Essay excerpt

This wisdom is from a friend who's spent MANY years in the public school reform trenches.  This is scary, as I'd always guessed that the number was maybe 10-20%:

ask any urban school leader, most educators, and even many senior union leaders and they will quickly confide in you that a significant percentage of inner city teachers (at least 33% is the conventional wisdom) are flatly not up to the job – and likely never will be regardless of how much training and structured curriculum support they are provided.

Not to repeat myself too often, but guess which kids are stuck with that 33%?!

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Excerpt from a friend's essay:

 

I begin with the well-accepted premise that “teacher effectiveness” lies at the heart of the challenge and must be the centerpiece of any successful solution.   Teaching and learning – the building blocks of student achievement gains – are completely dependent on quality instruction.   Without it, to be blunt, nothing else matters.   Additional resources, more targeted professional development, better strategies for addressing the social deficits that put many urban students behind the educational eight ball at the outset, and a more efficient central office may all be important.  In and of themselves, however, they simply cannot overcome an inadequate, unmotivated, and ineffective teaching force.  

 

It goes without saying that the teaching profession is dominated by well-intended and talented professionals who labor against sometimes overwhelming odds to achieve the best possible outcomes for their students.  While that is certainly true, ask any urban school leader, most educators, and even many senior union leaders and they will quickly confide in you that a significant percentage of inner city teachers (at least 33% is the conventional wisdom) are flatly not up to the job – and likely never will be regardless of how much training and structured curriculum support they are provided.   That admittedly impressionistic view finds support in the disproportionately low academic qualifications of the teaching force and an increasingly critical view of the nation’s colleges responsible for training them.

 

These are tough, highly charged and, without doubt, politically incorrect words.  But the stakes are too high to hide behind the usual platitudes.   Study after study shows that an elementary school child consigned to two or more years of poor teaching literally never recovers from the experience.   The consequences are far from abstract.  Poor teaching leads almost inexorably to being pushed permanently off the ladder of real educational and therefore economic opportunity.   

 

To be sure, the tragic human consequences of poor classroom instruction never stem from bad intentions and only rarely from lack of commitment on the part of the teacher.  The root causes instead are structural.  To name just a few, suburban salary differentials often cause the best and the brightest to exit the inner city as soon as they can.  Increasing economic opportunity for women in the work place has substantially eliminated the historic market aberration that drove talented women by the tens of thousands into teaching because they couldn’t command a better paying position in other sectors of the economy.   An entrenched seniority and tenure system operates to give the more experienced teachers the right to select the building in which they will work – resulting, again, in a disproportionate number of unseasoned teachers in the worst schools and severely limiting principals’ ability to put together a faculty based on a frank assessment of talent, building chemistry, and commitment to a common vision and implementation strategy.   Contractual pay schedules that guarantee salaries and raises regardless of performance are combined with a deep resistance to merit-based incentives based on student outcomes.   Extraordinarily burdensome obstacles result in remarkably few terminations of even the most consistently unsatisfying performers.  And, overlying it all, are the funding inequities that often result in a perverse allocation of dollars away from the schools with the greatest needs.

 

There is virtually no likelihood of reversing the educational crisis in more than incremental ways until such structural impediments to a consistently effective inner city teaching force are cleared away.   If we are to stop nibbling around the edges, this basic reality must be treated as the centerpiece of any reform strategy.  At the end of the day, the thing that counts the most is what actually goes on in the classroom.    It’s that elemental.  Any reform solution that fails to overcome the barriers to effective teaching and inadequate accountability for student outcomes – no matter how historically-rooted or politically untouchable those barriers may be– will fail.