While we all agree that education is imperative to the future of our nation and necessary for the strength of our democracy, we often don’t mention the central role of teachers, writes Vartan Gregorian. They deserve both material and moral support as well as our respect
Editor’s Note: Vartan Gregorian, the 12th president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, died unexpectedly on April 15, 2021, as this issue was on press. Gregorian founded the Carnegie Reporter magazine in 2000 and was deeply involved in the development of this issue dedicated to education and democracy. Among Gregorian’s many writings as an educator and a historian, this final essay focuses on subjects that he held dear — teaching and learning. Learn more about his extraordinary life and legacy.
Andrew Carnegie, our founder, had an extraordinary vision for our society. He believed in the necessity and the transformational power of education. He also believed that the success of our democracy depends on the quality of our education and of our teachers.
Reason and education, he believed, are bedrocks providing not only inspiration but also solutions and engines of progress for our free society. He was a firm believer in our democracy, its institutions, and our Constitution. He was convinced that an educated citizenry was the best guardian of our democracy, because they had learned that along with all of the rights bestowed upon them came an obligation to become engaged citizens.
After more than two centuries of independence, we in the United States still hold the notion that education is the instrument that provides advancement, not only of individuals but of our republic as well. However, great education needs great educators. They are central to the aspirations and progress of our society, not only in the scientific realm but also in the economic, social, and cultural domains.
America has always been and will always be a work in progress. Every generation has contributed and must contribute to that ongoing progress. Those of us who have been charged with following in the footsteps of Andrew Carnegie have believed as he did that an educated society is the best guardian and protector of our democracy. As John Gardner, one of my illustrious predecessors who served as president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, once said, when it pertains to our democracy, it is important to be both a loving critic and a critical lover, but never indifferent. America needs all of us to be both because, as he elaborated, “love without criticism brings stagnation, and criticism without love brings destruction.” One needs facts, scientific knowledge, respect for memory, and awareness of the past achievements of our democracy as well as its failures and deficiencies. We cannot know about our history, nor fill our scientific laboratories with expert scientists, nor fill our libraries with researchers as guides to our future, without a strong education system as well as competent and expert teachers.
During the past two centuries, we have made enormous efforts in America to democratize and nationalize access to education, thereby upholding the principle that education and the opportunity to learn should be available to all. Education is a necessity, thus a right not a luxury. Yet while we all agree that education is imperative to the future of our nation and necessary for the strength of our democracy, we often don’t mention the central role of teachers — to whom we have entrusted our children and grandchildren. In my opinion, they deserve both material and moral support as well as respect. We must counter the ambivalence toward the teaching profession that has long endured in America. On the one hand, we want the very “best teachers” for our children; on the other hand, it is ironic that many of us, across the nation, don’t want our sons and daughters to become teachers. We want them to aim at “higher” and more “rewarding” professions, namely ones with a higher salary and social standing. I don’t think many know the sad fact that in most states, we pay teachers less than any other occupation requiring a college degree.
A teacher does not merely instill an education, but rather, given adequate supports, provides avenues of discovery that enrich the lives of our children — who are our future citizens.
The psychologist Erik Erikson (1902–1994) once remarked that human beings are the “teaching species.” I believe this to be true. I also believe teaching is a noble profession, perhaps the noblest of all. It is not just a profession or a vocation, it is a calling. Thus, our teachers bear an awesome moral, social, civic, and historical responsibility in teaching new generations and, hence, creating our future. They are the ones who challenge students to engage in the joy of learning as well as “to undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves,” to quote the dramatist Richard Sheridan (1751–1816), meaning the process through which learning becomes knowledge.
“Education can do all” is a celebrated phrase, written and published posthumously in 1772 by the philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771). He wrote, “If I can demonstrate that man is, in fact, nothing more than the product of his education, I shall doubtless reveal an important truth to the nations. They will learn that they have in their hands the instrument of their greatness and their felicity, and that to be happy and powerful, it is only a matter of perfecting the science of education.”
