Who's Teaching Our Children?

WANTED

Men and women with the patience of Job, wisdom of Solomon and ability to prepare the next generation for productive citizenship under highly adverse and sometimes dangerous conditions. Applicant must be willing to fill gaps left by unfit, absent or working parents, satisfy demands of state politicians and local bureaucrats, impart healthy cultural and moral values and -- oh, yes -- teach the three Rs. Hours: 50-60 a week. Pay: fair (getting better). Rewards: mostly intangible.

With a bachelor's degree from Harvard and a double master's in literature and education from the University of Virginia, New Yorker Carol Jackson Cashion seemed a natural for a high-powered career in publishing or the arts. So last summer when cocktail chatter turned to the inevitable "What do you do?" question, Cashion was prepared for the shocked reaction. She told her companions that in the fall she would begin teaching at Brooklyn's Edward R. Murrow High School. Reports Cashion: "They looked at me as if I had just flown in from Mars."

Americans want their children to have good teachers, it seems, but they are not sure they want them to become teachers. And perhaps with good reason. Since 1983, when the federally sponsored report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" in U.S. schools, the country's 2.3 million public school teachers have come in for stinging criticism -- some of it no doubt justified.

After all, how else to explain the fact that an estimated 13% of 17-year- olds and perhaps 40% of minority youth are considered functionally illiterate? . That less than one-third know when the Civil War occurred? That in a recent ABC-TV-sponsored survey of 200 teenagers, less than half could identify Daniel Ortega (President of Nicaragua) and two-thirds were ignorant of Chernobyl (one guessed it was Cher's real name). Five years after A Nation at Risk prompted a flurry of reform, average scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) have risen 11 points. Still, as recently as last spring, former Secretary of Education William Bennett gave U.S. schools an overall grade of no better than a C or a C-plus. To the teaching establishment, and teachers' unions in particular, he issued a sharp rebuke: "You're standing in the doorways. You're blocking up the halls of education reform."

Teachers, of course, are unhappy about the assessment, though it was nothing new. "Over the years, you're constantly bashed," says Kathy Daniels, a Chicago English teacher. "You get it from the principal; you get it from the press. Bennett just topped it all." What particularly rankles is that while accusations are flying, policies debated and remedies proposed, no one has consulted the real experts: those who do daily battle to improve the minds of students. Says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: "Whatever is wrong with America's public schools cannot be fixed without the help of those inside the classroom."