I am extremely touched and honored to accept this award from the people in this country I admire and respect the most.
America's public schoolteachers, I accept this on behalf of teachers everywhere.
When I entered teaching in 1973, little would I have imagined how far we would have come in many respects since then. I accept this on behalf of all of my colleagues and my two daughters, both of whom are new teachers in California. And indeed, teaching is the greatest profession because everybody who is anybody was taught how to be somebody by a teacher.
The work that teachers do every day often goes unrecognized, but it is so critically important to the welfare of our democracy. As Thomas Jefferson put it when he was arguing for a public education system, "A nation that would be ignorant and free wants what never was and never will be." Public education is critical for our survival in this new economy.
The rapid pace of change has transformed the mission of education and the work that all of us do: From offering education to ensuring learning, from covering the curriculum to connecting to every child in a way that will enable him or her to learn to high levels. Yet, at a time when the success of individuals and of nations depends on our capacity as a nation to learn and on our capacity to teach, support for public education is increasingly under attack.
The battle for access to high-quality education for every person is as critical today as it was 60 years ago when W.E.B. Du Bois put it this way. "Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental."
The freedom to learn has been bought by bitter sacrifice, and whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn. The NEA has been at the forefront of this fight for equitable education. The NEA fought for fair systems of compensation, eliminating the discriminatory salary schedules that once paid blacks less than whites and women less than men. The NEA fought for desegregation of schools and fights for civil rights for all people today, including equitable funding for the schools that serve poor children. Right here in California, the primary voice, sometimes nearly the only voice fighting for investments in public education, is the California Teachers Association.
Well, and it is a sad time in California. This is becoming a life-or-death battle. California has literally starved its schools. We are 48th in the nation in spending, especially those serving the students of the poor, which receive significantly fewer resources and frequently offer crumbling facilities, no libraries or science labs, no art or music, a shortage of textbooks, curriculum materials and computers, a revolving door of under-supported teachers who earn about a third less than those working in wealthier districts and must pay out of their own pockets for the books, paper, and supplies their students receive.
My oldest daughter teaches in one of the poorest communities in California, and our family, like those of so many other teachers, buy supplies, collects books for the school and underwrites many of the resources her children receive. It should not be this way in the United States of America.
In this state, like too many others, the failure to invest in providing a decent education for children in many communities has led to a skyrocketing prison population, most of whom are functionally illiterate and high school dropouts and an expensive prison system which now costs us more than our higher education system.
Indeed, the United States is first in the world in one thing, and that's the number of inmates. We have 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's inmates, most of them young men from poor communities where schools have been neglected who are unable to gain access to the labor market because we wouldn't spend $10,000 a year to offer them high-quality schools in Oakland and Compton and East Palo Alto. We spend $35,000 a year to keep them in prison.
The real long-term solution to our budget problems is to stop pouring money into prisons and start funding education adequately and equitably -- so that every young person can become a productive, wage-earning, tax-paying member of society, and prisons will not be needed.
There is much that teachers need to fight for today. Indeed, as the NEA has suggested, we need a transformation of our public education system. How can we create a system of schools within which all students will have the right to learn and all teachers will have the supports they need to teach well?
We have many successes all over the country due to the hard work of educators like yourselves. We're great in this country at innovation. What we need to learn to do is how to take those reforms to scale so that they become the norm and not the exception at the margins of the system.
We need a system that supports the work of talented educators. We have many, many great people in our educational institutions, as Ted Sizer once put it, the people are better than the system. It's not the people who are at fault; it's the system that needs an overhaul.
We need federal education policies that support educators in doing the challenging work they have committed to do, that supports schools to improve, that supports students in and out of school with adequate health care, with housing, with community supports. You know, when you go to high-achieving nations around the world, they don't have children who are homeless. They don't have children without health care. They have a safety net that enables every child to come to school ready to learn that day and to take advantage of what the school has to offer, as well as well-qualified teachers, counselors, principals and plentiful, high-quality learning materials. We need to meet international standards by treating education and teaching in this country the way they are treated in high-achieving nations around the world.
Let me suggest there are three critical elements. First, we need finally to confront and close the opportunity gap in education. The highest achieving countries in the world not only provide high-quality universal preschool and health care for children, they also fund their schools centrally and equally with additional funds to the neediest schools.
Meanwhile, we provide ten times more money to the top-spending schools in this country compared to those at the bottom and a three-to-one ratio in most states. We cannot afford as a nation to maintain this commitment to inequality. We need to ensure that every child has access to adequate school resources, facilities and teachers.
In a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, federal education funding to states should be tied to each state's movement toward equitable and adequate access to educational resources. We should create opportunity to learn standards that hold states and districts accountable for providing the resources for learning.
Right now, there is not two-way accountability. We hold students and teachers accountable for producing test scores, but no one is held accountable for providing the resources to achieve the standards.
The OECD has developed benchmarks for equity that its nations are pledging to. We should step up to also embrace a set of benchmarks for equity. The cost of doing this will be less ultimately than the costs of not doing it. The $300 billion we spend each year because of dropouts, the $500 billion because of incarceration, the countless billions on the individual and societal costs of failure.
Second, we need to create and invest in a strong profession of teaching, ensuring that all teachers get access to all the knowledge they need for the demanding work of teaching, to the mentoring they need as beginners, the professional learning opportunities they need throughout the career and the opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise to improve schools. In this country, we still undervalue and underinvest in teachers.
