This is an earnest question. I’m not trying to provoke advocates of the adjunct-faculty agenda. But I couldn’t help wondering today as I was reading an advance copy of tomorrow morning’s Washington Post Magazine: Education Review about an apparent contradiction.
The headline on the cover is “Outsourcing Our Schools.” The paper reports that the Prince George’s County public schools are desperate for qualified teachers and have begun to import hundreds of them from the Philippines. Reading the story, I was reminded of a piece I read in The New York Times sometime in the last year or two about New York City bringing faculty members to the public schools from Europe and Latin America. This teacher shortage is going on at the same time that several of the nation’s public school systems (New York and Washington are two) are putting in place radical reforms in an effort to improve the performance of their students. Many of these school districts also bemoan that not enough teachers qualify to instruct in specialty subjects and that the systems have too many teachers “out of their disciplines” in the classrooms.
Even with the energy crisis, an economy in downward flux, and a war underway, I believe there is no more important national obligation than to see to it that we graduate students from our public high schools with justified self esteem, solid reading skills, the ability to handle math and science, comprehend literature, understand history, and appreciate the arts. If we are to remain globally competitive in the 21st century, this has to be one of the highest items on our country’s public agenda.
Given these two things — the importance of improving public-school education and a shortage of highly qualified teachers — I can’t help but wonder why some of the people who are struggling to support themselves as adjunct university professors don’t step forward and take the openings in primary and secondary schools. This is valuable professional work, providing full-time salaries, benefits that cover health insurance, pensions, and reasonable vacations. And to be blunt, it is a noble calling that for far too long has been the subject of mild (and often unspoken) disdain by those in the higher-education arena. To many, teaching (even part-time) at a university comes with a certain amount of social cachet while teaching in a public high school is perceived too often as an onerous burden. It is time to remove the stigma.
I recall as a young boy that there were, dare I say it, “overqualified” teachers in my primary and secondary schools. These were the last of the people who entered those classrooms during the Great Depression, when work in many fields was hard to find. And they were superb, standouts that I remember by name and with gratitude even now. The same is true during the days of the draft and the Vietnam War, when deferments from military service were offered to young men willing to go into public-school classrooms in the inner cities, where the students were considered disadvantaged and the schools appeared to be failing. During both “crises” the students were the beneficiaries of having very smart, talented people doing something that at the time did not appear to be their first choice of employment but what turned out to be extremely satisfying for many and of enormous value to the young people they taught.
I understand that people with Ph.D.‘s have earned them through diligence and sacrifice and would like to put their education and training to work in a university setting. But surely we all make choices in our lives, and if after banging on the door of a university in search of a full-time employment for a period of time proves fruitless, doesn’t it make sense to seek an alternative opportunity to contribute an important service as an educator to one’s community?
Perhaps one of the ways that universities, particularly those with schools of education, can lend a hand to their adjunct faculty (those who have served the college for a certain number of years) and concurrently help their local communities is to provide, at little or no cost, an opportunity to take the courses required for a license to teach in the public schools. (Most Ph.D. programs don’t provide training in the pedagogy skills necessary to be a credentialed K-12 teacher.)
There are many institutions of higher education, my own included, which have joint ventures underway with school districts, where undergraduates in the thousands volunteer countless hours reading to, tutoring, and working with children in schools abutting the university campus. A great start. Does my notion to address another part of the agenda seem to have a potential to be constructive for all the parties engaged? Is someone already doing this?
