and others three years ago. We have also introduced an important place for financial literacy, so that pupils learn how to manage their family and personal finances in adulthood.
Other features remain from before the consultation: new citizenship lessons (compulsory in secondary schools from 2002) to promote a greater understanding of democracy, and an improved secondary maths curriculum.
We are demanding a lot from teachers at present. So we have sought to ensure that the changes we have made will improve standards and allow flexibility where it is prudent and possible to do so.
Teachers asked us to include an exemplary non-fiction list. So we suggest some essayists, travel writers, journalists, diarists and writers about the natural world. The list is necessarily brief and hardly exhaustive, but includes people such as Samuel Pepys, Winston Churchill, Alistair Cooke, James Cameron and David Attenborough. It is not, as some suggest, “new Labour’s list of our greatest thinkers”.
Such debates show how we have moved on from when James Callaghan first controversially floated the idea of a national curriculum in 1976 — it was finally introduced by Kenneth Baker, the Conservative Education Secretary, in 1988 (whose own work with Bernard Crick has helped us to introduce the citizenship lessons from 2002). A national curriculum is now firmly a part of the educational landscape.
The new curriculum offers greater flexibility. In primary schools, we introduced the daily literacy hour last year. Teachers do not see this as a burden, far from it, 70 per cent of schools opted to introduce the numeracy strategy at the same time. The rest do so this term and we will soon learn the first key stage results with the new programmes.
The 1988 curriculum did not get it right on primary literacy and numeracy. With our new frameworks, we are finally redressing an imbalance and introducing a focus on phonics, spelling and grammar in English, and on mental arithmetic in mathematics, which has been absent from too many primary schools for perhaps 30 years.
Take-up of the strategies has been enthusiastic and widespread, but despite some criticism, good schools have always been free to adapt other strategies, provided they get the results.
The new curriculum restores some reduced prescription to those subjects where we had lifted the orders to support the 3Rs. These subjects have remained compulsory in any case, but I believe we are now striking the right balance in primaries — and am hopeful that we will soon see evidence of the effectiveness of our new approach after its first year.
In secondary schools, we have made less change. We have sought to offer some more flexibility, but at the same time ensure that pupils have a core of knowledge, particularly between 11 and 14.
For older teenagers, the work-related learning option is proving popular for those with more vocational interests and I expect its popularity to increase as the GNVQ (General National Vocational Qualification) Part One extends nationally this year. Greater flexibility at Key Stage 4 (for 14 to 16-year-olds) is an important weapon for teachers in the battle against truancy and social exclusion — and will be important in helping us to increase staying-on rates.
We are also providing teachers with more flexibility to stretch able pupils, enabling them to study in more depth their strongest subjects and, where appropriate, to take one or two GCSEs at 14.
There are those who argue that the curriculum has become too utilitarian, that it has crowded out the arts or physical education. I believe that not only are they wrong, but that other measures we have taken help to safeguard and strengthen these subjects.
The new after-school clubs network we are developing will greatly extend opportunities offered in the school day for the arts and sport, and new specialist colleges will enable more secondaries to provide a stronger focus on those subjects. Other measures are also helping. Strict new criteria have greatly reduced the sale of school playing fields. We have reversed years of decline in music funding with a new £180 million fund to promote expanded instrumental tuition and music services.
Developing the curriculum presents difficult choices and balances. There will always be subject lobbyists who think that their subject must take priority over all others. There are still those (including the Opposition front bench) who think all would be well with the 3Rs if schools were left to continue with a laissez-faire approach.
I believe, however, that we have a duty to give every child a basic entitlement, regardless of which state school they attend (and many independent schools opt for the national curriculum too), but to enable teachers to have as much flexibility as is feasible given the importance of that objective. The new curriculum achieves that balance.
WHAT MAKES A FIRST-CLASS TEACHER?
(Judith Judd, The Independent, January 14, 1993)
Anxiety about standards and the demands of teaching nine national curriculum subjects to young pupils have pushed the quality of primary schooling to the top of the education agenda.
There have been a number of important studies during the past 20 years that have provided clear clues to what makes good primary teaching, but, until recently, most teachers have paid little attention to them. Politicians have paid even less. In her pamphlet “What We Know About Effective Primary Teaching”, published last year, Caroline Gipps, a researcher at the Institute of Education in London, says: “Education in this country is characterised by the absence of any serious discussion of pedagogy — the science of teaching — and official documents are characterised by their absence of theory.” During the whole of the development of the national curriculum, she points out, nobody gave a thought to how it was going to be taught.
