Teaching Quality Series Part V: Parental Engagement

It's generally true that the more that parents are involved in their children's education, the more academically successful their children will be and the more effective the teachers will (at least appear to) be. I largely agree with Thomas Friedman's take on this.

That being said, the seemingly growing "parent accountability" movement troubles me. Moreover, the strategies (which are in many cases de facto requirements) some charter schools are using to engage parents are in some cases are worth emulating but in others amount to punishing kids for the failures of their parents.

Before I continue, I must acknowledge that I have almost exclusively taught students with parents who weren't very involved in their education, despite my varied efforts, and so some of my thinking on this may be colored by a certain fatalism. The parents could have been less involved because I taught secondary school and parents often think of this as a time to step back. It could have been because the parents worked very long hours and simply didn't have the time be involved. It could have been because I taught mostly the children of immigrants, whose parents sometimes cede almost all education authority to schools and teachers, or whose parents want to be more involved but don't feel included in the school community. Also, in some cases, these parents expect their older children, especially the males, to be at least partial bread-winners, treating them more like adults. Alas, frankly, a handful of parents simply didn't seem to care.

Now, in my mind, a lack of involvement doesn't necessarily translate to a lack of support. If nothing else, being supportive means doing an adequate job at home, as a parent and as such: sending your kids to school prepared to learn, adequately feeding and housing your children, making sure they have a quiet place to study, and encouraging them to read and study. For me, as a teacher, such support would be more than enough.

That all being said, just because parents aren't much involved or supportive, doesn't mean in any way that teachers and schools shouldn't work actively work to engage, involve, and get input from parents; they absolutely should. However, if such outreach fails, teachers must still keep in mind that their job is to educate their students, regardless of parent involvement. Students should not be punished because of their parents' lack on involvement. At the bare minimum, the parents should parent and the teacher and school should educate. And when the parent fails to parent adequately, well, schools are still responsible to educate those children students as best they can.

Which leads me to parent accountability. I've noticed among some of the blogs I follow, some support of the concept of parent accountability. Now, these links are pretty old (yes, it takes me a loooong time to get around to finishing many of my posts), which I hope means the idea is losing traction, but in case it doesn't. . .

Though he recently agreed with Friedman's softer take, this past summer, Ed Week blogger and former teacher Walt Gardner expressed a bit of a harder line on parent accountability, saying:

Yet there is a faint glimmer of hope on the horizon. According to The New York Times, legislators in some states have introduced bills holding parents responsible for their children's performance and behavior ("Whose Failing Grade Is It?", May 21). Whether these bills ever become law is another matter, but at least they signal a possible shift in the accountability movement.

An American Propsect blogger also threw her hands up, saying (albeit at the end of an otherwise very good post about evaluating teachers),

On a final note, I wonder if the day will ever come when we legislate or evaluate parenting as part of the performance of children. It may be an unfair intrusion of the state into the home, but it's rare to see improvement and advancement in children if it doesn't come from encouraging or demanding parents. This is the "x" in the education equation, and until we find a way to solve for it, no answer will ever truly be accurate.

This post on The Answer Sheet by is by Catherine Durkin Robinson who is the founder and president of a group called National Coalition for Accountable Parenting, which promotes parent accountability measures, including fines, jail time, mandated parenting classes, school-issued parent report cards, and financially rewarding "good" parents. Yikes. I'm not able to chose even one block from this piece as the whole thing is so chock full of terrible recommendations. I strongly suggest you read it for yourself. I'm telling you, the Tea Party couldn't make this stuff up.

Many states are considering fining parents for their children's truancy. In West Virginia, legislators proposed a bill that would revoke parents' driving licenses due to truancy and tardiness of their children. It's unclear to me how fining parents who are likely already struggling financially or taking away a means to get their children to school is supposed to help their children go to and succeed in school.

To me, these example of parent accountability via legislation is just spreading bad policy pain. I don't want to be held accountable for things that are beyond my control, but I also don't want parents and students to be held accountable for things beyond their control. The solution is not to transfer draconian and unreasonable demands from teachers onto parents (or even unto principals), to find new teams to play the blame game; the right thing to do is to do away with the concept altogether. As my father always told me growing up (and as I'm fond of declaring in these education reform conversations): Two wrongs don't make a right. We don't need a war on bad parents; we need a society and government that supports families, especially ones that are struggling. Also, do we really need to criminalize more things in our society? I really don't think so.

