Op-Ed Columnist: Three Sisters (Not Chekhov’s)

It's September, and school's in. Let's talk to some teachers, shall we?

The teachers I have in mind are Edel Carolan, 28; Denise Dargan, 36; and Melinda Johnson, 38. They're sisters, each with a different kind of teaching experience. Edel is a second-grade teacher at a public school in the Bronx, while Denise, who stopped teaching three years ago, spent eight years as a teacher at a New York City charter school, one of the seven charters that Carl Icahn, the financier, has opened in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Melinda, meanwhile, teaches second grade in a suburban school district in New York.

When I got them together over the summer, my thought was that it would be interesting to explore the differences between their varied teaching backgrounds. And there were certainly plenty of differences: Denise raved about her job teaching in the charter school, though she also said that the longer school days and the intensity of the place took a toll on her family life. Melinda, who had also taught at a public school in the Bronx before landing her current job in the suburbs, recalled being amazed at the "sense of calm" in the suburban school. "I was shocked," she said. "I thought 'Where's all the action?' " Edel talked about how she could never take parental involvement for granted the way her sisters could — but also about how satisfying it was when she had a class full of kids whose parents were invested in their educations.

In the weeks since we had that conversation, however, what has stuck with me is not so much the differences as something they all had in common. All three sisters felt that they had been unprepared to stand in front of an urban classroom when they first became teachers. Denise, who didn't have a teaching degree, had been hired by Jeffrey Litt, then the principal of the charter school — he is now the superintendent of all the Icahn charters — so it is not a surprise that she had to learn on the job. Indeed, she made it sound as if learning on the job was relatively easy because Litt was such a gifted teacher himself.

Edel went to a college in Pennsylvania and Melinda to one in New York. Both have undergraduate degrees in elementary education, yet they both recalled how lost they felt when they first stood in front of a classroom. They hadn't done nearly enough student teaching, they felt, and, in any case, the student teaching they had done hadn't prepared them to deal with issues, as Edel put it, "like poverty, drugs, crime, and hunger" that she was seeing on a daily basis.

In desperation, Edel sent a note to one of her college professors asking for help. (He gave her a few pointers.) Melinda recalls thinking that even the most basic elements of her job — classroom management, organization, lesson planning — were things she had to figure out on her own, after she had begun teaching. When I asked them what they had learned in college, they shouted in unison: theory! (Denise went on to get a master's degree in education, which she laughingly described as "not exactly hands-on.")

For all the talk about public school reform — much of which revolves around improving the practice of teaching — what goes on in schools of education never seems to get much attention. According to a study released a few months ago by the National Council on Teacher Quality — a study that reported that three-quarters of the nation's teaching programs are, "at best," mediocre — "the field of teacher preparation has rejected any notion that its role is to train the next generation of teachers." The report continues, "The burden of training has shifted from the teacher preparation program to the novice teacher — or more accurately the new teacher's employer."

Yet shouldn't teacher education be precisely what the reform movement should be focused on? Surely, it would be a lot easier to improve the quality of teaching by training people before they become teachers, rather than after they've started on the job, the way Edel, Denise and Melinda had to learn.

"It never fails to amaze me how few reformers have talked about this," says Amanda Ripley, the author of the fine new book, "The Smartest Kids in the World." Ripley investigated three countries that have educational outcomes better than ours: Finland, South Korea and Poland. In Finland, she discovered that getting into a university teaching program was akin to "getting into M.I.T.," she told me. "You master a subject, and then you spend a year doing student teaching, with a mentor who gives you constant feedback." By the time the teacher is ready to join the work force, he or she actually knows how to do the job.

As it turns out, there are some people who are trying to transform teacher education here at home. As the school year progresses, I hope to introduce some of them — and their ideas.

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