week of 4/10/02
 
 
 

Teachers still don’t get respect
By Scott McLeod
Hung, stacked and pinned above the hardwood in the Tuscola High School gym were the artistic creations of a few hundred students. There were crazy paper dragons and pastel still lifes from elementary students across the aisle from clay busts produced by high school students that were intricate in design. For a few moments I became a patron in a New York art museum, discussing my likes and dislikes of the various pieces as hundreds of other art lovers — parents, students and teachers — milled around.

But we definitely weren’t the typical museum crowd. The Southern accents and “you’uns” mixed with the hiking boots and well-dressed church crowd. The word “amazing” kept falling out of the people’s mouths, and I found myself checking the art teachers. They should be swelling with pride, and I’m sure inside they were, but the ones I saw were working: touting the talents of students, leading parents to the creations of their young geniuses, discussing the process to interested onlookers. Doing what teachers do.

I spoke briefly with Bill Eleazer, the popular art teacher at Tuscola. Eleazer is on a mission to contact former students and find out what they were doing with their lives. He was just a little proud to discover how many were in art-related careers (including two who work as graphic artists here at The Smoky Mountain News). I talked to him about how difficult it must be to get this kind of work out of students and how much time it must take. He was unfazed.

“From August until June they have me,” he said, admitting a total dedication to his students, his work, and the school system.

Eleazer’s art classes and his students, and the inspiring work they do, are a lightning rod for high praise. Eleazer, by all accounts, is an exceptional teacher. And, like the rest of the great teachers in the profession,he doesn’t get the respect he deserves. A report released last week showed that teacher salaries, nationally, rose just .5 percent during the 1990s when adjusted for inflation. In North Carolina we did a little better. Salaries rose 40 percent in the decade, which meant that your average school teacher had an inflation-adjusted raise of 7.8 percent for the decade.

That’s what I mean when I say lack of respect.

This has always been one of my pet issues, and I’ll admit now that I’m married to a part-time teacher. The huge, important issue, though, is preparing our children for the challenges and travails that await them as they progress in school and eventually go out into the world. Until we have public school teaching posts filled with the brightest, most creative people from our top universities, schools will never challenge students to live up to their full potential. As politicians from the White House to the school board fret over testing, accountability and leaving no child behind, they somehow refuse to see the obvious.

North Carolina and the country are on the verge of truly suffering from a teacher shortage. Already our school systems are failing to fill classrooms with certified, credentialed teachers. There simply aren’t enough students going into the education to fill the teaching jobs being created by retirement and population growth.

A highly publicized court case in North Carolina was settled last week in Wake County Superior Court that may affect how this state handles the looming teacher shortfall. The case was about how the state pays for public schools and was brought by five poor counties who say the funding system is inadequate. Tucked inside the ruling, though, was this line from the judge: all classes must be taught by a “competent, certified, well-trained teacher.”

Too often, that is not the case. Teachers certified in one area are asked to teach something they are not trained in. One school system my wife worked in offered an elementary teacher a job, but when she moved into the area and showed up for work, she was given a special education class.

This court ruling could affect one of this state’s most innovative programs to attract teachers. Lateral entry allows uncertified teachers to begin teaching as long as they are in the process of completing requirements for their degree. My wife began teaching using this program because the poor, rural district down east where she taught at the time needed Spanish teachers. The program works, but the only reason it is needed is because we aren’t doing enough to make the teaching profession desirable in the first place.

Ray Menze is an art teacher in Jackson County. He has also been one of the most ardent advocates of getting a supplement for teachers in that county. Each year at budget time, he is among a group who makes a pitch to county commissioners that the teacher shortage and lack of supplement is going to adversely affect students. Last week were were munching cream cheese-olive things at a reception at Hunter Library on the campus of WCU when I asked him if he would be back this year.

“Oh yeah, we’ll be asking them again. This isn’t something that will go away,” he said.

He’s right. This issue — teacher shortage, low pay, underperforming schools, unprepared students — is about to hit us head on. I’m not advocating throwing money at education, and the issue is one that will have to be dealt with at the state level. We must be careful how we allocate resources, whether it’s for technology, new buildings, or teacher salaries. Counties, though, can do their part by looking seriously at requests to improve supplements and provide other benefits to teachers. And they can lobby their state legislators to do whatever possible to address this important issue.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)