Some reformers, for example, Peter Meyer of Fordham, makes the case that good schools will make good parents. He posited in an earlier post that charters are superior to neighborhood schools because they better educate kids and they get better results. He said that KIPP, for example, creates motivated parents rather than merely attracting them because the type of education KIPP offers is a motivator. I tried to discuss the finer points of this with him (for one it's very hard to measure motivation) but didn't get very far.

Though people like Meyer do have a point that KIPP may well "motivate" parents simply by offering a solid education, this logic is ultimately faulty. I, as a neighborhood school classroom teacher, can promise and offer a rigorous and engaging curriculum, but I can't say that students can only remain in my class if their parents do their homework with them each night. That would be punishing my students for the behavior or actions of their parents. That's not fair to the students. Also, I just really couldn't do that.

I am responsible for communicating and being available to all parents, but if the parents don't do their part, I still have to treat that student the same as the one whose parent does meet me halfway. I need to promise my students best and most appropriate pedagogical practices and a rich and meaningful curriculum. If the parents get more on board because of that, so be it, but my duty is primarily to their children, not to them. Likewise, as a teacher I learned to assume nothing about my students' home life, to give only homework that they could do on their own. Any bigger projects that required supplies or computers or extra help we worked on in class. Otherwise, I would be rewarding students who had more resources and more available and educated parents and punishing those who didn't.

KIPP, HSA, and other charters can exclude kids because of their parent won't get involved. They can counsel them out if the kid hava behavior issues or special needs. I don't think KIPP denies this and this post isn't meant to explore any ethical dilemma inherent in that, only to say that it's not fair to compare performance of the two or claim that charters like KIPP are doing a better job with the same population. Such schools can openly exclude or expel or punish kids for their parents' lack of involvement, while traditional public schools can't. This is a form of parent accountability that ultimately holds students responsible.

We should work harder to engage and inform parents at our traditional public schools and to offer better education, and we shouldn't get rid of all charters--they're not without value. But if we really want to put the most vulnerable students first, we should focus our education reform efforts on strengthening the neighborhood schools that are responsible for educating them regardless of their parents' commitment to their education. We should strengthen our outreach to parents, or at least, not diminish it. And when parents can't for whatever reason be adequate parents, making their lives even more difficult via parent accountability schemes is not going to help and will ultimately, I fear, punish the children we're trying to help in the first place.

Teaching Quality Series, Part IV: Class Size & The Fallacy of Trickle-down Teaching

Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and some of the other presiding education reform yahoos have started to question the benefits of smaller class sizes. DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson deserves some credit for a semi-acknowledgement of the importance of smaller class sizes in this Q&A with Bill Turque. She states that at least some kids should have smaller classes, however she repeats the notion that it's better to have a class of forty students with one effective teacher than a class of twenty students with an ineffective teacher. Now, she's not completely wrong, but I would issue several caveats to go with her generalization.

Henderson's thinking is an example of what I like to call voo-doo education policy. This theory of "trickle-down teaching" says smaller classes dilute the benefits of effective teachers and that an effective teacher's magic, no matter how thinly spread, will trickle down equally to all students before her, by sheer force of her supernatural talents and effectiveness. I would argue that that's the wrong way of looking it, that the larger class sizes get (or total student load for some secondary teachers), the more that a teacher's effectiveness will be diluted.

In my experience, teaching is not like showing a movie in a movie theater where everyone has the same experience no matter how many people are in theater, nor is learning a passive experience. Teaching can be more like being a server in a restaurant: after a certain point, the more tables you have to wait on, the worse your service is going to be, especially if each table is full, with different orders, and even different menus. I don't want my own children going to a school that is modeled after a McDonald's, nor do I want as a teacher to be the equivalent of a McDonald's worker. As my mother, a DC-based civil rights lawyer and school finance expert pleaded once, "Can't our public school leaders at least aim for The Olive Garden?"

In general, smaller class sizes help to increase the quality of education received. Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters is the guru of the benefits of small classes. Read here for a summary, or here if you want a more extensive list, of the research demonstrating the benefits of smaller class sizes. That being said, there are many factors to consider when thinking about ideal class sizes. Optimal class sizes depend on what's being taught and at what level, who's teaching, who's being taught, and how many teachers or education professionals are serving any group of students at once.