All that is changing, however. For the past year, the National Curriculum Council has been reviewing the primary curriculum: its final report went to John Patten, Secretary of State for Education, last week. Mr Patten has yet to decide when he will publish it, but the report's broad contents are well known.
It advocates a better mix of individual, group and whole-class teaching, with more teaching by subject specialists; it proposes slimming down the curriculum content without reducing the range of subjects covered; and it urges the Government to take a hard look at whether primary teachers are being properly trained to deliver the national curriculum.
Ministers and their advisers are now talking about the themes that have preoccupied researchers and inspectors for 15 years: the value of traditional instruction from the front of the class, the need to teach only one subject area at a time rather than all-embracing topics, and the difficulties of mixed-ability teaching.
So what makes an effective primary teacher? Ms Gipps’ pamphlet provides a useful summary of the research of four authorities on primary education: Neville Bennett, of Exeter University, Maurice Gallon, of Leicester University, Peter Mortimore, deputy director of the London Institute, and Barbara Tizard, of the Thomas Coram research unit. Her conclusions suggest that a good primary schoolteacher should:
Focus on the whole class rather than individuals;
Use whole-class teaching while offering help to individuals or co-operative group work in which children help each other;
Teach one subject at a time;
Praise children as much as possible;
Have high expectations;
Encourage challenging talk rather than quiet, busy work;
Use a variety of teaching styles;
Allow children some independence and be democratic rather than autocratic about work and discipline;
Match work to a child's ability.
Not all the research findings sit comfortably beside what the Government is trying to do. The traditionalists’ image of a teacher at the front of a quiet class of children is a long way from the lively questioning and varied strategies that the studies found worked best. The traditionalist lobby scathingly condemns primary teachers for overusing so-called “discovery methods” — leaving pupils to find things out for themselves. Professor Gallon’s research suggests this is a myth; in many classrooms teachers spend a lot of time telling children what to do.
The most recent work on how to organise a classroom demonstrates that classes where children work mainly in groups rather than as a class can be effective, provided the groups are properly organised, enabling children to discuss with each other what they are doing.
Professor Galton also investigated how children's attitudes affect the teaching they receive, an issue largely ignored in the present debate. He found they were adept at devising strategies to slow down a class’s rate of work, for example taking a long time to complete one work sheet so that they would not be given another. A class go-slow at the beginning of the autumn term could hoodwink a teacher into reducing their work rate for an entire year. Most of the points being pursued by the Government have surfaced in the work of the four researchers outlined by Ms Gipps. From Professor Bennett's work, we know that even good teachers have great difficulty giving children work which matches their abilities, suggesting that large mixed-ability classes present serious problems.
From Professor Galton, we know that two types of teacher are most successful: those who can keep up a flow of challenging questions while switching consciously from class to individual teaching, and those who regularly work with the whole class, using high-level questions and praising children more often than their colleagues.
In Professor Mortimore’s work we find a reinforcement of the idea that the more time teachers spend in purposeful talk with children, the more children learn, and this is easier to achieve when teachers regularly address the whole class. He also believes teachers who concentrate on one subject at a time are more successful.
Finally, Professor Tizard’s research showed that teachers’ expectations for a sample of inner-city children were too low and the amount of the curriculum covered — in pre-national curriculum days — varied widely between schools. Those teachers who covered less said the subjects omitted were too difficult, yet children of similar ability up the road had coped well with the harder tasks.
As Ms Gipps says, these findings are not an indictment of teachers, since all information about what makes a good teacher comes from watching good teachers at work. She believes teachers should use the research to develop a model for good teaching and that this would improve morale.
The difficulty is that some of the studies are now being used to back the views of a government which many teachers believe to be deeply hostile to them. Only an outbreak of magnanimity on all sides will allow a helpful debate to take place.
PERSONALLY SPEAKING
(Ian Roe, The Independent, May 14, 1998)
Once I became a deputy head some seven years ago, I stopped having difficulties with pupils. Oh, I’m always there when one of them needs sorting out. It’s just that they are, generally, easy to deal with. The problems which disturb me involve teachers.
You see, for some of my staff, teaching is no longer a co-operative activity. It is now about order and control. Sadly, this inspires an element of inflexibility which means that some incidents are caused by the teachers themselves and not the pupils. Sometimes they cannot recognise that they are inconsistent, and sometimes they back themselves into a corner by being unrealistic about work or behaviour in confrontations which otherwise might have been avoided.
Why does this happen?
