Professional Grade Teachers
My British American Project affiliation scored me access to a great teleconference that spanned the Atlantic and featured speakers in the US and UK on education reform. A central point that was made - higher-quality teachers make for better educational outcomes for students, especially disadvantaged students - is echoed by a recent McKinsey report highlighted in last week's issue of The Economist.
If this is the case, how to attract more of our best and brightest into the classroom? As one of the speakers noted, the removal of the glass ceiling for women over the past 40 years has meant that fewer career-minded women today are choosing to be teachers, whereas their counterparts from a generation ago might have felt that other outlets were unavailable to them. That's a lot of intellectual firepower that is now deployed in law, medicine, engineering, and business that was once more focused in the classroom. So there is a silver lining to this challenge of recruiting more of our best young worker bees into the teaching profession: it's a challenge because women are finding more and better career opportunities elsewhere.
I'm wading into a world I don't know well, but it seems to be that the successful models are successful because of their freedom to and commitment to taking teacher selection seriously - picking good teachers, holding them accountable to results, rewarding them when they succeed, and getting rid of them when they don't. At the risk of having a rock thrown through my window by the teacher's union, if I was king of AFT, I'd co-opt that sentiment and work towards the group becoming an affiliation with cache, and teaching becoming a profession with cache, rather than trying to protect weaker members from being fired and resisting any attempt to inject some market discipline into the industry. But if you know me, you knew I'd say that.
What's at stake, of course, is more than just the mission and viability of the teacher's union. We're talking about matters of global competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-based economy, and matters of social justice in an increasingly stratified class structure. So it's crazy to me that we don't take teacher recruitment, selection, and monitoring more seriously.
Comments
However, I think there is a flawed assumption that threatens to be fatal to reform efforts. From my perspective the conversation focuses exclusively on teachers. Frankly, teachers alone are not sufficient to address the "achievement gap." I don't even think they're the primary problem.
The primary problem as I see it is the utter lack of the nuclear family as an institution within these communities. If we actually want to improve "achievement" in these communities, to say nothing of the humanity of their children, addressing this issue will go farther than any other measure, and failing to address it may sabotage any other efforts.
The problem with that problem is it goes against the ideology of those who have made the policy which most impacts these communities for generations. In fact, it is that same policy which has accelerated the demise of the family. To even address it requires an about-face and a repentance of those who have helped to bring it to that point. Counterproductive are more assertions that those before had the right general idea but the wrong execution, and that with more money and better skill we can succeed where they failed.
Programs like Teach For America heap guilt on their recruits when the students who they received two months prior and who were already irreparably damaged in many ways are not performing at "80 percent mastery." We are right to focus on our teachers. But we are wrong if we think that fixing the teaching profession is going to save our inner-city schools.
I can't speak for others, but in my post, what I am referring to is, of the things school systems can control, how they pick/manage/compensate teachers seems to be something that could be done differently and better. That argument doesn't attempt to touch the way in which parents can improve; I take as given that anything a school can do can be swamped - good or bad - by what a parent can do.