Stop the worrying!

I am of the opinion that a large part of our educational reform- or educational misreform rather, is because of our great distrust of teachers. I also think it is ignorant to say that this mistrust is unwarranted, and before you freak out let me explain.

I've probably said this before, but there's a very adequate reason that parents worry about teachers. They are literally sending their children to spend a day with these people. As I will explain in my group project about standards, this very fact is played off of a lot in politics. Politicians, unwittingly or otherwise are able to pass legislation to increase standards under the guise that it will improve teachers & schools. Of course parents are going to jump on board and support these things, because it's about their children and they don't take that lightly, nor should they.

Now, whether or not a teacher is good at their job doesn't really matter at all when it comes to this, because parents are very likely going to assume the worst. They're always going to assume that there's better out there for their very own and act based off of that instinct. When a politician brings up more standards, they say yes because that's a guarantee that their kids are going to get the education they need. Note that this guarantee isn't coming from teachers, but from politicians.

So how do we fix this? We put the guarantee in the teachers hands and not the politicians. Autonomy in the teaching profession is very clearly what teachers want, they want to be trusted to educate students in the way they want to. They also want security, and like all people pay for their work. So my solution, and of course this isn't new but perhaps my explanation as to why this works is, is to make teachers the new doctors.

Higher pay and more prerequisites to becoming a teacher. You can grown all you want about having more prerequisites, but the point would be that the higher pay would be worth it, the same way it is for a doctor going to medical school. What this would create is a guarantee that you're getting the best of the best. The job market would be more competitive not because the degree was easily attainable, but because of what it offered. You also get the added benefit of making sure the teacher is ready, and not just some 22 year old that still has to finish their masters.

Teachers would get higher pay, and the security they want from the fact that they are trusted, and parents would get the guarantee that their children are in good hands, and standards could be taken out of the equation. If politicians wanted to reform, they would have to do so productively, and not just by passing off responsibility to the parents, and by this I mean they would have to make changes to things like budget, and curriculum, rather than standards, and teacher contracts.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, please comment!