Teaching is a hard job, particularly in difficult schools like mine, which demand so much from the staff. It’s no surprise when they become tired and ratty. Through years of social disintegration, teachers have been reminded that they will slip into wilful incompetence if they are not constantly watched and criticised. It pains me to see what is happening to them in these circumstances, their confidence eroded, their self-belief destroyed.
Their own specialism is mangled or abused by adolescent minds consumed by rights, not responsibilities. The things that once inspired them are declared to be “crap” by their students. By extension, the teachers themselves are similarly labelled.
In an atmosphere where their personalities are assaulted, they struggle through lessons, trying always to stay calm. Battling against petty acts of ill-discipline is not why my staff became teachers. The pleasures of the job have long since disappeared. They now elevate classroom control above the need to pass on knowledge. As a result of this, they develop a poor self-image. Their pride as specialists crumbles and their conversation becomes deeply cynical. Colleagues grow older together and they reflect upon their careers, how they started out in hope and yet ended up here, energies spent.
It seems to me that society is expecting more and more from teachers, who have less and less to give. At the same time, pupils tell them that they must be bad teachers because the school is at the bottom of the league tables. Other schools must have better teachers. Of course, this is deeply ironic, for the reverse is generally true. But immature minds, striving only for effect, add to the process that grinds the teacher down. A sense of despair grows ever deeper in the staff room. And I can’t do anything about it.
In the end that is what I find most difficult in my job. I try to be cheerful and lively because the pupils deserve and expect that, but the joy has gone for many of my staff. All I can do is watch in sorrow.
I know what I need. It’s a younger staff, because the ones I’ve got are burnt out. They have been all used up and should be allowed to go with honour. They cannot. The fact is that they have to keep going because young people are not joining the profession. So we consign generations to be taught that the world isn’t about wonder and exploration; the world is about disillusion and problems, not solutions. And no one should underestimate the effect that teachers have upon their pupils. I mean, doesn’t the government’s latest recruitment campaign acknowledge this? Or have I got hold of the wrong end of the stick?
WHY TEACHERS ARE STILL GOING ABSENT
(Michael McMahon, The Times, November 30, 1999)
According to the Government’s recruiting slogan: “Nobody forgets a good teacher”. But after a £1.5 million advertising campaign no one wants to be one, either.
Almost no one, anyway. Official figures released this month reveal that applications to be trained to teach in primary schools are 27 per cent lower than at this time last year, and 50 per cent lower than in 1995.
Recruitment of secondary school trainees has been in free fall for years, and while the “golden hellos” that the Government has been reduced to offering in shortage subjects such as maths and science did bring about a brief flurry of interest, it has more or less fizzled out. Last year’s increases were from such a pitiful base as to be insignificant, and maths applications have fallen once again — by 20 per cent. Chemistry (down 27 per cent) is even worse. Modern languages are in the same boat.
But that’s not the half of it. Of those who do qualify as teachers, one in three hasn’t set foot in a classroom twelve months later. The number of serving teachers retiring early through ill health is now running at 5,000 a year; it was 2,000 in 1990. And as the population of secondary schoolchildren increases - by 300,000 in the next six years - the average age of those who are teaching them continues to creep nearer to retirement.
One in five teachers is now over 50, and if the Government hadn’t changed the rules so that they are no longer allowed to ask for the pension parachute they have paid for, many of those would have baled out, too. If the ministers responsible for recruitment were to be judged and paid by their performance — as they insist teachers must soon be — they wouldn’t be tearing open their pay packets to find the size of their bonuses, but to find out whether they had yet got their P45s.
One of the reasons that fewer people turn to teaching is that they have to find their own living expenses for the extra year it takes to qualify, at a time when they are already carrying three years of debt. Another year of study is another year without pay, and it would appear that the earning power gained by qualifying as a teacher is not enough to compensate for it.
Even if it were (and the Government claims that under performance-related pay it will be - for “good” teachers, at least) it is not money that has always drawn the best people to teaching, but a sense of vocation. But the language of learning has changed. The word “vocation” is no longer part of its vocabulary for now “teachers are made, not born” as the chief executive of the Teacher Training Agency recently put it.
Teachers are encouraged to think of themselves as professionals. But to qualify as one is not to earn the right to profess an art with independent confidence, but to be admitted to a suffocating system of line-management in which pre-scripted lessons are delivered so that outcomes can be measured to demonstrate that ever-moving targets have been met.