Today, we all realize that in the best of situations teaching has been and continues to be hard work. In tough situations, it is most difficult. In the past, we have witnessed the shootings of teachers and children, dying in our classrooms and schools. However, nobody anticipated a pandemic that would challenge all of our premises about theories of teaching and learning.
As our frontline education professionals during the pandemic, teachers have been forced to bear the brunt of several challenges: a massive overnight shift to “remote teaching,” forcing them to adopt new tools and skills, sometimes with little support or training; the health risks of in-person instruction; decreased online attendance and participation by students; large-scale learning loss; and inconsistent access to technology and learning assistance at home for disadvantaged students. They have had to learn on the job and improvise to deal with new challenges.
In a pandemic-induced moment when the American education system has been blown into 25 million homes across the country, where do we go from here?
We have seen an enhanced appreciation of teachers as families themselves have experienced the challenges of daily at-home learning and realized firsthand how a teacher does not merely instill an education, but rather, given adequate supports, provides avenues of discovery that enrich the lives of our children — who are our future citizens. Nevertheless, teachers have also experienced animosity and criticism. They have been caught in a dilemma between reopening schools at the risk of their and their familiesʼ health and well-being, and closing schools, which denies education to our children and challenges the very essence of a teacher’s obligation. These are new trials that teachers have not dealt with before.
While we often blame our teachers when they do not deliver expected results in the classroom, teachers and schools do not exist in a vacuum. They are affected by a very complicated system of PreK–12 and higher education in the United States. Allow me to extrapolate.
American education is unique in many ways in the industrialized world because public schools are a local and state responsibility. This was an inadvertent outcome of the landmark 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, which influenced a United States Supreme Court ruling on school funding in 1973. The study confirmed the prevailing view at the time among scholars of educational reform that good teachers and good schools could not overcome the disadvantages of growing up in poverty. After noting that scholars were still debating whether more money would improve schools, the court ruled that education was a state responsibility, not a federal one.
This much-criticized decision set off 28 years of litigation, involving nearly every state. After failing for many years, the legal efforts to equalize state spending began succeeding when courts focused on state guarantees of an “adequate” education for all children. Nevertheless, funding for public schools continues to be drawn primarily from uneven and sporadic income sources — often deriving from real estate tax, income tax, and occasionally from gambling — with built-in inequality. Furthermore, our education system is unique in relying on private funds and philanthropy for innovation and reform. In the meantime, the finding of the 1966 study, which was based on the very best information then available and unintentionally undermined efforts to improve schools and the teaching profession, has today been countered by numerous empirical studies that confirm that quality of teaching is the most important variable affecting student achievement.
In 1983, the landmark report A Nation at Risk famously said that if a foreign power had imposed our education system on us, we would have considered it an act of war. The report called for, among many reforms, improving teacher education and strengthening the profession. Since 1983, there have been many reports, reviews, and movements to improve our public school system and teacher education. The proposed reforms have not been uniformly successful. As a result, we still have a long way to go.
I do not underestimate the difficulty of putting teaching reform on the fast track. Even when there has been widespread support, it has been very difficult to change our vast and fragmented education system. Actually, it is a nonsystem. There is no national entity governing our entire public school system and there is an absence of national guidelines. On the national scene, policies that define the U.S. Department of Education’s role and its funding are changed every two or four years based on the results of congressional and presidential elections. Hence, this lack of coherence, continuity, and long-term planning impedes efforts of reformers to improve the education of 50.7 million public school students in a nation with 3.2 million public school teachers where federal, state, and local agencies spend $709 billion a year on public PreK–12 education alone. Since the national alarm of 1983, we have had scores of school reformers, associations, and foundations, even some states and municipalities, put forth proposals for improving our PreK–12 system, involving some 100,000 public elementary and secondary schools, 18,000 public school districts, and 50 state departments of education. These efforts continue.