While the research is more mixed for older grades, the research for elementary is pretty clear that in general, twenty-two is the largest a K-3 class should get before the quality of education received is compromised. Even twenty-two students, though, seems large if the class includes students with special needs or other students who require more intensive instruction.

Teaching veteran and Education Week blogger Nancy Flanagan reminded me that at the secondary level, it's important to consider a teacher's total student load. An experienced and well-regarded high school AP English teacher told me he could easily manage a class of thirty to forty (so, Kaya Henderson is somewhat right here) and often has--he is very popular due to his rigorous curriculum and the attention his students receive. However, he made sure to say that it was only really feasible if he is only teaching three sections of that size. Beyond that, his workload becomes unreasonable and the students don't get the feedback or volume of work they need--he assigns fewer essays, for example, and works a punishing number of hours. Teaching AP English, requires significant out-of-class-time: for planning lectures, studying texts in depth, and giving targeted, individual feedback on writing. He also made it clear that a class size of forty is only manageable in a course like AP English, with independent, disciplined students and an advanced curriculum and only after he had been in the classroom for about ten years--larger classes would have been close to impossible when he was learning the ropes. Less experienced teachers, no matter whom they're teaching, should not be broken in with larger classes.

This leads to the consideration of whom a teacher is teaching. For example, I have limited experience teaching larger classes because, with a few exceptions, I have taught ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), either on its own or by way of social studies--what's called Sheltered Instruction or content-based language instruction. Generally, the more fluent the students were, the larger my class sizes were (though still on the smaller side), which is as it should be. However, students' literacy skills and prior education  also determines how much attention they will need; the daughter of a professor visiting from Korea will need different instruction and less intensive attention than the son of a Salvadoran farm worker with limited or no prior schooling. The greater the needs of the students and the more feedback and guidance they require in class, the smaller the classes should be.

We also must consider the difference between class sizes and the pupil-to-teacher ratio in a school building. For example, the ratio may be 22:1 in a particular school, but that doesn't mean that each teacher has only twenty-two students in her class. For one, some employees while identified as teachers, bringing down the building's pupil to teacher ratio, may not be used for actual teaching. For example, because of the over-emphasis on data-driven instruction and standardized testing, many schools are forced to fill teaching positions, not to mention use scarce resources, with standardized testing administrators and data collectors/analyzers . (Yes, all of this standardized testing mania not only deprives kids of meaningful learning experiences but keeps teachers from doing meaningful, and in some cases actual, teaching.) In addition, some employees identified as teachers may be used for tasks such as monitoring hallways or the cafeteria, or for handling student discipline--these are all jobs which should be done and staffed by other professionals.

We should also go beyond the ratios, keeping in mind that some teachers are employed as specialists, and do not teach full-size classes, for example, a reading specialist, special education teacher, or media specialist. Those teachers will often push into classes or pull students out for intensive small group instruction which will reduce the load for the regular classroom teacher. Other K-12 education professionals such as counselors, school psychologists, school nurses, and social workers also keep classroom teachers' work loads reasonable and appropriate to their expertise by using their own expertise to help students and their families to deal with broader academic, social, medical, and psychological issues. When schools lack those professionals, the number of students as well as the tasks those professionals are meant to perform all fall to the regular classroom teacher and to her administrator(s), reducing her and her principal's effectiveness.

To further complicate things, different districts make different allowances for how teacher positions can be used or designated and awards teaching positions to schools using a different formulas.

I saw the difference a reasonable class size can make to the quality of education received when we moved from Oakland, California, to Hanover County, Virginia. My twin sons' kindergarten teachers in Oakland Unified School District were both excellent, just as good as their first and second grade teachers in Hanover County. But I saw a huge difference in the quality of attention my children received. (Besides attending parent conferences, school events and looking over the work they bring home, I volunteer weekly.)

The schools serve similar populations (although at 72%, the school in Oakland has a much higher percentage of non-white students while at nearly 50%, their Hanover school has a higher percentage of free and reduced lunch students), but the difference in resources (and in the levels at which California and Virginia fund their public schools) was astounding. In Oakland, not only were their classes larger at twenty-five (and these were only the kindergarten classes!), but there was almost no other staff. The PTA funded resource teachers in PE, art, music, and library. Otherwise, there was one teachers' aide for the entire school, one administrator, one janitor, one cafeteria aide, and one administrative assistant. The school relied on a steady stream of parent volunteers and constant fundraising just to fund the basics and the occasional assembly or field trip, and field trips could only be taken if parents could serve as drivers. There was no busing at all.

