Institutional History, Social Class, Demographics
I promised at the end of my first “teacher takes” post that I would get back to my story about my old teacher Mr. Stevenson. I intend follow through on that promise. But before I do, I’m going to tell three brief, contextual policy stories that circle around my primary foci on the lived experience of teaching and on labor market incentives within teaching as a profession.
I began that initial post with a physical description of my old high school. I did this in part to suggest that the American high school is now an old institution. The US was first out the gate when it came to mass secondary education more than one hundred years ago, just like we were early out the gate when it came to liberal democracy more than two hundred years ago. Many of the practices and rituals at the amazingly diverse Northern California high school I teach at today, from the bells at the end of class to the homecoming assemblies, are just the same as the practices and rituals I experienced at Roosevelt in the 1980s, which in turn are I strongly suspect recognizably similar to the practices and rituals Roosevelt students would have experienced almost from the school’s opening in the 1920s.
In a way this is deeply comforting and positive; in the US we continue to form youth experience within a very slow-changing, I would argue mostly successful institution situated within a wider society changing at a blindingly fast pace. Of course, one could also argue that the industrial age, mass culture institution of the American high school needs serious updating, and the truth is that urban schools have been the subject of near-constant reform efforts over history.
I don’t want “school reform” per se, to be the primary focus on this project. Instead, like I said earlier, I want the focus to be on the lived experience of teaching and on labor market incentives for teachers as professionals. Still, it feels important to note that the political climate around school reform can powerfully structure teachers’ experiences. The obsessive focus on testing during the “No Child Left Behind” years would be one example of this, as would the unquestioned allergy to school suspensions that reached a peak in the late 2010s and continues mostly in place today.
Then there is a second contextual item. I mentioned Roosevelt High School. Roosevelt isn’t just any school. It’s a desirable, historically successful school in Seattle’s mostly white and mostly upper and middle income Northeast District. The standalone theater where I saw Anything Goes has concert quality acoustics, and the theater program at Roosevelt has been of excellent quality for decades, winning numerous awards. Roosevelt even figured into a 2007 US Supreme Court Decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District #1, in which the conservative majority struck down District attempts to include race as a criteria for directing students to successful schools like Roosevelt.
In other words, by even raising Roosevelt as an example, I want to make the point that schools are not created equal, and that race, class, and neighborhood wealth matter in terms of thinking about K-12 education policy. Again, race and class are not the primary focus of this project, just as school reform broadly isn’t my primary focus. But it’s impossible to pretend that race, class, and wealth don’t play strongly into my actual primary focus on questions related to how labor market incentives ought to be structured within the teaching profession.
What do I mean by this? Right now, we have an unjust situation where a primary way to “reward” our most experienced teachers is to hand them classes that are more “interesting” from a subject matter point of view but “easier” from a management point of view, typically in richer schools or elite sub-programs within schools. Or else we sometimes “reward” teachers with higher paid and higher status but ultimately less important jobs in school administration, counseling, coaching, and the like. What set of labor market incentives would keep the most ambitious teachers in the classroom, at least part-time, with the kids who need them the very most, just like the most ambitious lawyers still practice law on the trickiest cases and the most ambitious doctors still perform the toughest surgeries?
A third “atmospheric” issue that circles around labor market incentives, and that my anecdote suggested, has to do with demographics. I mentioned that my old teacher Mr. Stevenson had just transferred schools due to declining enrollment. This seemingly casual observation is actually very important. The labor market for teaching school is connected powerfully to demography and growth. There are some interesting subtleties to this, but the basic reason demography matters to the teaching labor market is obvious. More teachers will be needed in areas like the one where I teach in the sprawling Sacramento suburbs that contain large immigrant populations and big families. Fewer teachers will be needed in rural areas declining in population outright or areas, like much of Seattle, where jobs are abundant, housing is scarce, and households often make choices to pursue career and lifestyle priorities over raising children.
I don’t have lot more to say about demography right now, and obviously I’m no kind of professional demographer (here’s a curious podcast interview with someone who is.) I do, however, hope to keep track of school enrollment data as I continue to work on this emerging project.
