There’s been much discussion of the value, in dollars and sense, of a good teacher (no typo). In many places, a conversation on the value of teachers is underpinned by debates over what’s being taught. In Texas, for example, the Republican Party approved a platform opposing the teaching of critical thinking skills, saying it’s behavior modification with “the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

Such discussions have prompted a “Your Dot” contribution from Janet English, a science teacher at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif. She is a recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching and the Distinguished Fulbright Award in Teaching. (Above you can watch a presentation English made last year at last year’s National Academies Summit on Science, Entertainment and Education.) Here’s her piece:

I was so scared the first time I taught in a high school science classroom, my knees knocked. I had entered a teenage culture built upon years of dominant kids oppressing the not so fortunate; I was the fresh meat in a scene from Lord of the Flies. Six boys lined up across the back of the room with their arms folded across their chests, challenging me for dominance. This was a coup; I wanted power and they didn’t want to relinquish it. School was not working for them; they were bored, apathetic toward schoolwork, and frankly, angry. What they wanted, or should I say demanded, was someone, something, to inspire them and convince them why they should be in school. They wanted to learn but they were tired of repetitive, boring, mind-numbing work and they had become frustrated and disillusioned with school. These kids wanted to become SOMEONE. Someone important. Someone that people noticed. Rote memory and learning for the sake of taking a test were not engaging them or validating their sense of self worth. They wanted more.

I’ve worked for many years with students of varying demographics and learning abilities and what I’ve learned over and over is that nearly all kids love to learn – even those who would like us to believe they hate school. But what they need from their education is more than the memorization of facts – they need great teaching, foundational knowledge, problem solving skills, and the understanding of current issues.

Last month I asked my students to take a pro or con position on the topic of genetic engineering; one student vociferously announced, “I completely disagree with it. We don’t know how it’s going to affect us in the long run!” The boy next to her replied, “Ally, they use genetic engineering to manipulate bacteria to make human insulin. I’m diabetic; that insulin keeps me alive.” Other students thrust their hands into the air anxious to share their point of view, while others simply blurted out their ideas – our classroom was intellectually alive and I was the moderator.

When asked why they were so engaged in the lesson one student replied, “It affects our future. We want to help build it.”

The other students clapped in agreement.

As a nation, we need a curriculum that demands more from our students than the mere memorization of facts, and a move toward a curriculum that supports deep and meaningful understanding of content, creative and critical problem-solving skills. To change our system would take money and a concerted effort to revamp how we do things. Is if worth the money?

I asked my brother, Bob English, a math major, to design an economic model to show how great teaching can financially benefit a student. He made the point that in our economy even small improvements in productivity can be extremely valuable; if a good teacher can improve the earnings of a student by even one percent over the course of a year, it can have significant benefits for the student and the community. Our country produces about $4 million in earnings for every person over their lifetime, and improving those earnings by a mere 1 percent could be worth $40,000 per person. If a good teacher has 25 students in a class (and many teachers have up to 40), then $40,000 multiplied by 25 students per year would be a value of $1 million! It’s difficult to put a firm number on the economic value of an education, of course, but if high school graduates earn 33 percent more than high school dropouts, a 1 percent per year increase seems conservative.

We’re having trouble keeping many of our young people in school because they’re bored and they don’t see the benefit of a memorized education; they want to learn and they want to contribute something meaningful to society. With life-dependent issues like climate change, biotechnology, and the availability of clean water facing us, we need to empower our youth with problem solving skills that will help them address these problems. Some adults oppose the teaching of critical thinking skills in our schools, but this is counterproductive. A viable democracy depends upon an educated populace. The National Academy of Sciences has been analyzing and synthesizing research for many years on how children learn; this work needs to be implemented into our educational design, and it needs to be aligned with what successful teachers know will work in a classroom.

Our youth want to help build the future – let’s use one of our nation’s best assets, our teachers, to help them succeed.