Idea: Give Teachers Assistants
Note: I have no idea what I'm talking about. I've been out of the classroom for over a decade and do not really study professional development.
It's seemed to me for a long time that one problem with teaching as a profession is that unlike most professions, the jobs of a novice teacher and the jobs of a veteran teacher are almost exactly the same. You go in your room, close the door, and teach, coming out only to go to the bathroom and maybe listen to your more poisonous colleagues gripe in the teacher lounge. In most other professions when you start you do sort-of ramp up to being a full-fledged participant. My (again nascent) understanding of becoming a lawyer is that when you start, you're not typically given your own cases to try in front of a judge yourself. Instead you work with a mentor who does the heavy lifting while you learn the ropes. By the time you go to court by yourself, you've been a number of times already, know the judge, and how things work. If you're good and work hard, you eventually become a partner in the firm, fully vested in its success and the training of new lawyers. (To me the analogy of tenure for a college professor and becoming partner for a lawyer is apt, but it does not at all seem analogous to my understanding of tenure in K-12 public schools.)
I have heard that there is a mentoring program in a nearby district that is fairly effective. The only one that I have much knowledge of (a decade ago in another city) put the mentors in charge of too many new teachers to be very effective.
For teachers, the only real means of promotion is becoming an administrator. I had an exceptionally good English teacher in middle school who became what seemed to me an exceptional average vice-principal (years later, I found myself in the home of the man who had been superintendent of my district who shared my assessment of this vice-principal---he makes great barbecue).
It seems to me that we waste a bunch of resources in schools. For example, it's clear to me why it's really important to have someone read to our kids. It doesn't make sense, however, that this should require a teacher with a masters degree. Lawyers have secretaries, why not teachers? College professors have graders, why not teachers?
I know what you're saying. You're saying, "Sure, Jay, that'd be great, but uh how are we supposed to do that?" My hair-brained response comes as a result of reading a piece in MIT Technology Review entitled "Philanthropy's New Prototype" (it's not online yet, apparently it's easier and faster to print and mail the magazine than to put it online) about the $100 Laptop. It describes how Carnegie single-handedly caused it to be an expectation that towns and cities would have public libraries. He did it by building libraries and requiring municipalities to agree to fund their upkeep. It goes on to talk about Negroponte's $100 laptop and how, if it works, it'll be de riguer for what are now 3rd world countries to supply every kid with a laptop.
The problem with schools, it seems to me is that they only barely have enough money to function as they are now. Some insanely large percentage of the budget is for teacher salaries (I told you this is not my area of expertise, but it's over 90%). Unions and inertia make any kind of change very difficult to change anything. (A grant project I was once involved with had trouble getting the union to agree to allow the grant to pay teachers for release time for training.) So my hair-brained idea (if I thought anyone was actually reading this, I'd ask for comments) is to get some philanthropist to put folks in schools to provide teachers with some kind of support. I don't know for sure what it'd be: Grading? Time to plan (a la Lesson Study?) with other teachers? Someone to help create tests and photocopies? I'm not sure who to give it to: new teachers who are overwhelmed with the whole prospect of teaching and will probably leave the profession in less than 5 years? Master teachers who can go co-teach with new teachers?
It'd be easy enough to come up with some ways to decide what kind of help teachers need and which ones to give it to. It wouldn't be that hard to come up with some measures to get some idea if it was working. The biggest problem, I'd guess is how to make sure that the help was going to those who were going to use the extra time to become better teachers and do better rather than give the ones who sit at their desk reading the paper while kids do decades-old worksheets. And if those worksheets are an effective use of kids' time, let someone else babysit them while they fill out worksheets. Actually, if there were someone who could sit with a class while students were taking tests or doing other activities that do not require the teacher's attention, that would do much to make a teacher's quality of life better.
The other big problem, of course, is vetting these helper people so that people wouldn't be concerned about the safety of our children.
It would seem like this might be something that Teach For America could do. Or people who are sentenced to community service. Back to the issue of child safety, but if more people knew how hard it was to be a teacher, they might be more supportive of them. There might also be a Hawthorne Effect of having more people knowing what's going on in schools.