Schwartz: Correct. Instead of being embarrassed by our naivete' when it comes to great lawyers, either in fiction or in history, as motivating us to want to become lawyers, we should celebrate these people, acknowledge that we want to be lawyers because of the good that lawyers do; we want to be doctors because of the good that doctors do; and so on, and so forth. We should acknowledge openly and celebrate that, and the celebration of these kinds of people should be built into the training that we get in law, medicine, education, or anything else. But my sense - I teach at an institution that has very smart students - and my sense is that you're really regarded as naive to have this kind of noble aspiration; you don't understand how the world works; you've got to put a shell on; you've got to become cynical. Under those conditions, you won't get anyone to do anything unless you make it worth their while financially. So I think we're headed exactly down the wrong road. I think that president Obama knows that, although I sometimes get a little nervous that he, too, thinks that incentives are this sort of magic tool to get us exactly what we want and need from our professionals.
Kall: Well, he did say last night that we've gone down the path seeking short term profits instead of long term prosperity. I like that quote from him.
Schwartz: Yes, indeed. And the question is: What is it that induces us to pursue long term prosperity? What is it that gets us to care about the well being of future generations? It ain't incentives.
Kall: So what is it, then? How do we systematize it, because there are so many failures in the educational system? You've talked about how education should be done by example and how teachers should be the moral exemplars; yet we've got an awful lot of... what is it? Half of the students don't make it through high school, half of the students who start college don't make it through college.
Schwartz: True, the education system is a mess, but you're not going to make it better by giving teachers bonuses if their students exceed some score on standardized tests. This is the magic bullet quick fix, and all it is, is cosmetic surgery. The underlying problem remains and, as Rahm Emanuel said, you should never let a crisis go to waste.
Well, we certainly have a crisis now, and I think that means we ought to think much more boldly about what it will take to fix the educational system. You want teachers who love to teach, and you want to enable them to work under conditions where it's possible for them to teach well. You certainly need to pay them enough, and we don't pay teachers enough. They need to make enough money that they can live a decent life and raise a family and all that stuff. You don't want their compensation to be a disincentive, but I don't think that you get better teachers by offering compensation above and beyond what's enough to live a decent life. What's more important is creating working conditions that allow them to do their jobs well.
Kall: Well, what about the seniority system? Right now, in many school districts, if you've been there longer, you get paid the most.
Schwartz: And, in addition, you get to pick what school you teach at. The sad truth, since I'm a supporter of organized labor in general, the sad truth is that I think teachers unions have really been bad actors in the development of the teaching profession over the last couple of generations. There's very little evidence that there's interest in anything other than the welfare of the teachers, and that creates constraints on what supervisors can do that make it almost impossible to transform the system. I think one reason why charter schools are working, when they are, and why they're even created, is that it's a way around union contracts, so that the principal of the charter school has the freedom to do stuff that a principal in the regular school that's part of the regular system couldn't do.
Kall: Now, you're part of the tenure system, right?
Schwartz: I am.
Kall: So what do you see as the solution? No Child Left Behind? I can't imagine you behind that.
Schwartz: No, I'm certainly not. You can have standards without having standardization. It takes more time, it takes more effort, it takes confidence in the judgment in the people who are doing the evaluations. We seem reluctant to trust in the judgment of teachers and evaluators and the consequence, again, like the lemonade story, is that we settle for mediocrity by ensuring against catastrophe. So, there is not a quick fix to this and it's too bad that there's not a quick fix, but I think, again, this crisis may have given us the opportunity to think big about what teacher training should be like and what the teachers' work environment should be.
Kall: So, have you been thinking big?
Schwartz: I always think big. The nice thing about being a tenured college professor is that you can have all these thoughts and nobody actually acts on them.
Kall: So what do you see as the opportunity here within this crisis for changing things-in any area, not just teaching. Where has this taken you?
Schwartz: Well, there is about to be a massive expenditure of resources in lots of different areas of current American life and Obama has certainly, and I think correctly, made a big deal about the importance of improving education. So, the thing to do is re-vision what a classroom is like, what kind of people you want to hire as teachers, what kind of conditions you want to give them to work under-and in that way, transform the system.
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