I began that initial post with a physical description of my old high school. I did this in part to suggest that the American high school is now an old institution. The US was first out the gate when it came to mass secondary education more than one hundred years ago, just like we were early out the gate when it came to liberal democracy more than two hundred years ago. Many of the practices and rituals at the amazingly diverse Northern California high school I teach at today, from the bells at the end of class to the homecoming assemblies, are just the same as the practices and rituals I experienced at Roosevelt in the 1980s, which in turn are I strongly suspect recognizably similar to the practices and rituals Roosevelt students would have experienced almost from the school’s opening in the 1920s.

In a way this is deeply comforting and positive; in the US we continue to form youth experience within a very slow-changing, I would argue mostly successful institution situated within a wider society changing at a blindingly fast pace. Of course, one could also argue that the industrial age, mass culture institution of the American high school needs serious updating, and the truth is that urban schools have been the subject of near-constant reform efforts over history.

I don’t want “school reform” per se, to be the primary focus on this project. Instead, like I said earlier, I want the focus to be on the lived experience of teaching and on labor market incentives for teachers as professionals. Still, it feels important to note that the political climate around school reform can powerfully structure teachers’ experiences. The obsessive focus on testing during the “No Child Left Behind” years would be one example of this, as would the unquestioned allergy to school suspensions that reached a peak in the late 2010s and continues mostly in place today.

Then there is a second contextual item. I mentioned Roosevelt High School. Roosevelt isn’t just any school. It’s a desirable, historically successful school in Seattle’s mostly white and mostly upper and middle income Northeast District. The standalone theater where I saw Anything Goes has concert quality acoustics, and the theater program at Roosevelt has been of excellent quality for decades, winning numerous awards. Roosevelt even figured into a 2007 US Supreme Court Decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District #1, in which the conservative majority struck down District attempts to include race as a criteria for directing students to successful schools like Roosevelt.

In other words, by even raising Roosevelt as an example, I want to make the point that schools are not created equal, and that race, class, and neighborhood wealth matter in terms of thinking about K-12 education policy. Again, race and class are not the primary focus of this project, just as school reform broadly isn’t my primary focus. But it’s impossible to pretend that race, class, and wealth don’t play strongly into my actual primary focus on questions related to how labor market incentives ought to be structured within the teaching profession.

What do I mean by this? Right now, we have an unjust situation where a primary way to “reward” our most experienced teachers is to hand them classes that are more “interesting” from a subject matter point of view but “easier” from a management point of view, typically in richer schools or elite sub-programs within schools. Or else we sometimes “reward” teachers with higher paid and higher status but ultimately less important jobs in school administration, counseling, coaching, and the like. What set of labor market incentives would keep the most ambitious teachers in the classroom, at least part-time, with the kids who need them the very most, just like the most ambitious lawyers still practice law on the trickiest cases and the most ambitious doctors still perform the toughest surgeries?

Subscribe now

A third “atmospheric” issue that circles around labor market incentives, and that my anecdote suggested, has to do with demographics. I mentioned that my old teacher Mr. Stevenson had just transferred schools due to declining enrollment. This seemingly casual observation is actually very important. The labor market for teaching school is connected powerfully to demography and growth. There are some interesting subtleties to this, but the basic reason demography matters to the teaching labor market is obvious. More teachers will be needed in areas like the one where I teach in the sprawling Sacramento suburbs that contain large immigrant populations and big families. Fewer teachers will be needed in rural areas declining in population outright or areas, like much of Seattle, where jobs are abundant, housing is scarce, and households often make choices to pursue career and lifestyle priorities over raising children.

I don’t have lot more to say about demography right now, and obviously I’m no kind of professional demographer (here’s a curious podcast interview with someone who is.) I do, however, hope to keep track of school enrollment data as I continue to work on this emerging project.

As the students acted out charming romantic hijinks amidst the moving parts of a stage set depicting a transatlantic ocean liner, I found my mind floating back to my own high school experience. Naturally, as a high school teacher, I think about my own K-12 days with some regularity. But I’ve long noticed that the human brain processes time and space in ways that are neither fully discrete nor fully linear. Being back on the Roosevelt campus made me think about my old school, and my teachers, in an uncharacteristically vivid way.

My Superstar Teacher, Part 1 …

One adult I remember clearly from high school was a man named Mr. Stevenson, a veteran teacher who had transferred to Roosevelt from Lincoln, an even older multi-story brick high school in the close-in Wallingford neighborhood. I still remember how Mr. Stevenson told us how much he loved Lincoln, where he had spent his entire career. I suspect now that the transfer was a significant culture shock for my English teacher. But the shock was inevitable. Due to a reduction in the population of urban families with children, Lincoln had just closed. A completely new Lincoln High School reopened in the same building decades later, in 2019. But declining enrollment still plagues the Seattle school district.