Young people making career choices know what life as such a professional is like: they have recent experience of school. They have seen the stresses their own teachers endured. When they hear that the Government has introduced a free telephone help line for teachers for whom everything has got too much, they don’t think how generously teachers are looked after by their employers, but wonder why anyone would want to embark on a career in which such support is necessary.
When they hear tub-thumping politicians demonstrating their determination to bring about national salvation by eradicating inadequate teachers, the prospect of joining a perpetually self-purging profession fills them with foreboding ratter than pride. However brilliantly they begin, they fear that if they burn out they’ll be given the boot.
And every time they hear Her Majesty’s unassailable Inspector of Schools open his mouth, they must wonder whether they want to spend a life with that toad, Ofsted, on their backs.
This recruitment crisis was inevitable. Now that our politicians have redefined education as little more than preparation for work - the training of drudges, by drudges, for drudgery - it is hardly surprising that so few young people are keen to spend more time in such an atmosphere than they have to.
That might be an awkward thought for the present, but it surely offers hope for the long term.
ABSENCE IN THE CLASSROOM
(Fred Bayles, The USA Today, November 16, 1999)
This morning, an estimated 96,000 teachers will be marked “absent” in classrooms across the nation. They’ll be out for the usual reasons: illness, personal leave or training. But the task of finding substitute teachers to take their places has become anything but usual.
The economy and demographic shifts have drained the usual pool of substitute teachers, creating a critical scarcity of qualified substitutes throughout the country.
Some school districts are so desperate that they now hire people with nothing more than a high school diploma. Louisiana schools ask parents to step in as temporary teachers. Chicago has tried enlisting off-duty police and firefighters. School districts in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts have turned to temporary employment agencies to do the job. And, according to several education surveys, more than 90% of the nation's school districts have trouble finding substitutes.
“The main goal is often to get a warm body in there,” says Max Longhurst, an education specialist with Utah State University's Substitute Teacher Institute, which studies trends and develops programs for substitutes.
A measure of the need came recently when Kelly Services, one of the nation’s largest temp agencies, announced it was getting into the substitute teacher business. Kelly plans to recruit people through newspaper and radio ads, arm them with a teacher’s handbook, an instructional video and two hours of training, then send them out to schools. A college diploma will not be required in most cases.
“We see this as a great opportunity,” says Kim Osborne, a Kelly spokeswoman.
But the task could be daunting.
Some substitute teachers get less pay and fewer benefits than fast-food workers, and they can be asked to take over classes of students who are eager to test a stranger’s authority. That often leaves school officials with substitutes who are untrained, inexperienced and occasionally dangerous.
Over the past two years, there has been a steady increase in the incidents of sexual abuse, drug dealing and even solicitation for murder involving substitutes.
Full-time teachers are away from the classroom so much these days that substitute teachers are having a growing impact on a child's education, administration and teacher union officials say. Emphasis on teacher excellence has added more out-of-class time for training for full-time teachers.
And the federal family leave law has given them more latitude to take weeks, even months, off to deal with family issues.
As a result, the Substitute Teachers Institute estimates that any student who finishes high school today will have had a substitute for the equivalent of a year of classroom time.
“We need to take a deeper look at the issue of educating students with untrained teachers,” Longhurst says.
Better opportunities leave job pool empty.
The shortage of substitute teachers is due, in part, to a booming economy that offers jobs with better pay, benefits and peace of mind to someone who might otherwise face a day of combat with unruly students. The decline in substitutes also has its roots in the Baby Bust, the drop in the nation's birth rate during the 1970s.
“It was a time when we had more teachers to go around than there were classrooms,” says Jaime Horwitz, a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, the union representing about half the nation’s 2.5 million teachers. The lack of teaching jobs discouraged college students from majoring in education. Then, in the past three years, “we’ve seen this surplus population of teachers vanish,” Horwitz says.
Recent college graduates with degrees in education, who were once a reliable part of the substitute pool, are now hired straight from school to fill full-time teaching jobs. Retired teachers also are turning down assignments in favor of better deals elsewhere in the workplace. So are others with some teaching credentials.
The school district for Saco and Dayton, Maine, recently raised substitutes’ daily stipends by $10 a day to $60 to remain competitive with local fast-food restaurants. It turned out to be too little. “Burger King and McDonald’s pay $68 a day, and they have 401 (k)s,” Superintendent Gerald Clockedile says. “The closer we get to full employment the harder it is to get people to step into a classroom for $60.”
Substitute pay can range from $35 a day in some Louisiana parishes to more than $100 a day in some affluent suburbs in Illinois and New Jersey.