In my opinion, presently, we don’t have the means to resolve administrative tensions between jurisdictions, so we must seek and provide exemplary education models that can be adopted. It is a fact that in the United States we cannot impose progress from above because of existing civil, legal, and administrative systems. We must therefore make progress primarily by means of persuasion and inclusion of different stakeholders, by providing successful educational reform models, and always encouraging collaboration.
In our case, Carnegie Corporation of New York has been very active in supporting reforms to modernize our public school systems in cooperation and collaboration with others. I commend the work of Corporation grantees like the iLEAD (Improvement Leadership Education and Development) network, an initiative of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, our sister institution, which has established district-university partnerships around the country committed to developing leaders, addressing local problems of practice, and promoting equitable educational opportunities and outcomes for all students. Also laudable is the work of EdPrepLab, a grantee that is working to transform how we prepare educators by fostering collaboration between preparation programs, school districts, and state and federal policymakers. However, more needs to be done. While we are seeing progress, it is not at the scale that is needed for teachers and students everywhere to thrive.
The Corporation’s Democracy program makes the case for long-term investment in civic education as imperative to the civic and civil health of the nation.
Naturally, we still have some bully pulpits, such as: the president of the United States, the U.S. secretary of education, the National Governors Association, the United States Conference of Mayors, two national teachers unions (the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association), and some prominent leaders of educational reform. In the past, some influential university presidents, who have been committed to the reform of PreK–12 public education, have provided platforms for inspiration, advocacy, and guidance. Furthermore, in recent years, businesses and philanthropies have assumed a crucial role in promoting public school reform in order to provide not only opportunity but also economic and social stability for their local communities. Last but not least, we have witnessed with gratification the organization of parents who are providing additional impetus for reforms and support for teachers through the Parent Teacher Association. The latter at present has a national profile, but their chapters are locally controlled. Of course we cannot talk about change and school reform without mentioning the other organizations representing principals, superintendents, school boards, and a myriad of entities that would like to play a role in the renewal of the nation’s education system. Unlike in other countries, there are too many cooks in our education kitchen.
For me, one thing is clear. Public school reform is not enough without teacher education reform. Our “nonsystem system” needs to be revamped to better support teachers’ education, knowledge, and skills. State and federal authorities must focus on improving teaching and making that the cardinal element of school reform. After all, without quality teaching “all the directives and proclamations are simply so much fairy dust,” as the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future put it in 1996.
I still believe that it is in our nation’s classrooms that the future is created on a daily basis. Therefore, it is essential that the work in those classrooms be carried out with the guidance of teachers who are well educated, well trained, and knowledgeable about their respective fields of expertise. In addition, teachers must be committed to the idea that no student can be written off as mediocre or inconsequential. After all, students are potentialities not mere actualities. Therefore, all students must be given the opportunity to succeed in their quest for knowledge.
Unfortunately, at the present in our country, there is a serious deficiency in the quality of the education and training that teachers themselves receive in many of our universities and colleges before they are sent into our nation’s classrooms to help educate the next generation of Americans. In my opinion, we continue to overlook the responsibilities of our universities and colleges to PreK–12 education in educating and training a generation of inspired individuals who, against all odds, want to be teachers — good, competent teachers. Therefore, if we really want to improve learning, we have to make some structural changes in the curriculum of teachers to improve the art of teaching as well as a mastery of subject matter. I have always felt, maybe naively, that teachers fail, students don’t fail. As the philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867) put it succinctly, “As is the teacher, so is the school.”
My colleagues in higher education have a historical obligation to take decisive action in fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the education of teachers remains one of the central priorities of their institutions. Schools of education do not enjoy central roles in many universities. In general, many of them are poorly endowed and are often subject to benign neglect. We must continue efforts to make sure that our schools of education are not isolated islands that are marginalized and sustained by financial incentives and self-contained curricula.
Ideally, universities must provide prospective teachers with the best education, the best knowledge of their individual fields, as well as the latest theories of pedagogy, strong skills in technology, considerable classroom and distance learning experience, and professional mentoring. It would be wonderful if every two or three years, teachers were able to return either to their alma maters or nearby universities, preferably during the summer, for a month or two of renewal, at the expense of the universities or local school districts. This would enable teachers to catch up with major developments not only in their specialized fields but also in related academic disciplines, such as science, psychology, neurology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology — disciplines that affect learning and quality of teaching and are relevant to pedagogy.