During his first year at Roosevelt, Mr. Stevenson taught freshmen like me in a portable near the old track, behind the lunchroom. He had a beard. He was around my age now, somewhere in his fifties. I’m not certain but I imagine him as a smoker. He had a fatherly air, though not too overtly so, and like my actual father he was a good raconteur. I loved his class. I remember classroom discussions about things I’d never heard mentioned in school before, like personal values and how our values might influence our future career choices. My memories of this little unit make me think Mr. Stevenson might have been a good AVID teacher, had AVID existed at the time, even though his droll personal style might have clashed with AVID, which can run to the rah-rah. Whatever the case, I still remember choosing “prestige” and “meaning” as my two highest career values. I guess this is not inconsistent for a teacher who used to work in public policy and is presently an aspiring writer. (Story to be continued in next post …)

Policy-Related Teaching Stories: Goals and Constraints

I just told two stories here. One was a story about my return to my old high school, and the the second was the beginning of a longer anecdote about my old teacher, Mr. Stevenson. My choice to begin this “Teacher Takes” Substack with these stories was intentional, in that both stories about the past point to aspects of the present that interest me. But my goal here is not to pen a series of nostalgia pieces. Instead, my goal is to eventually tell several detailed, interconnected, policy-related stories about teaching as a profession and as a labor market, and eventually to turn these policy stories into a book.

As an active in-service teacher who is also a published novelist and a former urban labor market analyst, I think I am in a unique position to tell these policy-related stories connected to teaching. Of course, also as an active in-service teacher, I have some real constraints in terms of exposing any too-revealing tales about current students, or criticizing specific policies at my own District. But I’ve decided to be mindful about these constraints while at the same time using my voice. We need more in-service teachers speaking out; not yet more people opining about teaching and education who haven’t actually managed a classroom full-time in years, if ever.

Four Initial Labor Market Stories

I said earlier that I want to focus on labor market incentives within the teaching profession. So, here are four labor market stories that relate closely to the part of the anecdote about Mr. Stevenson I told already.

• The facet of the story about Mr. Stevenson’s transfer from Lincoln points to a highly unionized working environment with seniority protections. High union density is a fact of life for teachers in most of the US outside the South. This is a first order reality to take up when discussing labor market conditions for teachers, and I want to state up front my perspective that all the hate tossed at teacher unions amounts to a form of unproductive “venting.” While I am not opposed to charter schools, the true path to lasting, positive, institutional change in American schools is not going to come through creating end runs around unions. Instead, any lasting change is extremely likely to come in the form of “sectoral bargaining” arrangements with organized labor.

• The story about Mr. Stevenson’s transfer is also a story about revealed preferences. In a number of other professional labor markets, if Mr. Stevenson’s firm had closed, he would have been simply out of a job. But as a group of workers, teachers have a revealed preference for job security. We also have revealed preferences for meaningful work, adequate vacation, and in many cases the freedom (within reasonable boundaries) to be our own quirky, idiosyncratic selves inside our own classrooms. Teachers, in other words, are a very singular bunch of humans. Wishing we were more purely focused on money and status incentives, as if we all truly wanted to be corporate lawyers or investment bankers or surgeons but couldn’t hack it, is just as much a form of unproductive “venting” as wishing we were less unionized. Revealed preferences and desires are what they are, and any attempt to “fix” labor market incentives needs to take this into account.

• My slight dig about the “rah rah” nature of the AVID program (which I love) in my story about teaching (which I also love despite the sometimes extreme difficulties) can be read accurately as a bit of pique, as a man, about the highly female demographics and therefore culture of teaching as a profession. It’s possible, I suppose, to argue that the disproportionate number of women in teaching roles is simply a matter of revealed gender preference, in much the same way I argued just now that teacher interest in job security is a form of revealed preference. But even acknowledging this, my suspicion is that when it comes to gender, we may have a true problem. At very the cultural moment in which women have made huge inroads into traditionally male-dominated professions, the percentage of men in teaching has actually decreased, and not just by a little bit. There’s something troubling to me, atmospherically speaking, about how the relative absence of men in teaching suggests the continuation of a very narrow cultural definition of masculinity. Equally troubling to me is to realize that a male student today would be much less likely to find a male role model like Mr. Stevenson than would have been the case during my own high school days in the time of the dinosaurs (and the Ronald Reagan Administration).

• I mentioned that Mr. Stevenson was an older, very experienced teacher. There’s a saying, however true I don’t know, that you want a young doctor but an old lawyer. Following this metaphor, I’m going to put out a hypothesis that teachers, at their best, are more like lawyers. The craft of teaching takes a long time to learn. Also, practically every teacher I’ve ever spoken with would agree that the applicability of their in-school teacher education was quite low (in contrast to, say, the extremely high immediate value of medical school). So my guess, to specify my hypothesis outside the realm of metaphor, is that the seniority-based, “back-loaded” salary structure of the teaching profession actually makes a great deal of policy sense. Then again, there are also cases of burned out older teachers, teachers that have stopped growing, and more experienced teachers who were perhaps never that great in the first place. Plus there is the issue that early career salaries for entering teachers are straight up unlivable, a fact that older teachers like me with outsized voices when it comes to collective bargaining priorities can often ignore. All in all, the ways seniority plays a role in the teaching labor market is a crucial issue and one I want to take up on this blog.

Thank you for giving my first Teacher Takes post a chance! I will have more stories, and eventually more in the way of grounded data analysis, in upcoming posts.