Why Teach?

K-12 education still attracts the best and the brightest. Keeping them is another matter.

by Christine Foster

Photography by Peter Stember

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS: Garcia-Lopez expects to leave the classroom one day to work toward education reform. "I feel a little guilty that I won't always be teaching."

THE EARLY SPRING SUN has nearly disappeared and the hallways are quiet as Paloma Garcia-Lopez gathers up some papers from her desk and heads for the door. The clock in her classroom at Santa Clara High School reads 6:35, and she is finally going home. But her workday isn’t finished.

A couple of minutes later, her husband, Jose Luis Lopez Jr., pulls into the school parking lot in a Toyota 4Runner, the couple’s only vehicle, and Paloma piles in. By 7 o’clock they have arrived at their $900-a-month studio apartment in San Jose.

After dinner, Garcia-Lopez digs back into her work, poring over students’ history assignments. She writes encouraging notes in the margins and sets aside a few essays that are especially good or show improvement. She will hang some of them on the wall in her classroom, including one from Tino, whose mother she has been working with closely in an effort to motivate the boy. It’s the first paper he has turned in all year.

It’s now 9:30, and Garcia-Lopez, ’97, MA ’00, has logged more than 12 hours of work since morning. She has taught, in various ways and with varying degrees of attention, more than 150 students. She has organized, assembled and presented more information than a typical executive at a Fortune 500 company. And she has done it for roughly $15 an hour—about the salary of a manager at a fast-food restaurant.

Not that Garcia-Lopez is keeping track. She didn’t become a teacher for the money—nobody does. Like most who enter the profession, she is there for the kids, and the 60-hour workweeks are part of the gig. But Garcia-Lopez won’t provide four-star service at McDonald’s prices forever. And if she is like a growing number of young teachers, the poor salary will be just one variable in a yearly conundrum: to stay or to go. Energy waning, frustration growing, many will decide to leave, and in their places will come another crop of recent graduates, full of spark and dreams of changing students’ lives, willing to live modestly. At least for a while.

Is the teaching profession destined to attract talent only to lose it later? That’s what a lot of folks in education are trying to figure out.

Researchers, politicians and policy makers are grappling with the causes and possible remedies for a teacher shortage projected to reach 2 million over the next decade. Retention has become a national crisis. As many as 30 percent of new U.S. teachers leave the profession within five years, according to research by Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond. This past summer, the nation’s public schools scrambled to fill 180,000 teaching slots, a situation made especially unsettling by the flight of thousands of midcareer educators. Some school districts have softened their credential requirements to allow untrained teachers to make up the shortfall.

“Turnover accounted for by retirement is relatively minor when compared to that resulting from other causes such as teacher job-dissatisfaction and teachers pursuing better jobs or other careers,” concluded a research report issued earlier this year by the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy—a consortium that includes the University of Washington, University of Michigan, Teachers College/Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania, in addition to Stanford. The report goes on to say that “school staffing problems are primarily due to excess demand resulting from a ‘revolving door,’ where large numbers of teachers depart their jobs . . . .”

Why do they leave? A better question might be: why would they stay? Is teaching still a viable career for promising professionals or merely an entry point, a place to burn off idealistic energy before moving on to more lucrative jobs? Can reformers learn from the experiences of Stanford teachers?

THE SLOGAN ON THE BROCHURE for the Stanford Teacher Education Program could double as a mantra for every student who chooses to become a teacher. “Teach a child. Change the world.” It’s a powerful motivation—and every year, 60 or so STEP alumni enter classrooms throughout the country, although a majority stay in Northern California. A 12-month program, STEP offers a master’s degree and teacher certification for future secondary teachers. Students receive practical training in local schools in addition to classroom work. Another chunk of undergraduate alumni enter teaching after being certified at another university or through a short-term specialized program like Teach for America.

Regardless of the route they take to become teachers, only a few remain in the classroom for the rest of their careers. Some of them stay in education as administrators or policy makers, a progression that is encouraged by STEP faculty. More than half the Stanford alumni interviewed for this story no longer teach but are working toward PhDs, training other teachers or working on education reform.

