All classroom teachers are required to have at minimum a baccalaureate degree in education before they can be licensed in Massachusetts. There is a similar requirement in all 50 states, although it is now so difficult to fill teaching vacancies that states have begun to issue waivers to applicants, conditioned on enrollment and progress in a required program of professional training. There is an additional requirement that teachers who have not yet earned a master’s degree in education must do so within the first several years of employment.
While there are substantial requirements for teacher licensure, baccalaureate programs as they are currently constituted are preparing graduates to turn back the hands of time and seek employment in 1960’s America. In the 60’s, teachers were expected to teach content, or what was and still is referred to as “the 3 R’s”: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic. Clearly, knowing how to spell was a low priority.
In the 1960’s, teachers were expected to dress professionally and work an 8-hour day teaching academic content. The most common student discipline problems included chewing gum, speaking out of turn, and being the “class clown.” You could count on a fist-fight between one boy and another several times a year, and those fights usually occurred on the playground. Student discipline took the form of after-school detentions and school suspensions. Being sent to the office always involved a call home to one’s parents, and they were expected to provide additional discipline. This typically took the form of spankings and groundings.
Very rarely, when a student had seriously violated the norms of expected behavior (I remember one kid so out of control in third grade that he slammed the classroom door with sufficient force to shatter the glass), the student was expelled. And in those days, “expelled” meant that you could never return to school. Ever. The third-grade door slammer is the only student I can recall being expelled in my entire public-school experience.
In those days, teacher preparation programs taught teachers how to teach, and that’s all they were expected to do when they entered the profession. There was no expectation to spend one’s career doing anything but teaching the 3 R’s. That was it. Show up, teach, go home.
Special Education, as a federally mandated entitlement program, didn’t exist. Students were identified as bright, average, or what was then referred to as “slow learners,” and they were assigned to particular classrooms based on their academic acuity. This process was called “tracking” which was subsequently discontinued in the 1980’s because of concern that such practices injured children’s “self-esteem.” Times have changed, but teacher preparation programs have not. In other words, we are preparing today’s teachers to teach in a 1960’s educational setting..
When I attended my teaching program 35 years ago, we had a single, semester-long course entitled “Classroom Management.” This course concerned itself primarily with tips for classroom organization. It in no way prepared me to manage the behavior of emotionally dysregulated students. In conversation with younger colleagues who are relatively recent graduates of their programs, it appears that they receive not much more than a semester-long course in classroom management, either.
This is a big problem, because the classrooms of the 2020’s have little resemblance to the classrooms of the 1960’s. Behavioral infractions like gum chewing, speaking out of turn, and being the goofball at the back of the room have now been replaced by physical battery, temper tantrums in which students destroy entire classrooms, bullying and harassment amplified by social media, refusal to put away cell phones, sexual assault, drug dealing, defiance of teacher directives, and foul language that would burn the ears off an elephant.
Teachers now have to manage all of the above behaviors, serve as mandated reporters of suspected parental abuse and neglect, differentiate instruction for students with disabilities and implement the accommodations and modifications described in student special education plans, implement behavioral reinforcement systems and take behavioral data, provide trauma-sensitive and mental health interventions, participate in active shooter training and drills, learn how to physically manage assaultive behaviors, participate in meetings with community mental health providers, provide mindfulness instruction, detect the tell-tale signs that a student might be homicidal or suicidal, monitor progress on state-required standards, prepare students for proficiency exams, teach children manners and kindness, and maintain an even temper and cheerful disposition all the while.
And what they absolutely did not teach you in your teacher preparation program is that 6-year-old students bring loaded guns to school and shoot their teachers at point-blank range.
So the next time anyone wonders why teachers are leaving the profession in droves and applicants to teacher preparation programs have dwindled alarmingly, or why children are being taught by long-term substitutes because there are no qualified applicants for open teaching positions, there’s your answer.
