Okay, I Get It.

I understand that people see my leaving teaching as some sort of "cop out" or that I am abandoning my kids. Yes, I know this. I feel terribly guilty about it, as I have expressed multiple times on this blog. But in all honesty, classroom instruction is not what I'm interested in as a career. I am a decent teacher, [relative to the amount of experience I've had... I'm certainly not even remotely close to being a veteran or expert, but I've had my moments], but I am more interested in the bigger picture. I don't make any grand claims to be able to "fix public schools" in my lifetime [and I apologize if I sounded like I thought that], but I also don't think that it is fair to say that going to graduate school does not qualify you to engage in policy and reform. I don't mean that once you get a PhD you can go back to teaching grade school or middle school [or even grad school or college] but you are suddenly better at it. I have my Masters in Teaching and to be honest I don't think it did a damn thing for me except change my payscale and make my certification permanent. [On a sidenote, what that says about Teacher Certification is a whole other story....]

I'm not going back to school to learn how to be a better teacher. I also do not plan to become a principal, or I'd be getting an Administrative degree, not a research/policy PhD. I'm going back to learn how school policy works, to gain research experience in order to be able to back up policy ideas with sound research, and to learn more about the history of educational reform in order to avoid "repeating history's mistakes." Ultimately, I want to be involved in writing policy, consulting lawmakers or politicians on their policy, or headstarting educational reform programs in a major city. I find it kind of sad that some of you have left comments expressing that pursuing this as a career is essentially "a waste of time." I know that three years of teaching experience does not make me an expert, but it also doesn't mean that I am completely ignorant to the problems of public schools, or that I will not remain involved in public schools when I work on my degree.

It sounds like those who discourage getting involved in policy are suggesting that you just stay in the classroom and continue to focus on the kids you can reach as a teacher. I see incredible value in this, and my complaining about teachers was not at all meant to insult those teachers who are doing their jobs. It is definitely the case that we are left thinking "a bad teacher is better than no teacher" and that there simply aren't enough qualified teachers out there to take the place of the incompetent ones. What I don't understand is, then why is pursuing a career in educational reform where one might design a program or policy to change the "appeal" of teaching in underserved communities or work on increasing teacher retention rate with further incentives not seen as a valuable path to choose?

I realize that in this area, some of us just may have to agree to disagree--further, that if you are the kind of teacher that is out there reading other teacher's writing, or keeping your own teaching blog, and involved in educational issues, then you are probably NOT the kind of teacher who I was referring to when I spoke about incompetent teachers, so I should hope that you would realize that I wasn't trying to insult you personally, or insult the profession as a whole, but rather to insult a framework that allows inadequate teachers continue to teach with no real consequence or action taken to improve them or move them out.

My question to you is, if you agree that public schooling is in need of improvement, and if you are troubled by poor administrators and teachers, what do you propose we do to improve on these issues? I know continuing in the classroom as a teacher is obviously a great way to reach your own students, but what about the rest of the students who might not be lucky enough to have a good teacher? Shouldn't someone be addressing that situation?