It may be Pollyannaish but ideally higher education should demonstrate the importance of teaching in many ways, including equalizing the rewards for those who conduct research and those who apply it. This means granting tenure, promotions, and raises to faculty who teach prospective teachers or strengthen the profession in any number of ways, including advising school districts, coaching teachers, or even teaching in local schools. After all, colleges and universities need to recognize their responsibilities and opportunities in what de facto is a PreK–16 education system. The neglect of PreK–12 education is detrimental to the quality of higher education in the United States and also to equal opportunity.
I am the product of my teachers who instilled in me the joy of learning and the value of knowledge as a lifetime companion.
Of course, the above suggestions require federal, state, and local funding as well as philanthropic endeavors. The teaching profession is not a lucrative one. We cannot ask our teachers to learn more and give more, only to be burdened further with debt. To help them, we must continue to provide more scholarships and grant loan forgiveness to individuals from all backgrounds who have chosen to join the teaching profession. We also need induction programs that provide new teachers with ongoing professional learning that is deeply connected to their work in the classroom.
If there is to be real fundamental teaching reform along with an accompanying restructuring of our PreK–12 schools, we need teachers as allies rather than adversaries. Whatever the reforms envisaged, teachers must receive the necessary training and education and the means to carry out the aims of those reforms. That’s why in recent years, to ensure that teachers have a leading voice in the policies that impact their students and profession, Carnegie Corporation of New York has supported several teacher-led organizations, such as Educators for Excellence and Teach Plus. All of us know that more work still needs to be done to make sure that teachers’ expertise, experiences, and opinions inform management decisions as well as reform agendas and proposals.
The success or failure of our schools does not rely solely on teachers. Good schools need good teachers, and they need good principals — and they, in turn, need good superintendents. Yet the job of school administrators is more complex and demanding than ever before given their responsibility to work with teachers to remake schools so that they are more focused on teaching and learning by all. Superintendents and principals must receive adequate preparation to be instructional and organizational leaders with the authority and autonomy to enhance the educational mission of their respective schools. In our modern world, schools must provide teachers with adequate support, the latest technology, and work environments conducive to efficiency and creativity to enable teachers to do their best work. We must not thwart their leadership. We must be reminded that high turnover among principals and superintendents is a recipe for chaos and continued delay in the reformation of our schools and school districts.
Our universities and our colleges, our libraries and our learned societies, indeed our contemporary scholarship and our PreK–16 educators, more than ever have a fundamental historical and social task and responsibility to ensure that we provide not training but education, not education but culture as well, not information but its distillation, namely knowledge, in order to protect our society against counterfeit information disguised as knowledge. This is not an easy task. For in addition to an explosion of information and knowledge, we also face dangerous levels of fragmentation of knowledge, dictated by the advances of science, learning, and the accumulation of several millennia of scholarship. One of my favorite guides has been T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). As a poet, he summed it up best: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Understanding the nature of knowledge, its unity, its varieties, its limitations, and its uses and abuses is necessary for the success of our democracy.
The quality of teacher education — and hence the ability of excellent teachers to uplift and inspire their students — was of paramount concern to Andrew Carnegie, who helped elevate the quality of teacher education through, among numerous other ways, the founding of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, established in 1905 to “do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education.”
Carnegie’s personal commitment to our nation’s teachers stemmed from his belief that they are among the greatest resources American democracy can rely on to keep it strong, vibrant, and self-renewing. Today, those of us who appreciate teachers and teaching know there are few greater joys in this world than being able to rouse students’ curiosity about the world around them; to draw out of them the dreams and abilities that are born within them; and to help set them on a path that will lead them toward the kind of life and work that will offer both personal and professional fulfillment.
