Larry Strauss evocatively describes the plight of teachers in America: low pay, low status, public ignorance, poorly behaved students, job insecurity, standardized testing, etc.... Simply put the present situation only seems to go from bad to worse. Why don't we have the best schools in the world? Why don't our schools lead in all the international parameters used to evaluate schools? Unfortunately the problem goes back to society's attitudes to the teaching profession. "If you can't! Teach!" goes the old joke. or "If you can't teach, teach teachers." We get the system we deserve. At 18, if you are intelligent and able and ambitious, you go to college and become a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, a businessman, a professional - but a teacher? No. That's almost an admission of no ambition with a maximum salary after twenty years of perhaps $90,000? Idealism is great but it doesn't pay the mortgage. So there's a serious shortage of teachers. Here in Arizona we are so short of teachers, we drag who we can find into the classroom and tell them "here... just do this, follow these instructions. It doesn't matter if you are not qualified. Good luck."

In America you get what you pay for and a quick glance at those protesting political and public health issues provides a disturbing picture of people struggling to understand some basic issues. It is my experience that unless they have children in the system, many Americans don't care much about the quality of teaching or the education process. The only underlying philosophy towards education seems to be "Does it get you a good job?" After all what else could education be for? The answer that it's about who you are as a human being, about your intellectual and emotional development and understanding of the world seems to fall flat because it doesn't pay the bills.

Another sticking point in the public's attitude to teachers is that they get these long vacations. To many, real American workers don't get or take vacations. Larry Strauss is writing opinion columns and books and is on a board of Contributors of the USA Today ... why isn't he teaching? People who work and have real jobs don't have time to do those things. So Larry should be happy. Teaching must be a part time job because it has given him the free time to do all those other things. But teaching is actually a bit like acting, it's a performance art. You learn what works what doesn't, what gets results. It's not an easy job to do well. Some of the skills are innate.

If we seriously want to change the status of the teaching profession, we need a career structure with financial incentives which reward the best, where good practices are handed on from one teacher to the next. We also need to attract to the profession men and women from the top 20% of the graduate pool and not just the bottom 20% as we do now. It's important to recognize that the skills required of a Grade School teacher are totally different to those required in a High School. Principals of schools need to be both teachers and administrators which demands alot. They need to be recognised as important leaders in society where their opinions and professionalism matter to the whole community and be paid accordingly. A complicating factor here is that an excellent teacher in a particular subject may not necessarily be a good administrator and vice versa.

We find the top people to lead our universities, why not for our secondary schools? Attracting those people should be a priority. Ideally schools should be treated as hallowed places of learning and enlightenment, the training grounds for the future not dumping grounds or warehouses where kids are entertained so that parents can work. Also the present system of the teacher giving letter grades to their students is in my view obsolete and destructive. A student trying to preserve their grade point average knows how to pick teachers who give As. Another complicating factor is that all too often politicians see the education budget as a political football which can be knocked about between one election and the next to the detriment of everyone.

Ideally there should be different types of schools to give parents choice and cater to the changing needs of different students as well as the changing world economy. No two students have the same needs, just as in a family no two children are the same. A factory system of education trying to turn out the same shaped cogs to fit a constantly changing world economic machine and environment will never prepare our students adequately. The word education after all means to lead forth. It's about change. The job of teachers, under paid, over worked and under-appreciated is to lead and to point students towards the future, to give them the skills and the learning to adapt to that future. Don't we all carry in our memory the images and names of teachers who made the biggest differences in own life. We need to think of more ways to get more of those.

As a "fifty year teacher" who has taught around the world and endured an interesting range of working conditions and administrators, I would remind all my colleagues who labor at the white board in the privacy of their own classrooms that, however tired, annoyed, under paid, under appreciated they feel, without their efforts there would be no doctors, no lawyers, no businessmen, no musicians, no writers, no journalists. Teachers work at the cutting face of life. They deal with hope, hope for the future. Their job is to nurture potential, understanding, excitement and curiosity. They help mold the future however imperfectly. That is their ultimate reward. They throw pebbles into the great pool of life and watch the ripples spread out. In the end that is the reward and nobody can put a price on that or ever take it away. We remember the best teachers, those who inspired us because at the root of those memories is love. We draw from a teacher's passions what makes our lives richer and more whole.