It is sad for me to see how little things have changed since I entered teaching in1973.I came in during a period of shortages, through an alternative certification program that allowed me to enter the classroom without the preparation I needed to serve all of my students well. I floated from one classroom to another with a little shopping cart to carry my books as an English teacher. I had few materials to work with and no mentoring or support. For many teachers today, these conditions have not changed very much.
My two teaching daughters live with my husband and me because they cannot afford an apartment in the San Francisco area on a teacher's salary. We have made important advances in building a profession. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, developing standards by teachers and authentic assessments of real teaching rather than the multiple-choice tests created by nonteachers to set bars for the profession.
We can recognize accomplished teachers. But few communities have figured out how to engage the skills and leadership of board-certified teachers. Many of our most accomplished teachers are all dressed up with no place to go. And we have not yet guaranteed as other nations have high quality learning opportunities for all teachers.
If you were entering teaching today in Finland, in Singapore, in Korea, you would have full government support for three or four years of teacher preparation in a high-quality program with a stipend or a salary while you trained to teach. If you entered in Singapore, you would earn more than a beginning doctor in your first days on the job. In all of those countries and many others, you would have a system of mentoring set up to support you as you entered the profession, and in all of these countries, you would have 15 to 25 hours a week for collaborative planning, for observing other teachers teach, for engaging inaction research and lesson study, for developing and scoring assessments because teachers manage and control the curriculum and assessment system in high-achieving nations.
In Korea, there's a saying, which I love, "Don't ever step on the shadow of a teacher." The level of respect is expressed in all of these nations by the supports that are available for learning to teach and teaching well throughout the career.
As a nation, we must make these investments in the ability of schools to hire and support well-prepared teachers and leaders. While No Child Left Behind sets an expectation for qualified teachers, it does not include the policy supports to make this possible. We need a Marshall Plan for teaching. A focused, purposeful policy agenda like those in high achieving nations. Such a plan could ensure within five years that all students are taught by well-qualified teachers who are prepared without going into debt to enter the profession they love.
For an annual cost of less than one week in Iraq, we could fill all the vacancies filled by unprepared teachers each year. We could fund 100 top quality urban teacher education programs and improve the capacity of all programs to prepare teachers well. We could ensure mentors for every beginning teacher in America. We could provide collaboration time for teachers and provide incentives to bring expert teachers into high-need schools through targeted improvements in salaries and working conditions. We can do all of that and more if we direct purposefully our attention to the places that matter most.
And while there is attention to the issue of pay for performance, teachers need to insist on career development programs that will actually improve teaching and learning.
Merit pay has come and gone many times in the last century. What we need are not the kinds of approaches that have previously failed. Rather than the end of year bonuses for a few teachers that cause competition and demoralization rather than cooperation and learning, we need systems that offer ongoing opportunities for learning coupled with high-quality assessment of practice, rewards for deepening knowledge and skill and means for teachers who demonstrate excellence in the classroom to share their expertise with others and become mentors, coaches, curriculum developers, and leaders in school improvement.
When we develop -- the profession of teaching, we will develop opportunities for students to learn.
And finally, we need the opportunity for teachers to transform our schools, to create personalized learning environments that go well beyond the factory model assembly lines with egg-crate classrooms, scripted curriculum, and narrowed measures of learning to design new models of education, to allow in-depth learning and collaboration for both children and adults.
These new schools are not only charters, they are more often regular public schools in districts from Gorham, Maine to Seattle, Washington, from Minneapolis to Birmingham. This fall in Denver, in Math Science Leadership Academy supported by the Teachers Association, will open led by teacher leaders and a group of teachers half of whom are national board certified to offer a challenging supported curriculum for in a low-income Latino community, where previous shortages are now ended because teachers are lining up trying to get hired to come into this school. Where teachers have the opportunity to be effective with learners with good leadership, with sound curriculum, with thoughtful learning, that's where teachers will want to teach.
These schools like those in high-achieving nations focus on critical thinking and problem solving, on 21st century skills, not just on bubbling in answers to multiple-choice tests. To support this work, we not only need to create opportunities for teachers to reinvent schools, but we also need to create a new framework for No Child Left Behind. That does not leave the money behind, and that understands that we need multiple measures of student learning.
We need a full curriculum in science, social studies, the arts, music, and technology.
We need assessments that are performance-based, like those in other countries where teachers are involved in the development and scoring and design of assessments that really measure learning.
We need a new form of accountability in our schools, tests and punishments will not create accountability. Students will not learn to higher levels unless they also experience good teaching, a strong curriculum and adequate resources. We need an accountability to children and parents for providing the conditions under which students can learn the skills they need in the 21st century. Do we have the will? Do we have the courage? To bring about a transformation in public education? This agenda will require leadership from teachers, individually and collectively.
I know all of you are working hard day by day to educate students, but we can do this working together across states and localities, across party lines, across educational roles if we remain committed to the vision that is America.
As Langston Hughes put it, America, land created in common, dream nourished in common, keep your hand on the plow, hold on. If the house is not yet finished, don't be discouraged builder, if the fight is not yet won, don't be weary, soldier. The plan and the pattern is there, built into the warp and woof of America. All men are created equal. No man is good enough to govern another man without that man's consent. Better die free than live slave.
Who owns those words? America.
Freedom, brotherhood, democracy.
A long time ago an enslaved people heading toward freedom made up a song "keep your hand on the plow. Hold on!" That plow plowed anew furrow across the field of history. Into that furrow, the freedom seed was dropped, from that seed, a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow. That tree is for everybody. For all America, for all the world may its branches spread and its shelter grow until all races and all people know its shade. Keep your hand on the plow. Hold on.