But others leave the field entirely. Particularly in traditional public schools, teachers become frustrated by poor salaries, little administrative support, bureaucratic decision making and discipline problems. They chafe at state policies and curriculum mandates that limit instructors’ creativity and freedom. They become discouraged by their own limitations in making meaningful change. Every year, up to 6 percent of the nation’s teachers leave the profession.

BURNED OUT: The fire service offers more camaraderie and fewer frustrations, says Mendoza.

James Mendoza is one of the statistics. After earning his master’s through STEP, Mendoza, ’93, MA ’94, taught middle school science for six years in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Last year, he quit to become a firefighter.

A combination of factors drove him out, he says. Lack of respect for teachers generally. A sense of isolation, of being “on his own.” He recalls cleaning laboratory glassware at 1 a.m. to get ready for the next 15-hour day. “It’s a very lonely job,” he says.

“It is the most physically exhausting, draining, all-encompassing thing for the first couple of years,” Mendoza adds. “You take [your students’] problems home and wonder how you can reach them. You are constantly absorbed.”

The worst part, he says, was being a disciplinarian. Mendoza recalls once breaking up a fight and immediately fearing that he would be subpoenaed the next day. “I didn’t get into teaching to yell at kids or force them to be in school,” he says.

He wanted to teach science—and when that’s what he was doing, he loved the job, he says. Mendoza recalls the thrill of developing a new way to teach a concept and watching students embrace it. His favorite: a lesson on diffusion, using the analogy of a father whose dinner of beans and rice at a Mexican restaurant produces a predictable and smelly result in the car going home. When the lesson was over, Mendoza says, students not only had a good laugh but also understood how smell travels.

Mendoza’s new career as a firefighter for the city of San Jose combines many of the things he loved about teaching—the possibility of helping people, of doing something meaningful—with other things he thought were missing in education, including a sense of working as part of a team. “You don’t get the camaraderie in teaching that you get in the fire service,” he says.

VETERAN PRESENCE: Researchers say long-term teachers like Swenson are important for student achievement.

Lee Swenson, who has taught social studies at Aragon High School in San Mateo for 34 years, has had quite a different experience.

Swenson, ’66, MA ’67, can point to two major factors that have kept him teaching while others have left the field: a close-knit department in which teachers collaborate and support one another, and the opportunity to develop his career beyond the classroom. At Aragon, teachers in the social studies and English departments share an office, which becomes a central gathering place. During lunch each day, anywhere from 15 to 25 teachers show up and swap ideas about lesson plans, tests and classroom management. Swenson says teachers in the two departments are so close that a group of 20, including spouses, took a ski trip together last winter. “That’s a missing ingredient for a lot of teachers. It makes you want to go to school, and not just for students,” he says.

Swenson has also worked under administrators who encouraged him to take on new challenges. He has attended workshops, including one through the Bay Area Writing Project, has taught at STEP, and has helped develop curriculum at the district level. “That is a large part of my happiness,” says Swenson, who believes teacher retention might improve if more schools provided similar opportunities. “It is a satisfying blend.”

But Swenson is quick to admit that choosing and sticking with teaching now is much more difficult than it was when he started in 1967. Take finances. Swenson and his then-wife, also a schoolteacher, bought a house in Palo Alto in the early 1970s, something no young Bay Area teacher could dream of today. Teacher salaries today are so low relative to the Bay Area cost of living—the median cost of a home in Santa Clara County was about $470,000 in June—that some communities have developed nonprofit organizations to provide housing assistance for young educators.

It’s not so bad in all parts of the country, but most urban dwellers, regardless of region, would be hard pressed to buy a house on a teacher’s take-home. In the Career Development Center’s survey of students graduating in 1998 (the most recent year for which numbers are available), no group of bachelor’s degree recipients made less than those who went into teaching. Their average starting salary was $29,340.

