Tenure Doom
Education is a popular campaign topic. This politician or that is constantly promising more teachers, more money for schools, and many other things that will not improve education significantly. The decry the lack of good scientists and highly skilled workers, but they ignore the real problems. What are the real problems? One of them is tenure in higher education, and what the requirements for it are.
Let me tell you a sob story. I know it well, because it's one of my sob stories. I went to college, with no real plan except to graduate so I could get my father to pay for art school. I did have a pseudo-plan of thinking about thinking, so I could improve my mind (something I read while I was in the hospital the year before). While I was in college, I discovered Cognitive Science.
"Isn't that psychology?" I hear you ask. No, not really. Cognitive Science is a multi-disciplinary field that studies thinking and minds from all possible angles. It includes Neuroscience, Psychology, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Linguistics (and Sociology and Anthropology, depending on who you ask). I took the introductory class and immediately became hooked. It was not only something I was interested in, it was an important field of study, IMHO.
One thing struck me about the introductory class. It sucked. There were five fields to cover, and rather than try to do it alone, there were two professors and numerous guest lecturers. The complete lack of continuity made for one of the more impressive clusterfucks I've ever seen.
I decided that what Cog Sci needed was good teachers. It was a relatively new field, and needed growth to succeed. For growth it needed new students, and those come from introductory classes. I set out to become a good teacher with at least a basic grounding in all five fields, so I could effectively teach an introductory class solo.
For the first time in my life I worked my ass off. I kicked a 6 year old, $200+ a month drug habit so I could concentrate on my studies. I concentrated on them so hard that I nearly had a breakdown at one point. I became an under grad TA, teaching recitations and occasionally lecturing full classes. I took a broad range of studies, touching on Neuroscience and Psychology, and delving deeply into the other fields of study. I was doing well. While I only graduated with honors because of a clerical error, the last few years I was working as hard and learning as much as the other students who graduated with honors.
And I didn't get into grad school. There were two reasons for this, but the shocking one was that grad schools don't want teachers. They want research assistants.
Why? Because the reward system for professors in higher education involves tenure. Tenure is obtained by researching and publishing the results, not by teaching students. As I had not shown that I could help the professors reach tenure, I was not accepted to grad school.
So the system promotes a situation where the students are not learning at maximum efficiency, because they are being taught by researchers. It doesn't stop at higher education either, because higher education is where we train our other educators.
There are two systems being used in education schools across the country. In one, the teachers to be are taught in college classrooms, having little if any contact with the students they will eventually teach. In the other, they spend the mass of there time in actual classrooms, teaching the students under the guidance of a professional.
The immersive approach of actually working in schools tends to produce the better teachers. Not only are they more skilled, but they are more likely to actually look for and keep jobs as teachers. However, only a small percentage of the teachers to be in the US are in these immersive programs. Why?
Because the immersive technique requires a lot more time on the part of the professor who is teaching the teacher to be. This leaves the professor with a lot less time to do research and publishing, which hurts their chances of getting the holy grail of tenure. So the system is set up to produce mediocre teachers on all levels (and some really good journal articles).
This is not the only problem facing education in the US. Teachers are underpaid and under-respected. They're also overworked, but getting more teachers won't help if they can't teach. Schools are under-funded, and Virginia is leading the way in under-funding by cutting the Car Tax, and giving the burden of equal funding to localities that have historically shown themselves to be unable to cope with such responsibilities. I think the tenure problem is the worst of all, because no solution can work without good teachers. We can't make good teachers until we do more than just give lip service to doing so.
We're already giving our children enough problems to deal with. Can't
we at least give them the minds to deal with those problems?
Last Modified 6/9/99
Created 9/13/98