Before school started this year I began my new Substack with a teacher tale that had policy and economic/institutional overtones. This tale was set at my old brick public high school, Roosevelt in Seattle, and centered on a sweet man who served as my freshman English teacher; a guy named Mr. Stevenson. I mentioned that Mr. Stevenson had recently transferred from a different high school, that he was a relatively senior teacher working at a new school, and that he was willing to include what now might be called “AVID-style” lessons, or perhaps “social-emotional-learning,” in his English curriculum.
Now that the rush of the first week of school has ended, a very hectic time for even an experienced teacher like me (or like Mr. Stevenson back in the day) I want to take a breather on Saturday and continue my story.
The Story Continues
… another thing I remember about Mr. Stevenson’s class is that we read whole novels and engaged in meaningful class discussions about them, a process that by many accounts is beyond the attentional capacity of most college students today, even some with grades high enough to secure entry to the Ivy League. The good old days weren’t always perfect, but even fourteen-year-olds were expected to read challenging novels back in the 1980s. A great many of us knew how to enjoy them. My novel-reading cohort, moreover, wasn’t even an “honors” section. I first encountered Mr. Stevenson after a disastrous middle school experience led to a temporary retreat from the cloistered but competitive world of accelerated classes.
I recall in particular reading James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, and discussing the nature of happiness; whether one would even want to enter Shangri-La, if such a place existed in the real world. Lost Horizon is a short novel, but it is thematically rich and features elegant prose with varied sentence structures, not to mention challenging British vocabulary. Under Mr. Stevenson’s sage guidance our “regular ed” frosh English class took the book in stride and without complaint. Personally, I found the confidence to think of myself as a good student again, a triumphant if quiet teaching success for Mr. Stevenson. I don’t think I ever told him.
Later, back on the honors track as an 11th-grader, I took Mr. Stevenson for a second time. He was downstairs in the main Roosevelt building now, in a classroom with high ceilings and big windows. I know from being a teacher myself that a junior honors class is a plum assignment, and it’s obvious to me now that Mr. Stevenson had regained department seniority perks at his new school a mere two years after Lincoln closed.
Still, for me, something wasn’t quite clicking. There were stories of some kind of family trauma, maybe a divorce. I don’t remember. It’s possible Mr. Stevenson may have been depressed at this stage—certainly we know today that depression is much more common among teachers than among workers in comparable professions. Even so, I remember him as an organized, competent 11th-grade English teacher. He still managed the classroom well, even if classroom management is rock easy in an honors class. He still focused on classic novels. I actually enjoyed The Scarlet Letter, and read enough of Moby Dick (in an awkward condensed format with two columns of small vertical text per page) to get a decent grade on my handwritten essay test. I was a solid student again, my middle school academic debacle long past. Even though my true focus junior year was on my unrequited love for a red-haired exchange student, this didn’t get in the way of my grades. My English teacher was a solid one, if perhaps not as exceptional as he had been two years previously. But as an honors class junior, having a superstar teacher didn’t matter so much anymore. Fortunately for me, I had already lucked into a superstar teacher, as it turns out the very same dude in a less fancy classroom, at the time I most needed him freshman year.
More Policy-Related Labor Market Stories
In my first post, I mentioned that the first part of my story about Mr. Stevenson carried several implications. These were around the role of unions in the teaching profession, the role of revealed preferences for things like job security and vacation time, the very female culture and demographics of present-day K-12 teaching, and my hypothesis that experience makes a meaningful degree of sense as a proxy for teacher effectiveness. Each of these items requires a lot more explanation, of course, and my plan is to go deeper in future posts.
Right now, however, I want to suggest that the rest of my story about Mr. Stevenson, the part I told today, points toward several additional policy and institutional issues.
- I’m frankly not sure how you measure the kind of impact Mr. Stevenson had on me freshman year, but I definitely do not think the person most likely to “see” such an impact would be a school administrator without a foot in the classroom environment themselves. I do tend to think that test scores, or more properly improvement in test scores, might be one way (though never the only way) to measure teacher impact and effectiveness. Teacher evaluation is a complicated issue. Certainly, I think a teacher able to generate the kind of impact that Mr. Stevenson generated my freshman year deserves more money. I often like to think they deserve the most money of anyone in the system, including the principal and the school superintendent, just like a law partner, not the law firm business administrator, gets the most money in a law firm. But, like I said earlier, how one might “see” and measure this kind of very high impact is a subtle and knotty issue.
- I mentioned that I needed Mr. Stevenson much less when I was an honors class junior than when I was a non-honors freshman. Lincoln High School’s loss was Roosevelt High School’s gain, and my own. But most freshmen in lower level classes never get to experience super-effective, highly experienced teachers like Mr. Stevenson. As I mentioned in my second post about the American High School, it is simply not the case that current labor market incentives reward the most effective teachers by placing them in classes with the students who most need their help. Quite the opposite. The fact that I got such an effective and experienced English teacher in a non-honors class freshman year related to an unusual confluence of events in which an experienced teacher was forced out of a high school that had just closed.
- Extending from the last observation, I want to note here that I am not here leaning into the problematic notion of “combat pay” for teachers, but instead suggesting a broader idea. The system should allocate the best teachers to the neediest classes. But it doesn’t, and it won’t under current labor market incentives. I don’t think change means letting a thousand charter schools bloom. But at the same time, change may require teacher unions to let go of time-honored perspectives and demands. In particular, we may need a less flat salary arrangement in teaching; one (like I just said) where the most demonstrably and consistently effective teachers make the most money of anyone in the K-12 system, provided they are willing to take the toughest classes in the hardest schools and show consistently strong test score improvement impacts.
- Another issue my story implicitly raises is around classroom management; something I mentioned Mr. Stevenson was very competent at. Classroom management isn’t everything, but it is the entry point to becoming an effective teacher. It’s completely bizarre that management isn’t taught in teacher education programs in any kind of practical way, at least in California, and that new teachers are then given the toughest classrooms to manage. It’s “trial by fire,” and the teachers who can figure it out or have the most stamina for dealing with bullshit are the ones who survive. This is no way to run a professional labor market.
- Finally, at the end of my story, I raised the issue of teacher mental health and teacher burnout. Teaching is an impossibly hard job sometimes. As much as I love being a teacher, I also sometimes wonder whether the job as traditionally structured should even exist. Still, setting this aside, I already linked to a RAND study which documents teacher depression and burnout. What I did not mention already was that the prime listed cause for burnout had to do with stress related to classroom management; something I think relates to the broader education system’s unwillingness to impose effective consequences on problematic behaviors. Following from this, we need to problematize the trend toward dramatically reduced suspensions. Suspending less often is treated as an unmitigated good, and there are clearly very good aspects to keeping kids in school. But the on-the-ground reality is more complicated than legislators, administrators, and people outside the classroom more broadly are willing to consider or admit.
I’m going to move on from my story about my old high school days now. There are too many urgent issues in the present to spend too much time focusing on the past. But before I let go of my little story, I want to end with the observation that teaching is a highly personalized, intrinsically human endeavor. I realize I feel protective now toward Mr. Stevenson. He truly had a big impact on me out in the portable by the gym at age fourteen, reading Lost Horizons and having serious AVID-style talks about future careers. He didn’t make as big of a connection with me at age sixteen, down in the pretty honors classroom with the big windows. But he still did a more than competent job teaching The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick. To me, this all suggests something about the mutability of the teaching environment, the mutability of young human beings, and for lack of a better word the chemistry that can come and go in all human relationships.