Joe Feldman could be a lawyer. He holds a JD from NYU, but while he was earning it, he felt pulled to education. His first job was teaching English and history in an Atlanta high school, where he made $31,000 a year. He says he was able to rent a one-bedroom apartment and “live comfortably,” but he recalls feeling disconnected when friends and classmates described exotic vacations and expensive weekend trips. “I was the poorest paid of any of my Stanford friends,” says Feldman, ’91, who is now principal at a charter school for middle- and low-income students in Washington, D.C.

Paloma Garcia-Lopez makes $40,000 a year and gets a $120 monthly bonus for her master’s degree, which cost $35,000. She carries $50,000 in student loans. When colleagues and students learn that her degrees are from Stanford, famous for its millionaire entrepreneurs and leading-edge business thinkers, she says, they assume she could or should be doing something different. “I’ve had students ask me, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” Garcia-Lopez says. Although she understands the assumptions behind the question, it still puzzles her. “I would think people would want the best of the best to be teachers.”

Teaching seemed a natural career choice for Garcia-Lopez. The daughter of first-generation immigrant parents who worked with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, she grew up in a family committed to education. She overcame the low expectations of others around her to excel as a student.

Now she regularly sees students who, like her, are ready to blossom if watered with encouragement and guidance. Problem is, Garcia-Lopez says, “there aren’t enough hours in the day.”

She teaches 156 students in 5 periods, and most of her classes have at least 35 pupils. The energy required to keep them orderly and focused is enormous. Garcia-Lopez says students in one class tested her early in the year, shouting across the room to each other while she attempted to present the lesson. She must develop lessons that are appropriate both for very low achievers and for kids capable of honors work. Those who need individual attention often go wanting because Garcia-Lopez simply runs out of time. “I see students for 50 minutes a day [in class]. It’s hard to give individual feedback.”

Garcia-Lopez admits, with resignation, that she often conducts her student conferences while she is in the midst of completing paperwork or performing some other duty. “I see myself becoming one of those teachers living by the bell, not able to talk for a minute,” she says.

Always looming are the demands from outside the school district. California’s state standards for 11th-grade history classes call for Garcia-Lopez to cover, for example, “the Founding Fathers’ philosophy of divinely bestowed inalienable natural rights” and “the significant domestic policy speeches” of every president since Truman. In effect, the standards limit Garcia-Lopez’s time to do something special or creative. “If I were to teach everything [in the standards], I would spend 12 minutes on Vietnam,” she says.

BOLD STEPS: Starting new schools may be a better solution than reforming old ones, says Darling-Hammond.

What she has described is what Darling-Hammond calls the “factory model” of public education. Huge, impersonal schools with short class periods in which students are shuffled from one teacher to another with little or no integration of the instruction. It may have worked 50 years ago, says Darling-Hammond. It doesn’t work now.

“I believe the large, comprehensive high school that was designed in 1920 is a vestigial organization. It wasn’t designed to meet the needs that we have today. We have a lot of research that shows big schools are less effective than small schools, that schools where teachers and students work in teams are more effective than schools where students are passed off to different teachers every 45 minutes,” she says.

Redesigning that model to a more collaborative, small group structure benefits teachers and students, says Darling-Hammond. “If you reallocate your resources in these new school designs, a teacher can have somewhere between 40 and 80 kids a year rather than 180. The periods are longer, the courses are more integrated and there are fewer nonteaching personnel. You end up with a much more personalized setting where teachers aren’t going crazy trying to batch-process large numbers of kids, and kids are feeling more cared for and attended to.”

Such schools, says Darling-Hammond, go a long way toward solving teacher shortages. “At schools like this in New York, in the very same neighborhoods that were shortage areas before the schools were redesigned—Harlem, South Bronx, Brooklyn—teachers are lined up down the block and around the corner to teach. I was talking recently with the head of one of those schools and he said they have 500 applicants for every position,” she says.

While STEP continues to train would-be teachers to try to make meaningful change in traditional public schools, there is a growing recognition that developing new schools is a shorter route to real reform. Using a $4.8 million grant from the Gates Foundation, the School of Education has established a training program for people interested in starting new schools using a new model. And it has opened its own charter school in East Palo Alto in partnership with Aspire Public Schools, a non-profit organization. The school was to open on September 4 with 75-80 ninth grade students. One grade level will be added each year, ultimately growing to about 320 students in grades 9-12. STEP graduate Nicky Ramos-Beban, ’91, MA ’92, is co-director.

