So You Want to Be a Teacher

So You Want to Be a Teacher

A former journalist offers some caveats, but presses ahead on his quest to change professions

By Matthew Cox

Walking away from a 26-year career in journalism to become a secondary school English and language arts teacher was a difficult decision. My wife and I have always relied on two incomes to support ourselves and our three daughters. Getting a teaching license in Vermont meant I would have to quit my newspaper job, take out more than $12,000 in college loans, and go without a paycheck for at least 15 months.

I left print journalism in May 2007 -- my last job was as night editor of the Rutland Herald -- because I'd long ago stopped having fun and it seemed to me the industry's decline was never going to end. I thought I could make a greater contribution to my community as a public school teacher than I had as a reporter. So I enrolled at Vermont's Castleton State College in a program designed specifically for people who are entering education from other professions.

There were a dozen of us in my class, including a retired New York State prison guard who wanted to teach art; a pharmacist who wanted to become a science teacher; a National Forest ranger seeking to share his love of biology; and a convenience store owner pursuing her dream of teaching elementary school. At 51, I was one of the older members of the class; the youngest were in their early to mid-20s and fresh out of college.

In 13 months we had to pass 36 credits of graduate school while preparing an elaborate, six-part teaching portfolio, which in my case exceeded 40,000 words. Each of us received a post-baccalaureate certificate and, later, a state teaching license. The program offered no guarantee of a job, and while we were free to seek resume and job-interviewing skills at the career center, no special placement assistance was built in. Sixteen months after starting the program, only four of the 12 of us have found full-time teaching jobs. Only one of those three was changing careers.

I assumed the strength of my resume - reporter and editor at well-known newspapers like Newsday, published author and Pulitzer Prize finalist -- would make me a strong candidate for a job teaching English or language arts once I had my state teaching license. The hardest part, I thought, would be clearing the hurdles that stood between me and that license.

I was wrong.

Since completing my licensing requirements in May, I have applied for more than 30 teaching jobs and have been rejected for each one. In those districts where I've been able to ask why, I've received the same explanation: I have no experience. I am unproven as a teacher.

It's not that there aren't opportunities. The Vermont Department of Education Web site lists secondary school English as a "designated teacher shortage area." Still, the competition for English jobs is stiff. One search committee chairman who interviewed me for a high school English teaching job said he'd stopped reading after receiving 63 applications. The problem I'm encountering is that many schools seem reluctant to look at nontraditional candidates.

The two most recent jobs for which I've interviewed don't even require a teaching license. I was rejected for a job at an alternative school -- run by a nonprofit agency - where I would have worked with emotionally challenged public school students unable to function in a regular classroom.

It is possible that reporters changing careers in larger cities, where schools have more difficulty retaining teachers, might have an easier time. If you are thinking of making such a change, you might first want to be clear about the job opportunities or consider working at the college level, where a reporter or editor with a master's degree can forgo the painstaking process of obtaining a state teacher's license.

If you still want to teach in public schools, you might need to be prepared for a substantial pay cut. In Vermont, public schools offer starting salaries in the $30,000 range, whether you are a 21-year-old college graduate looking for your first job or a professional writer twice that age. (As night editor at the Herald, where I managed the newsroom from late afternoon until the start of the press run, I was paid $40,000, already less than half of what I made in my last job in New York.)

Prepare yourself to jump through a mind-boggling series of hoops. For example, teacher candidates in Vermont must pass standardized exams known as Praxis I and Praxis II, made specifically for teaching candidates by Princeton, N.J.-based testing giant Educational Testing Service.

I paid $430 for the two tests I took, including a $50 annual fee, a $30 fee for getting scores over the telephone, and a $45 fee for deciding to take two tests on the same day. The first test in the series, Praxis I, is designed to "measure basic academic skills," according to ETS, and I passed it easily.

Praxis II measures "general and subject-specific knowledge and teaching skills,'' and my experience with that exam was baffling because I somehow flunked the essay test.
There are two versions of the Praxis II test -- essay and multiple choice -- and a Vermont teaching candidate needs to pass only one to qualify for a license. I passed the multiple choice exam, so I cleared the Praxis II hurdle. But I flunked the essay version, which required me to analyze several works of literature. The range of possible essay scores was 100-200, and Vermont requires aspiring English teachers to attain a minimum score of 160. ETS readers gave my four essays, written in two hours, a cumulative score of 155.

I'm a reasonably successful writer. Besides being paid to do it for 26 years at newspapers and a wire service, I'm co-author with another reporter of a book about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland (Their Darkest Day: The Tragedy of Pan Am 103 and Its Legacy of Hope, Grove Weidenfeld, 1992). With three reporting colleagues, I was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993 for newspaper stories about the inadequate medical care given New York state prison inmates. I shared in a 1997 staff Pulitzer at Newsday for coverage of the mid-air explosion of TWA Flight 800 and its aftermath.

I found irony in my situation -- a writer failing an essay exam -- but an ETS official did not. Linda Tyler, vice president of ETS's higher education and school assessments division, said English content essays are intended to evaluate a test taker's skills at literary analysis and interpretation, not his or her writing ability.

"Being a very good, professional writer is not a guarantee that you'll pass a constructed response exam in the Praxis II series," Tyler said.

Dr. William Mathis, the superintendent of the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union, where I did my student teaching, said he's never found success on the Praxis tests to be an indicator of future success as a teacher. Recent research by Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, and Michael Podgursky, a professor of economics at University of Missouri, Columbia, confirms that performance on such tests is unrelated to a teacher's effectiveness.

The most rewarding part of my training has been student teaching all year as an unpaid intern at Otter Valley Union High School, a rural Vermont junior and senior high school in Brandon with 700 students, leaky roofs, and stale air. Some students have been known to hunt for deer before class; in the winter, some commute by snowmobile.

I learned that I love teaching. It feels like a calling. I developed respect and affection for my students, for my two compassionate and generous mentors, and for the school's staff.
In a middle school skills workshop called The Brain Cell, I felt a profound sense of purpose as I worked to boost the skills and self-esteem of academically struggling seventh- and eighth-graders - many of them at risk of dropping out, and with little educational support at home. (About 25 percent of the school's students are eligible for a free- or reduced-price lunch.)

In an Advanced Placement literature class, college-bound high school seniors and I ended up pitying Shakespeare's ranting, mercurial King Lear. I sat back with my mouth open as the same students wrote and read aloud personal essays, some of them remarkably brave and intimate, after weeks of complaints that the essays we'd read from an anthology were boring. I felt a loss when we said goodbye. Watching them file out of a stifling hot auditorium wearing caps and gowns, I was overcome by a bittersweet sensation: sad to see them leave, happy to see them making a successful transition to adulthood.

Has changing careers been worth it? I have no regrets yet, although I am angry and hurt by the rising pile of job rejections. I have to remind myself every day that change is painful, and that my decision to walk away from a comfortable career and start another at the bottom rung took courage that I didn't know I possessed.

Two things I am sure about: I'll feel better when I've found a full-time teaching job, and I won't go to my grave wondering what it would have been like if only I'd taken a different path.

Cox is a freelance writer and is still looking for a full-time teaching job in Vermont. He is working as a substitute.

Justin Snider contributed to this story.