The pay spread between districts can mean one system has the buying power to hire well-qualified substitutes while a neighboring school is left with poorly qualified candidates.
“You wind up fighting over the same people,” says Mick Starcevich, superintendent of a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, school district that formed a substitute pool with other schools to end the bidding war.
But for many schools, particularly those in rural areas or in tougher urban neighborhoods, it is hard to get substitutes of any experience. “Not everybody is willing to go into some parts of the city,” says Carlos Ponce, chief of human resources for the Chicago school system. “It’s not a question of racism. Sixty percent of our teachers are minorities. It’s the perception of safety.”
The result: “Schools are taking people they would never consider in the past,” Horwitz says. “We’re hearing horror stories from all over.”
In Espanola, N.M., a substitute teacher was arrested outside a junior high with a syringe of heroin that she admitted she was trying to sell.
In suburban Houston, a substitute tried to recruit two 14-year-old students to kill her daughter’s ex-boyfriend.
In Los Angeles, a substitute teacher is accused of stripping in front of a fourth-grade class. The next day, the man was substituting at another school. Word of his actions was not passed on to other schools in desperate need of substitutes.
School officials acknowledge the problem. They complain that it is costly, time consuming and ultimately frustrating to run background checks on applicants who often quit after a few days in the classroom. Michael Contompasis, chief operating officer for Boston's public schools, says his office can run up to 100 background checks a month, with limited results. “Background checks need to be as thorough as possible,” he says. “But the issue is whether they go deep enough.”
Schools find ways to screen substitutes
Frustrated over background checks that take up to six months, a Bennington, Vt., school board is considering a novel alternative: requiring applicants to buy handguns. The background checks for handgun purchases required by law take gun dealers just minutes because they can use a federal database. The check would cost the school district nothing.
When the district finds a substitute teacher candidate now, it often has to wait until the next school year to use the person because the background check takes so long, according to school administrators.
Some schools have taken another tack, using specialized employment agencies to find and screen substitutes. Opus, a Wakefleld, Mass., company, uses print and radio ads to find potential substitutes, then interviews applicants, runs background checks and even offers several hours of training before sending them on assignment.
“They’re not certified teachers, but they’re good substitutes who we teach how to teach from a lesson plan,” says Michael Brooks, director of educational services at Opus.
One of the Opus substitutes is Robert Breen, a 48-year-old retired firefighter who never taught a course until last spring. But with a bachelor’s degree in fire sciences and criminal justice and some graduate school-level education courses, Breen has been in demand ever since.
While the pay is low — about $70 a day — Breen says he loves the work. “It’s not about money,” he says. “It’s about giving back to the community.”
Filling in recently in a bilingual world history course at the high school in Salem, Mass., Breen is a study in kinetic energy as he tries to get his 12 students interested in Julius Caesar with a dialogue that jumps from Shakespeare to the movie Spartacus.
Breen is vigilant for attempts to test him. “Don’t try to stall me,” he says, as students try to distract him from giving a quiz by asking questions and requesting extra paper and pens. “You have to come in here like it’s a multiple-alarm fire,” he says outside of class.
Substitute teaching as a field of its own
Education experts see people such as Breen as a possible solution to the substitute shortage. The Substitute Teaching Institute's Max Longhunst says the education system needs to regard substitute teaching as a specialty and train staff for the travails of walking into a new classroom every day.
“Pay is only one of the problems in attracting substitutes,” he says. “Retention is another problem. If someone is prepared to deal with the different issues they’re going to face, it’s going to be a more enjoyable experience and they are going to stay at the job.”
The Chicago school system is restructuring its substitute pool program, looking to establish a cadre of teachers who specialize in substituting. “Substitute teaching needs to be a profession unto itself,” Ponce says. “We need someone who can go in like a relief pitcher and take care of any situation.”
One of Ponce’s relievers is Latrice Thomas, a 26-year-old history teacher who substitutes three days a week so she can spend more time with her 4-month-old daughter. Thomas is listed as a “full-time substitute,” a new designation that gives her a little more money and a choice of assignments.
With a broad teaching certificate for kindergarten through grade 12, Thomas can jump into many different situations within a week. “It’s not a problem because I’m pretty mean,” she laughs. “Word has gotten around that you don’t play with Ms. Thomas.”
For administrators such as Ponce, Thomas’ specialization is a prototype for tomorrow's substitute teacher.
“All of us are re-examining what a substitute should be,” he says. “We have to differentiate between those doing true substitute teaching as opposed to those who are just holding down the fort.”