IF THE ANALOGUE for the old model was a factory, these new schools offer education closer to handmade. Teams of teachers plan together and share students; and because they know their students personally, teachers can offer more individualized attention and help them through difficult periods. “At a large school, chances are good that a student may not know a single adult well. When a parent tries to get involved, they don’t even know who to call because there are eight different teachers, none of whom really knows the kid,” says Darling-Hammond.

Can these reforms be applied to existing schools? “I think the answer for a 2,500-kid high school where the students are anonymous and the teachers see 180 kids a day is, ‘no,’” says Darling-Hammond. “You can’t get there from here.”

Matt Alexander, who is opening a school of his own in southeast San Francisco, can speak firsthand to the frustration of trying to change the old system. Alexander, who earned his undergraduate degree at Yale, was hired at gritty Balboa High School in San Francisco shortly after earning his master’s in education at Stanford in 1996. He was one of four ’96 STEP alumni who joined the Balboa faculty hoping to reinvent the urban high school. The system got in the way.

Classrooms were overcrowded and noisy, and when Alexander tried to minimize disruption, he ran smack into a bureaucratic wall. Each time a student had to be removed from class for disciplinary reasons, Alexander had to navigate a cumbersome procedure that included calling a security guard and filling out report documents. Meanwhile, time ticked away from an already too-short class session.

Alexander recognized that he was up against a culture that discouraged ingenuity and inhibited learning. For example, the school had only one high-volume copier for teachers to use, locked in a room in the basement unavailable after regular school hours. “Sometimes I would see a great article in the newspaper that I wanted to share with my students, but I wasn’t able to make copies in time for the class,” he says. “That’s the culture we were trying to change.”

THOSE INVOLVED IN TEACHER education at Stanford would love to see more Lee Swensons—people who continue to feel challenged, supported and respected even after years in the classroom. For the sake not only of the teachers but of the schools. Study after study has shown that a stable, long-term faculty is a key determinant in student achievement. Constant turnover robs schools of the cohesion and sense of community critical to their success, researchers say.

Swenson still remembers fondly the band instructor from the tiny Minnesota town where he grew up. The teacher, R.Q. Johnson, organized a year-round concert schedule for music students and created a thriving program. He was one of a handful of dynamic teachers who, says Swenson, “simply made the town better.”

An old-fashioned notion? No, according to Darling-Hammond. The people entering teaching today can be just as motivated, just as influential, and stay around just as long, she says, but they can’t do it in a dysfunctional, out-of-date system. “Teachers want to be successful. They want to be in a setting that supports high-quality teaching,” she says. “Where they can have good relationships with students and with each other, those are the places to teach.”

After all, say those who love teaching, the rewards are rooted in the pleasure of seeing children learn. Even in the toughest schools, there are glimmers of how good it can be. Alexander cites a project by a group of ninth-grade girls in his studies skills class at Balboa. Trying to get students to sharpen their research, reading and writing skills, Alexander asked them to find a current issue of interest and create some sort of change. Several girls—annoyed by the school bathrooms, which seemed to be constantly dirty and lacking soap and toilet paper—chose that as their topic. They surfed the Internet and found documents outlining state standards for school bathrooms, as well as suggestions about how to keep them clean. They then wrote to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi to ask for her support in enforcing the standards—and she wrote back, promising to help.

“Students’ eyes light up when they get these letters from state senators and assembly members. You can see the possibilities opening up for them,” Alexander says.

Garcia-Lopez, despite the harried pace and enormous demands, occasionally stops long enough to see that she can have a similar effect on students. Like Rocio, for example. A student in a vocational education program, Rocio had intended to earn a nursing certificate and forgo college until she met Garcia-Lopez.

“I never really thought about wanting to better myself until you became my teacher,” Rocio told her. “Hey, I should go to college. Why can’t I be a doctor?”

Or, perhaps, a teacher.