Putting Teachers Up on Top

By Ezra Bowen

Should the country's future be in the hands of people whose skills are, by market perceptions, worth only $25,257 a year? Decidedly no, says a tough- minded report on schoolteachers and their calling. Released last week by the influential Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, the 135-page study lays down an eight-point program to upgrade the often spotty training, low professional stature and lagging salaries of U.S. teachers. The most far- reaching proposals:

Put an end to undergraduate education degrees and require, instead, baccalaureates in arts and sciences, capped by a proposed Master's in Teaching.

Establish a board that would set nationwide professional teaching standards for certification, which is now awarded by states according to varying criteria.

Define progressive levels of skill, responsibility and reward, with a salary norm of $35,500, rising to an average of $65,500 for special "lead teachers," who might do anything from setting curriculum standards to actually running a school, perhaps by committee.

The proposals amount to potential giant steps for a profession that has been stumbling badly, often with little support from the communities it serves. The report, produced by a 14-member task force that included Mary Hatwood Futrell, president of the National Education Association, and Bill Honig, superintendent of California schools, and was chaired by IBM's chief scientist Lewis Branscomb, recommends putting teachers in control of the educational process.

Unless this is done, the task force maintains, the mass of U.S. public schools may fail to meet the needs not only of average pupils but of the more than 20% of students, mainly minorities, now living below the poverty level and attending schools that typically cannot attract top teachers. "America must now provide to the many the same quality of education presently reserved for the fortunate few," says the report, written principally by Carnegie's executive director Marc Tucker. "Only the teachers can finally accomplish (that) agenda . . . The cost of not doing so will be a steady erosion of the American standard of living."

Reaction to the report was strong and mixed. Theodore Sizer, chairman of the department of education at Brown University, praised the study's objective to "attract the best teachers and then make it possible to keep them within the system." U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett favored higher certification standards, liberal arts training and top pay for top people. But he noted, "There is a missing person in the report, and that is the school principal. You cannot run a school by committee."

Futrell, whose NEA is the nation's predominant teachers' union, approved of the teacher-centered thrust of the report. But, though a task-force member, she expressed doubts about the pay system and the lead-teacher concept. She feared that they might "become another merit pay or career ladder plan, those plans having been seriously flawed and having failed in many instances in the past." Ultimately, the attitude of experts like Futrell may be the key to the Carnegie program's success or failure. For just as teachers are central to the study's implementation, they will also determine whether the program will be accepted or rejected. "If the NEA decides to play," says Bennett, "there's a game. If not, forget it."

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles