Ed Policy, part 2

A recent Newsweek article suggested another approach to education reform: we should make it easier to fire incompetent teachers. That’s a reasonable and probably necessary idea, but we haven’t thought this through, either.

First, most schools have some really good teachers, some poor teachers, and a lot who fall somewhere in between (since human behavior generally conforms to that normal curve distribution). Making it easier to fire “bad” teachers may fix the problem at one end of the curve, but it does nothing to address the skills of all the teachers in the middle - the ones who teach most students. Plus, the fact that some schools appear to have far more than their share of “bad” teachers points to a systemic issue that has little to do with the teachers, themselves.

(A good example  is the recent case in Rhode Island where the entire faculty of a school was fired. Is it possible that all fifty of those teachers were “bad”?  Where does one find fifty good teachers to replace them? If those teachers are so good, why don’t they already have jobs? If we don’t fix the system, where will these teachers be in five years?...)

The vast majority of teachers enter the profession wanting to be successful. But the profession’s 50% five-year “drop-out” rate is largely the result of a long tradition of placing teachers in classrooms, on their own and without adequate support - or preparation, a whole other issue.

Then there’s the widely held belief that “good teachers are born and not made”, which the authors seem to blindly accept. This, however, is nonsense; in what other profession is it true?

In fact, Teach for America has spent years studying the issue of teacher effectiveness. They’ve concluded that the two best predictors of an effective teacher are 1) perseverance, and 2) the willingness to change when a strategy doesn’t appear to be working. In other words, teachers become “good” teachers by continuing to work at it.

This doesn’t occur in a vacuum. “Quality teaching depends … on the environment in which teachers work; a curriculum focused on higher-order thinking; opportunities for teachers to plan with and learn from one another; and regular occasions to evaluate the outcomes of their practices.” (Linda Darling-Hammond)

More on this later.