On behalf of the 32 million teachers, David Edwards, Secretary General of the Education International, spoke about the needs of teachers on the occasion of International Education Day in the United Nations. See the full text below:
“I’d like to thank the President of the General Assembly for this important gathering and this opportunity. When we found out about International Education Day we were very excited at Education International. For those of you who don’t know who we are, Education International is the global federation of teachers’ organizations representing about 32 million teachers in 174 countries. They have a lot to say about this very topic. Before I get into that I’d just like to stop for one second and I’d like to think about a teacher. I’d like you to think about a teacher in your life who influenced you in a profound way. Who helped you through something, maybe inspired you in some way. Think about how important, how fundamental, how inspirational that person was to you and where you are now. When we survey teachers around the world we are finding that we are losing a lot of our great teachers the ones that you’re thinking about. We find that in the first five years we’re losing about 50% of those who go into teaching. And there’s a variety of reasons for that. There are variety of reasons why we are unable to attract people into the teaching profession in many countries. There’s many reasons why they’re leaving in others. And to break it down in a simple way I’d like to put forward this idea of teachers in today’s world are faced with a professional and moral paradox. So people who go into teaching and I think about those people again they didn’t go there for money but they certainly need a salary to live. And what we’re finding in our research is that in many countries teachers are still working at or even below the poverty line. We are finding that they have to work extra jobs in some countries. There’re some countries and I won’t name them because I’m here but there are countries where they don’t get paid for the first year when you’re a new teacher. There’re some countries where teachers are in debt just to become a teacher and there are other countries where they actually receive a stipend when they’re in high school to try to get them to become a teacher and teacher education is free. There are countries where there is a learning trajectory for teachers. Where it’s not just you get trained in this initial training but it’s built in all the way across the life of a teacher. Learning… there’s the time, the tools and the trust to understand that teaching is not just about knowledge but it’s also about wisdom, it’s about the ability to adapt, it’s about the ability to take in a lot of different information at the same time. And the paradox I’m talking about is that in a world where conflict is rampant, where bullying is on the rise, where the environmental challenges are extreme we’re trying to attract people by saying “come into teaching and we will pay you very little money, we’ll give you very little autonomy and we need you to follow this script and we will be basing your performance on a very narrow set of standards. So right now, the system as it’s built, is not ready in many countries to bring teachers in and to keep them there and that’s very very concerning. We are also seeing a 69 million shortage and a lot of fads that try to fill that. Throughout the 80s and 90s, there was a fad to try to just give unqualified people an iPad and somehow they would be able to teach. They would be able to make all those choices and become all those inspirational people that you were just thinking about. It’s not going to happen. So one of the things we have to do is we have to put the fads aside. We have to do the mundane supremely well. What we’re finding in terms of the research Jo and the GPE, they do a lot of work at country level in terms of building systems, building good teacher policy the Norwegians and others have invested in teacher dialogue with teachers so that decisions in classrooms, decisions in schools, decisions in education systems are based on what teachers and students need and not what somebody in some far-off place in the world thinks they need and does to them. I have just a couple of quick things and I know we’re short on time but what the solutions are. I already said we need to do the mundane spectacularly well. We need coherence across teacher development, policy coherence that needs to be able to change administrations and time. It’s something so important that governments need to do. We need good labor policy. Because good labor policy is key to good education policy. We need to be able to balance the short, medium, but also be building towards the long term. We can’t just be bringing in volunteer teachers. Teaching isn’t charity work, it’s a profession and we need to treat it as such. We need dialogue with teachers as I said, and their organizations because these are the people on the ground that actually know what’s best and what they need. They can design their own professional development. They should have a voice in all of this and it’s absolutely crucial. So these are some of my reflections in terms of what we need to do at a sort of a macro level. But it’s quite urgent. And I think for the people you just thought about in your head and if you want to multiply that by 69 million because it can’t be just for the richest to get those teachers, it has to be for the disadvantaged and marginalized as well. We have to keep equity front and center as well.”