Speakout Columns
How to make ‘teacher caring’ effective
Nov 17, 2005 2:14 PM
I recently had the occasion to discuss the question of teacher quality with a small group of high school students, assembled as part of the Urban Youth Collective program of NYU’s Institute for Education and Social Policy. The students were all members of community-based organizations, participating in a seminar to learn how to organize around improving their education. When asked how they would identify a quality teacher, the students highlighted the importance of a teacher “really caring” about them and their academic success.
In focusing upon the importance of a teacher “caring,” the students expressed not only their own sentiments but a significant finding in the educational research. Educational practitioners and researchers from Deborah Meier and Nel Noddings to Anthony Byrk and Andy Hargreaves have affirmed the importance of a strong, caring and mentoring relationship, based on respect and trust, between teacher and student.
“Caring” is not, of course, a substitute for teacher command of pedagogy or teacher knowledge of subject material, but it is central to building sustained motivation and commitment to hard work in students. A “caring teacher” and a “caring school community” are especially important, it seems, for students who are struggling in school and for students of color and students living in poverty.
Yet much of the educational literature dedicated to the topic of “caring” in teachers is ultimately unsatisfactory. The most tireless advocate of an ethic of educational care, Nel Noddings, develops the idea as a moral imperative, something a teacher should do because she is a moral person. For Noddings, good teachers, like good people in general, choose to “care” and become involved. And good communities promote this value in their members.
This conception places all of the moral agency, and thus all of the moral responsibility, in the hands of the teacher. Whether or not a teacher is a “caring” teacher is up to the teacher, and the teacher alone. No actions taken by any other actors — politicians and elected officials, school district officials, school administrators, parents and students — have a meaningful effect on the individual choice of the teacher to “care” about her students.
It is this contention which must be challenged.
No one enters teaching in the United States to become wealthy or powerful. In its 2000 study “A Sense of Calling: Who Teaches and Why,” Public Agenda found that 96 percent of new teachers reported that they went into teaching because “it is work they love to do,” that 75 percent called teaching “a lifelong choice,” and that another 68 percent said that they received a “lot of satisfaction” from teaching. A bare 12 percent fit the profile of a “non-caring teacher,” someone who “fell into teaching by chance.” Yet after five years, the National Center for Education Statistics reports, one out of every two new teachers has left the profession. In urban school districts like New York City, the attrition rate is even greater. Something rather dramatic, one might even say traumatic, is happening to caring new teachers in those first few years of teaching.
When asked why they are leaving the profession, new teachers tell of being overwhelmed by the demands of a job that often seems impossible, of not receiving support or mentoring from the district or their school administrators, of a complete lack of respect on the part of the district and school administrators for their professional judgment and of chaotic schools that are neither safe nor conducive to education. And while they never expected to get rich at teaching, new teachers were still stunned at the extraordinary disconnect between the difficulty of the job and the rate of compensation for it. While they sacrifice to teach, they don’t know how they are going to pay for the college educations of their own children.
Teachers burn out not simply because the job is so demanding, although the work of an inner city teacher is right next to that of urban police on a stress scale. They burn out because the conditions in which they labor make effective caring — that is, caring which results in positive changes — so difficult to accomplish.
Consider the typical school day for a high school or a middle school teacher in New York City. She teaches five different classes, with each class filled close to the contractual maximum of 34 students. She can see anywhere from 160 to 170 different students a day. Many of those students bring extraordinary needs — academic, social and personal — to the classroom. How many of those students will the teacher have the opportunity to actually know well? With how many of those students will the teacher be able to establish a meaningful mentoring relationship? And with how many of those students would a “caring teacher” be able to bring about positive academic and personal change?
It is instructive to contemplate the frames and metaphors that urban teachers often use to describe their work under such conditions. One of the more common frames is triage, the battlefield or hospital emergency room practice of selecting from among the wounded those who can be saved by immediate intervention.
Such conditions have an effect on the capacity to “care.” I am reminded of the historical studies on the different conceptions of infancy and childhood in the pre-modern and modern West. Only in the modern era, when infant death became the exception to the rule, did parents begin to make extraordinary emotional investments in infants even before their birth. Why should teachers, working under conditions which make “effective caring” so difficult, be any less susceptible to forms of emotional distancing than pre-modern parents? Indeed, what is remarkable, given these circumstances, is how many teachers refuse to surrender against such odds, how many teachers continue to “care.”
What is unforgivable is that far too often those who have the power and the ability to change the conditions under which teachers labor — especially, the elected officials, the school district officials and the school administrators — choose to “not care” and refuse to provide urban schools with the essential resources needed to educate the young people in their care.
There are ways to organize education which support teachers who care.
Part of the great promise of the small school movement was that it would create democratic educational institutions on a human scale, schools in which teachers and students could come to know each other well and work together closely. What was important was not so much the size of the school itself, but the democratic and collaborative culture of the school.
This vision is in danger of being lost in New York City in the current mad rush to mass produce for political effect new small schools by the scores every year. Far too many new small schools are being staffed with inexperienced school leaders given to autocratic styles of governance and with entirely novice staffs struggling to learn how to teach at the very time that they are taking on the most challenging task of a professional career, starting a new school. Worse, far too many new small schools are becoming what Michelle Fine once called “big schools in drag.” A small school placed in a terribly overcrowded school building, a small school with large classes, a small school which schedules teachers for five classes of 30-plus students a day, a small school bereft of collaborative relationships is no great educational achievement or advance. Small surprise, then, that many of the founders and leaders of the small schools movement are questioning what is being done in its name.
But the democratic vision of the small schools movement, and the powerful example of the first schools it created, reminds us that we know how to support effective teacher caring if we choose to do so. The problem is not with the teachers. It is with the political will of those who create the conditions in which teachers labor.
Leo Casey is a UFT special representative. He taught social studies for 14 years at Clara Barton HS.
