July 20, 1998, Monday, Late Edition - Final

   John Cole, president of the Texas Federation of Teachers, objects to what he says has been the most widely used test to become a public school teacher: the thermometer test. "If you register above 97 degrees, you pass," he lamented.

It may seem surprising to hear a teachers union leader complaining that some of those placed in front of classrooms are only warm bodies. And, indeed, Mr. Cole said, not many years ago he would not have been caught doing so. He saw the union's role as that of purely protecting members from attacks by administrators and school boards.

But today, with education moving to the top of the national political agenda, much of the attention is focused on teacher quality, widely seen as the most important variable in a pupil's education. Advocacy groups, state legislatures and Congress are seeking ways to attract better candidates to the teaching profession and improve teacher education, needs that have grown in urgency as school populations swell after years of shrinking.

In one sense, the nearly one-million-member American Federation of Teachers, whose delegates, like Mr. Cole, are meeting here for their biennial convention, is an organization under siege. The leaders, who are treating better teacher quality as a priority, have little choice: If they do not promote change it will be forced upon them.

So today the union passed a resolution calling for local affiliates to negotiate a role in the hiring of teachers, take part in assisting and reviewing teacher performance and, ultimately, in dismissing those teachers who are beyond help. Because a similar resolution was rejected at the union's convention two years ago in Cincinnati, this year's vote is evidence of changing times and growing pressure.

Yet it is also clear in the cavernous halls of New Orleans's riverside convention center where some 3,000 federation delegates have been meeting that the new national focus on teacher quality is seen as an opportunity. If handled properly, it should translate into higher pay, better benefits and greater honor for a profession that has fallen on hard times in the last few decades.

"If a company has a shortage of computer programmers, what does it do?" asked Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles. "It raises the salaries of programmers to attract more of them. The market works in every other sector of the economy. Why not here?"

Teacher salaries start at about $25,000 around the country, well below those of most other professions. Those who leave teaching -- as do some 50 percent within the first seven years of entering the profession -- further complain about safety, especially in urban districts, and lack of an attractive, professional environment. The buildings in which they work are often old; they frequently do not have easy access to telephones or computers and the lack of much contact during the day with colleagues can be isolating.

"My sisters are in the business world and they don't have to take professional development courses on Saturday or in the evenings," said Brenda Mitchell, director of the Center for Professional Growth and Development of United Teachers of New Orleans, the local federation affiliate. "They take them during working hours. They work in nice, air-conditioned offices and are treated like professionals. That's what we need for teachers today.

"I'm 51 years old and, as an African-American, I can tell you that many career paths were not open to me when I was younger. There was teaching or counseling. Today that's not true. All these other fields are wide open and people are going into them instead of teaching."

The teacher crisis stems partly, researchers agree, from the increased options opened to women and minority group members by the 1960's civil rights era. Their turning elsewhere combined with growing disorder in schools and reduced budgets, especially in inner cities, and a drop-off in school populations after the baby boom generation graduated. Now, with the children of the baby boom group in school and most good jobs so information-based, the need for teachers is heightened just as fewer high-achieving students are interested in the profession because of seemingly better options in a robust economy.

That is precisely what is worrying critics of public education, who maintain that teachers are increasingly drafted from a below-average group of applicants. In Massachusetts, for example, the first mandatory teacher test, taken in April, showed 59 percent of prospective teachers unable to pass a basic skills portion. Words like "improbably," "corrupt" and "relief" were often misspelled by the test takers.

The results led the president of the Massachusetts State Senate, Thomas F. Birmingham, to propose enticing new teachers with $20,000 signing bonuses. He said, "We're never going to pay teachers what corporate lawyers get but that doesn't mean you can't do something to attract better people."

In Washington, some members of Congress are proposing other financial incentives as well as sanctions, including abolishing student debts of teachers, especially those who go to poor neighborhoods to teach, and cutting Federal aid to teachers colleges whose graduates do not perform well on standardized tests. Only about 40 percent of the education schools in the country are accredited.

Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, made teacher quality the centerpiece of her convention opening speech here on Friday, saying it was on everyone's mind as well it should be, but she said the fault was not the union's.

"So long as state and local education authorities continue to issue emergency credentials and to misassign teachers into subjects they are not qualified to teach, higher standards will be a fiction," she said.

Ms. Feldman said there would be a need for 2 million new teachers in the coming decade and already some 6.5 percent, or about 13,000 out of 200,000, new teachers hired in public schools each year come with emergency credentials. In addition, she said, some 36 percent of the nation's public school academic teachers had neither a college major nor a minor in the subject to which they were assigned to teach.

She said that if administrators were to take up her challenge and this school year end the practice of emergency credentials, the teacher deficit would be truly exposed for what it is -- the result of school boards and administrators more concerned with placing anybody in front of a classroom than with real teacher quality.

Mr. Higuchi of Los Angeles said the national push for small class size was actually counterproductive without improving teacher quality.

"There is this illusion that all it takes is small groups to improve learning," he said. "But you could put the kids around a dining room table and if the teacher doesn't know what he is doing, it doesn't help."

Among the federation delegates there was some concern about the move to have the union involved in dismissing bad teachers when it is also the advocate for all its members.

Bill Roney, a kindergarten teacher from Yonkers, said such a dual role would only weaken the union, turning it into a form of management.

But other federation members said it was time for the union to move toward being a more professional association, rather than purely a trade union, in keeping with what teaching is. The A.F.T.'s union stridency is thought to have played a role in the rejection by the National Education Association, its rival, of a merger with it at its convention in New Orleans earlier this month. The two unions are expected to continue merger talks as well as cooperative ventures on things like peer review for teachers after the A.F.T.'s overwhelming vote on Saturday to pursue the merger.

Tom Mooney, president of the Cincinnati A.F.T. affiliate, said that in his city and a dozen others, peer review systems in which the union helps select and dismiss teachers have been working well. To critics who worry that the union will protect its own, he said that since the system began in Cincinnati, twice the number of bad teachers have been dismissed as under the previous system where it was only up to the principals.

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