Linda Bakken: Support our educators

After five decades in education, I recently retired. Although I ended my professional career at the university level, I started at the K-12 level in public education.

I am a great believer in public education. I have had the privilege to experience public education to some degree in Michigan, Washington state, Utah, Ohio, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Kansas. And in each of these localities I found similarities at most educational institutions: the desire of the teachers to teach their students in ways that learning would be fun and hopefully a lifelong process.

I also found the principals try to set up their buildings in ways that are conducive to productive behaviors and social interactions. They implemented curricula and learning philosophies that helped children grow and develop into responsible and contributing adults in society.

I wonder why in most professions we measure their endeavors by the success rate, but in education we talk about how it fails. We say that education is failing us – that American children aren’t learning, that American children are falling behind, that they aren’t prepared for the job market, that they aren’t ready for college, that they do not learn to think critically, that we spend too much money but we do not educate our children.

In business, industry and technology, owners spend how much money is needed to be successful and, because their products are often inanimate, success can be measured rather easily. In public education, teachers and principals are at the mercy of state legislators who determine what “success” is.

Determining success in the form of “human success” is difficult to measure. However, don’t the vast majority of students graduate from high school? Don’t the vast majority of our high school graduates find jobs and succeed in them? Don’t the vast majority of the high school graduates who go to college find success at their college endeavors, and graduate from college and find careers and succeed in those careers?

Why can’t we look at the successes of schools and what schools do well, and how diligently schools work at their jobs to ensure that our children of today are prepared to become our citizens and leaders of tomorrow?

During the past eight years, I have been working on a research project wherein I have been interacting with teachers and principals, mostly in the Wichita and Derby districts but also in outlying districts in Kansas. They have been so similar to those educators I witnessed over the past 50 years in other parts of the United States: dedicated to educating our children to be lifelong learners, to be socially and emotionally responsible citizens.

Teachers and principals haven’t changed. We have changed in how we perceive educators. We have changed from supporting those whom we charge with helping form the minds of our youngest to placing on them the blame for anything that seems to be amiss. (It must be the schools that are the problem.)

Rather than castigating those professionals who are paid so little and who sometimes use their own pay to supplement for teaching purposes, perhaps it is time to thank these hardworking educators.

This story was originally published February 28, 2015 at 6:05 PM with the headline "Linda Bakken: Support our educators."