Education Next has a thoughtful discussion between Ed Trust's Kati Haycock and the Hoover Institution's Eric Hanushek on how to get "An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom". However, I have to take issue with what Hanushek says here:

Inner-city schools and especially those serving the most disadvantaged students routinely display unacceptable achievement levels, ones that seal their students off from further education and from good jobs. Coupled with the general finding that effective teachers are the key to a high-quality school, it is natural to infer that the children most in need are systematically getting the poorest teachers.

Unfortunately, direct evidence on the distribution of teacher quality and its impact for disadvantaged students is hard to come by. Researcher Marguerite Roza and others have produced considerable evidence that teachers in schools serving the most-disadvantaged students have lower average salaries, reflecting in large part the movement of more-experienced teachers away from schools with a higher proportion of minority students and with lower-achieving students. There is also evidence that these schools tend to have more teachers with emergency credentials and without regular certification, although this appears to be declining over time. The problem is that these readily measured attributes of teachers have virtually nothing to do with teacher effectiveness.

Extensive research on teacher quality by me and others suggests that the only attribute of teacher effectiveness that stands out is being a rookie teacher. Teachers in their first three years do a less satisfactory job than they will with more experience. And this has an impact on schools serving highly disadvantaged populations, because the more-experienced teachers who leave these schools are generally replaced with new teachers. The net impact of this on disadvantaged schools is unclear, because there is also some evidence that the experienced teachers who leave these schools are on average not their most effective teachers.

This is nonsense, and fortunately Kati Haycock quickly rebuts it:

No matter what measure of "quality" you look at, poor and minority students—and not just those in inner-city schools—are much less likely to be assigned better-qualified and more-effective teachers. Core academic classes in high-poverty secondary schools are twice as likely as those in low-poverty schools to be taught by a teacher with neither a major nor certification in the subject. The percentage of first-year teachers at high-minority schools is almost twice as high as the percentage of such teachers at low-minority schools. The list of disgraceful statistics goes on and on.

Even if we dismiss traditional measures as imperfect gauges of true teaching quality, new studies employing more-sophisticated measures reveal the same inequitable patterns. When the Tennessee Department of Education analyzed the state's Value-Added Assessment System—which measures the impact of individual teachers on their students' tested academic growth—it found that "low-income and minority children have the least access to the state's most effective teachers and more access to the state's least effective teachers." Recently, researchers at the University of Virginia studying teaching practices and learning climate in more than 800 1st-grade classrooms were dismayed to find that lower-income and nonwhite students are much more likely than their counterparts to be placed in "lower overall quality classrooms."

We also have clear evidence of just how damaging those inequities are. An analysis of data from Los Angeles found that the impact of individual teachers is so great that providing top-quartile teachers rather than bottom-quartile teachers for four years in a row would be enough to completely close the achievement gap between white and African American students. In fact, attending to this problem is the most important step policymakers can take to address the nation's long-standing achievement gaps.

For my slides on this topic, see my school reform presentation (www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/TheCriticalNeedforGenuineSchoolReform.pdf), pages 65-70, 111-117 and 220-224.

However, the best data, though hard to capture, is just talk to ANY teacher or principal with relevant experience – they'll tell you the real situation is FAR worse than what the data shows.

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