How to Save Our Schools: Recognize Teachers as Heroes

Everybody knows who Babe Ruth was. Millions watch the Jerry Rices of our world catch footballs and the Lance Armstrongs race through France. But how many people can name the winner of an award won by a teacher in their own community – if in fact there is such an award?

As a person who taught and administrated in schools for years and then consulted with teachers, I offer a plan for the reform of American education: make teachers into heroes, put them on a pedestal and celebrate the act of teaching for what it actually is: the most fundamental activity in our society.

But that's obvious, you might say. Everybody knows that no one can get anywhere these days without a decent education and that the nation's welfare depends on an educated populace. Well then, I ask, where's the glory around teaching? Why aren't teachers being interviewed on TV and radio? Why aren't thousands of young people asking themselves, "Do you think I can get to be a teacher? Do I have what it takes?"

The reason that our culture doesn't award hero's status to teachers isn't that we don't recognize the critical nature of what they do; it is that most people think they could be good teachers. That's a fantasy. Most people could not. We haven't come to grips with how hard it is to excel in teaching, how rare the native talent that is required, how much there is to learn, how innovative one must be, and how self motivating to improve each year and not get stale in a job where there is no external change, no ladder to climb from one position to a new one. When we understand enough to marvel at a well taught class as we marvel at a successful heart surgery, we will see true reform. We'll focus then on recruiting the best and brightest into teaching and training them and supporting them, not just with pay, but with respect. The teachers will do the rest. People who see themselves as heroes perform accordingly.

But people tend to see themselves as they are seen. Year after year in an annual workshop for experienced teachers, my co facilitator and I heard teachers tell stories about how in their parents' eyes they were "only a teacher." How hurtful! Surely, those parents were reflecting our culture's opinion. All that parental love and care, all that money for college, had been in service of a different expectation.

We began to focus the workshops on celebrating the teaching profession, and helping the participants see themselves as highly skilled professionals providing a service without which everything would collapse: heroes. Some of them told us that the workshop is one of the reasons they stayed in the profession.

We need to do that on a national scale. For every breathless article about some twenty-year-old's performance in a game the outcome of which changes the world not one jot, for every platinum recording of a song that very likely will be forgotten in a year or two, we need a feature on a teacher. Let's put TV cameras into the classrooms where star teachers work, with an expert commentator the way we do sports and show what actually happens in a good classroom, the decisions minute by minute, the teacher makes. Instead of inviting some famous person to speak at the college graduation ceremony, let's invite a local teacher whose work has opened doors for kids who otherwise would not have had a chance, some of whom will be in the audience. Give her the honorary degree. (Besides, she'll probably make a better speech.) Prizes for teachers, parades for teachers, whatever works to surround them with glory. Then we won't have to check up on them, treating them like children by endless standardized tests of their students. They will proudly hold themselves accountable to the highest standards.

Think about a culture in which pictures of teachers outnumber those of athletes on the walls of young peoples' bedrooms and in which teachers are begged for their autographs. That's a culture in which good schools will blossom.