I am honored to feature Caroline Lewis on the blog today! This post is part of the WOW! Women on Writing Book Tour series for Caroline’s book. You can read more about Caroline’s book tour here. 

Our profession is prematurely losing some of our most effective colleagues, AND we are failing to attract top college graduates with the talent and passion for teaching. In broad strokes, we can thank the education reform movement for this.

We seem to skim over the fact that successful public education requires development of three key pillars or legs of a stool:

• the readiness-to-learn of the learners
• the quality of the teachers
• the culture and tone of the school (leadership, resources, parental involvement, etc.)

We talk a lot about RACING TO THE TOP and LEAVING NO CHILD BEHIND in trying to spearhead education reform.  But, we seem fixated on only one of the pillars, teachers, and not in ways that improve quality, but in ways that undermine, place blame and seriously demoralize too many good teachers.

Teaching gave me a sense of pride, purpose, and meaning throughout my career. It was a journey that began anew each day, each week, each grading period, and each year. It was always exhausting, but the joy of reaching and teaching young people, working with colleagues, and shaping the climate of a school, was reward enough. This joy seems to elude today’s effective teachers.

And effective teaching IS exhausting work. What’s easily measurable isn’t always what’s significant in teaching-learning environments. What a teacher truly contributes to an individual student’s attitude, ambition, choices, career paths, and so on may never truly be known. Teacher effectiveness is a complex issue. Much is missed and undocumented in the lives and classrooms of real teachers and real students. Teachers, students and some parents remember this. Education pundits often don’t.

Somehow, in the debate on what constitutes successful education, the spotlight has become laser-focused on a teacher’s ability to get students to pass tests. The realities of inadequate school leadership, increased poverty levels, and the fragile lifestyles of too many of our children, never get fully addressed in the accountability equation.

A few years ago I saw a young protester’s sign that read, “Don’t make me regret becoming a teacher” and I just wanted to cry. A part of me grieves for this great profession. We ought to take a brutally honest look at what it really means to teach effectively today, day in, day out—preparing, instructing, reflecting, interacting, assigning, strategizing, collaborating, assessing, disciplining, counseling, motivating, evaluating, and being evaluated. And, teachers must teach all students—those who are motivated and unmotivated; sated and hungry; disciplined and unruly; and nurtured and scared. They must get each of them to care, to think, to learn, and to perform well on tests.

A particularly worrisome trend is that our good teachers, the effective ones, are those most vulnerable to burnout and despair in the current climate of education reform and measurable learning gains. They put their hearts and souls into the job and do not feel fulfilled. Hence, those who can leave, leave.

We must rethink our education strategy and change the current debate. We cannot—we categorically cannot—reform public education if our pool of effective teachers continues to shrink. We must extol, not vilify, teaching. Let’s restore nobility to the profession—the thing that drew me in. Teaching is losing its magic, as the declining ranks of effective teachers suggest.

How then do we attract and keep good and great teachers in the profession?

I have a plan…Let’s elevate the conversation and change the focus of education reform. Let’s attend to all three legs of the stool and put people like me in charge of the TEACHING leg…let’s do it.

Caroline Alexander Lewis is the author of Just Back Off and Let Us Teach. You can find out more about her at www.CarolineLewisEducation.com.