Naturally, Carnegie’s faith in education has been reflected in the mission of our Corporation. During past decades, we have sounded the clarion call for better early childhood education and care; for research about how children learn and about their cognitive development; for improved middle schools; for educational television for children; and for the right of all children to receive an education of great quality, an education that will truly prepare them to be citizens and participate and succeed in our society.
The 21st century presents education with many challenges. Almost every profession now requires knowledge and an understanding of complex information, a mastery of evolving technology, and an ability to weave them together as a whole cloth. As the world changes and artificial intelligence begins to play an important role in providing additional tools, so too must schools change. At the Corporation, this imperative has taken the form of working with school systems across the country to bring about a fundamental reformation of secondary and postsecondary education, reshaping our schools into learning communities with cultures that support high expectations, inquiry, effort, persistence, and achievement for all.
Let me conclude by quoting the historian Henry Adams (1838–1918): “Teachers affect eternity. They never know where their influence ends.” Each of us bears the imprint of a teacher who has had a major influence on our lives. My first teacher was my Armenian grandmother, an illiterate peasant yet wise disciplinarian, who raised me in Tabriz, Iran, where I was born. She instructed me in the moral lessons of life and the “right way” through her sheer character, stoic tenacity, formidable dignity, individuality, and utter integrity. My life was changed thanks to a series of subsequent teachers, including a passionate and inspiring elementary school teacher and high school teachers, one of whom was educated in Prague’s famous Charles University and who instilled in me a love of history, and another, educated at British schools in Cyprus and later at Oxford, who taught me English (but not the right accent); and then of course my professors at Stanford University, who practically adopted me, helped me, and launched my career. I am the product of my teachers who instilled in me the joy of learning and the value of knowledge as a lifetime companion.
All of my teachers taught me, guided me, and assisted me in making the right choices and wise decisions. It is because of them that I was able to make the transition from being a student to becoming a teacher myself. But along the way, it became clear to me that for those in the position of guiding students, it is vital to refrain from thinking of students as blank slates. Not at all. In fact, I subscribe to Plato’s notion of the role of teachers as those who have the great moral responsibility to draw out of students the talents and curiosity and desire to be educated that is born within them. In other words, for Plato, the role of a teacher is not to assume that students are empty vessels that need to be filled but rather to work with young people to help them learn how to learn and to think deeply and critically and in an organized way, so that ideas can turn into knowledge and knowledge may lead them to wisdom. Indeed, that is one of the most important qualities of a good teacher: to help a student uncover the abilities that he or she doesn’t even know they possess.
As president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, I feel a civic and moral obligation that we must maintain, prepare, and uphold a new generation of teachers who are dedicated to teaching all students who are entrusted to them. I firmly believe that the health of our country and the future of our democracy require that education, and the opportunities it affords, be sustained by well educated and prepared teachers from all backgrounds. I also believe that vigorous curriculum and instructional materials must be aligned with professional learning and school- and classroom-based innovations, new technology that is revolutionizing learning, and effective family and community engagement. Let me iterate that our country and democracy cannot afford to see one-third of our students fail to receive an education. It will make a mockery of equal opportunity and of our commitment to quality of education and knowledge for all.
I would like to conclude my remarks by paying tribute and express my utter respect for our nation’s teachers. Perhaps no other field of human endeavor serves as directly and forcefully as a “flight school” for the human spirit as teaching and learning. As the visionary businessman Lee Iacocca (1924–2019) once said, “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less.”
Vartan Gregorian served as president of Carnegie Corporation of New York from 1997 until his death on April 15, 2021. This essay is a continuation of his thoughts on teaching inspired by several of his earlier speeches and essays, primary among them his Tanner Lecture, The Real Crisis in the Classroom: How We Have Devalued Teachers (2001).
TOP: A teacher from Yung Wing Elementary P.S. 124 in New York City’s Chinatown remote teaches from her rooftop on March 24, 2020. Due to the spread of COVID-19, the city’s vast system of 1,800 schools had entirely shut down the week before. (Credit: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
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