Too Few Teachers, Too Many Consultants?

The Post ran two education stories yesterday, both unsatisfying, albeit in different ways. (Although it's possible that my mood was altered after reading that great/scary profile of the Vice President...)

The front-page piece, about teacher shortages, reads like the prologue to a good article about big-picture teacher policy issues. I just wish they had written the actual article. In summary: the current generation of retiring teachers entered the profession in a time when women had few career options other education. Thus, schools got a disproportionate share of really smart women, who stayed in the classroom for their entire career. Once the economy opened up, the best and brightest women started going into law, medicine, business, etc., and the teacher talent pool declined in quality. At the same time, NCLB has raised the bar for entering the profession, and new teachers are less likely to see teaching as a 30-year career, leading to frequent turnover and exacerbating the challenge of replacing the older smarter generation.

In broad strokes, all true, although the article should have pointed out that teachers shortages vary widely by region and subject. Some states still produce more new teachers than they need, and schools of education continue to graduate a surplus of elementary education majors even though the shortages are concentrated in secondary education, special education, and science and math.

But the more interesting question is where you go from here, and the article misses most opportunities to explore those issues. Some people, for example, see the shortage and the move to raise the bar for entering the profession as in opposition. Others think that the only way to attract all those women back out of law school is to provide an even higher bar, on the ground that ambitious people want to see themselves as part of a profession that implicitly denotes high standards for entry. Unions point out, correctly, that teachers get paid less than the professions to which smart women now flock. Others see this as a reason to support Teach for America-like alternate routes into the classroom. The article could have put some or all these issues on the table and helped readers sort through them, but for the most part they were nowhere to be found.

The other article, about management consultants hired by DC Public Schools, begins as follows:

Two dozen high-priced consultants have set up shop on three floors of the D.C. public schools' headquarters, wearing pinstripe suits, toting binders and BlackBerrys and using such corporate jargon as "resource mapping" and "identifying metrics."

That lede pretty much gives the game away, doesn't it? "High-priced suits," "pinstripe suits," and "jargon" -- oh my! And even Blackberrys, which would have been a meaningful signifier if this was 2001, not 2007. Newsflash: everyone and their Mom sends wireless email these days.

A couple of weeks ago, the Post ran a great, important series of articles making the case, in excruciating detail, that many of the woes of DCPS lie with comically incompetent bureaucracy that will never, ever, be able to reform itself. A problem of management, in other words. Now the same paper write a cynical article criticizing DCPS for hiring management consultants who, according to the article, have already saved the district $7 million to $9 million. What, exactly, is the problem? The article notes that DCPS has previously hired consultants at great cost, and then ignored their advice. Does that mean that if your doctor puts you on an exercise program to lose weight, and you ignore it, it was stupid to go to her in the first place and you never should again?