Why don't more good people go into teaching - and why do so many good teachers leave? You've heard some of the answers to these questions: low pay, lousy working conditions, lack of community respect. But a reason you rarely hear is the shabby way school districts often treat even their best teachers. Far from being rewarded for their achievements, teachers who do anything out of the ordinary are likely to pay for it.
Implausible? Maybe, but I've seen it happen plenty of times. And the story of Ed Rauchut, an English teacher in the Omaha public schools, really brings to life the old saying "No good deed goes unpunished."
Rauchut is a serious scholar who has published books and articles on Shakespeare's history plays. He's also a top-notch teacher - last year the senior class in his high school voted him their favorite teacher. And Rauchut's excellence recently got national recognition. He was one of 52 teachers in the U.S. to be named a National Endowment for the Humanities/Reader's Digest Teacher-Scholar and awarded $27,500 to take a year off and pursue research.
Few pre-college teachers ever get research fellowships, so this was both an unusual opportunity and an honor for Rauchut. The Omaha public schools were winners, too. Here was an opportunity (largely at someone else's expense) for one of the district's excellent teachers to become even better. And of course having one of their teachers recognized nationally was also a feather in the school district's cap. A cause for celebration and congratulations. Or so you might have thought.
As it turned out, Rauchut has to pay a big price for getting his big honor. He will still have his job when he returns, but he'll have to take a financial hit equivalent to about one-third of his salary of $33,239. In addition to losing almost $6,000 in salary, he'll have to pay $4,000 for health insurance and pick up the costs for his pension and insurance coverage. As Rauchut calculates it, the loss will put his family of five close to the federal poverty level.
Can't somebody do something about this? Of course. But the real question is, "Does anybody want to?" The school district says it has to go strictly by the contract, and since Rauchut has only been teaching in Omaha for five years, he's not eligible for a sabbatical. The only suggestions, apparently, have been that Rauchut sign up as a substitute teacher -- something that the terms of the fellowship make impossible. Or that he take a tin cup approach and hope that enough money will be donated to a charitable fund the school district has set up for him.
If administrators and school board members were serious, they could offer some real help. For instance, why not recognize that Rauchut's research can benefit the whole district, hire him as a curriculum consultant and assign him to give a series of teacher seminars when he returns next year? His salary could be the $11,000 he's losing by taking the fellowship, which wouldn't amount to much for a school district with a budget of $182 million this year but would make a big difference to Rauchut and his family.
Apparently other NEH/Reader's Digest Teacher-Scholars have had experiences similar to Rauchut's, both this year and last year in the first round of fellowships. In most of the other cases, the problems were ironed out. But what does it say about the position of teachers when the most talented and outstanding members of the profession have to plead with their school districts before they can afford to accept honors they have been awarded? No other field puts its distinguished practitioners in the position of choosing between scholarship and eating.
How can we account for it? Do the people who operate our schools discount the connection between good teaching and intellectual activity? If so, it's ironic, when teachers are so often criticized for not knowing their stuff, that some of the best can get it in the neck for being too serious.
But a more important reason is that school administrators and board members -- and sometimes teacher unions -- get obsessed with doing things by the rules. Rules ensure a rough kind of fairness and predictable results, but they can become an excuse for not thinking and for not making adjustments and changes to fit the circumstances.
If Rauchut and the other teacher-scholars who had trouble taking up their fellowships had done something that fell within the rules, there would have been no trouble. But rules are often not flexible enough to deal with people who want to try something unusual. They put a premium on staying in line; and they encourage mediocrity.
We're talking a lot about school reform now, and we know that figuring out how to improve student learning requires people who are out of the ordinary - independent thinkers who are willing to take the initiative, who are committed to what they teach and how they teach it. In other words, it requires the kind of people who became NEH/Reader 's Digest Teacher-Scholars -- and found that achieving something worthwhile could also bring them a whole lot of trouble. We can't afford to squander this kind of talent. But wherever bureaucratic rules become a substitute for thought, the teaching profession will have a hard time attracting and retaining people of Ed Rauchut's calibre.