In their Hanover County public elementary school, on the other hand, each class has between sixteen and nineteen students, and the school has fully funded resource teachers for art, music, and PE; reading and math specialists; special education teachers; a gifted-and-talented teacher; a registered nurse; several teachers' aides; two administrative assistants; a principal and an assistant principal; a social worker; a school counselor; a school psychologist; language pathologists; two or three janitors; and an entire cafeteria staff. County school buses transport students to and from school and there are lots of special assemblies, presentations, and field trips. Despite this "lavish" education spending, Hanover County is an extremely conservative district (represented by Eric, ahem, Cantor), socially and fiscally, and is known for its low spending.

In both schools, each of my sons had one teacher who was more traditional but more organized, while the other had one who was more creative but less organized. However, because of the smaller class sizes in Virginia, the teacher who was less creative was able to be more so without sacrificing classroom management, while the class of the teacher who was less organized didn't suffer for it because the class was smaller. Essentially, the teachers in Hanover County were more effective, not because they were more talented, but because they had smaller class sizes, adequate numbers of specialists and other education professionals, two administrators, and in general more support. As a parent, I get much more feedback and direct communications from teachers and see my sons flourish in the much more individualized and targeted instruction and attention they receive. I've often had the experience of the school contacting me about a potential issue before I have the chance to contact them, and believe me, I'm a vigilant parent.

Besides the extensive body of research available at Class Size Matters, Education journalist Dana Goldstein and Forbes education blogger E.D. Kain make the case for why the American public wants smaller class sizes. I would add my voice to that of the American public's. I acknowledge that smaller class sizes aren't a panacea. However, limiting a teacher's total student load, and assigning class sizes according to what age and level they teach, their experience, who and what they teach, and providing a supportive context with knowledgeable specialist teachers and other education professionals all make teachers more effective and increase the quality of education received.

Trickle down economics has failed us and so will trickle-down teaching. The larger the classes and student load, and the more support staff, counselors, school nurses, social workers, specialist and resource teachers' positions are eliminated, the more diluted any teacher's effectiveness will be.

Teacher, I Mean, Teaching Quality Series, Part III: Teachers Compensation

No doubt about it: teachers' pay should start higher than it currently does. Higher pay would attract more people to the profession who might otherwise go into other fields and it would more fairly compensate those who are currently teaching.

That being said, I don't think that higher or merit pay will lead immediately to better teaching quality. As veteran teacher and Teacher Leaders Network member Renee Moore put it:

I fundamentally disagree with one of the conceptual pillars of most merit pay plans: That teachers can be motivated to achieve better results for our students through pay incentives. The majority of teachers are working as hard as we can and getting little recognition and less support. To suggest that we are withholding our best from our students and would provide that in exchange for a few extra dollars is a slap in the face of every professional educator (not just the "bad" teachers).

In addition, merely raising salaries will not attract more qualified candidates or lower the high attrition rates in public school teaching unless working conditions are also improved. Over-crowded schools, over-sized classes, crumbling facilities, lack of resources, poor leadership, inadequate support staff, too many responsibilities, and not enough time for planning and grading all hinder good teaching, no matter how much teachers are paid. (I will address the influence of those components on quality teaching in future posts.)

Salaries should be raised equally and transparently for ALL teachers and not just for teachers whose students receive higher scores on standardized tests and not because of where the teacher went to school as an undergraduate or what place in their class they graduated. It is not fair to pay someone more because they were privileged enough to be in a position to attend a place like Harvard. Moreover, higher grades or a degree from an elite institution does not make someone a good teacher. It is also unfair to pay someone more because they happen to teach students who do well on standardized tests. Furthermore, higher scores on standardized tests aren't necessarily evidence of quality teaching. Even if you believe otherwise, making the all too common mistake of confusing higher test scores for real student achievement, according to this report as well as this study, merit pay for high scores on standardized tests does not work. In Atlanta, merit pay for high test scores seemed to cause not better teaching but rather more cheating.

That being said, I am not unopposed to merit pay by other means. Rick Hess, for example, has some proposals for merit pay that are worth serious consideration. Once salaries are raised and working conditions are improved across the board, teachers who are ready for increased responsibilities or who want to work more hours, without compromising quality, should be paid more. If a teacher is taking on more students by teaching an additional class, that means he'll be working longer hours planning and giving students feedback. If a teacher leads extra-curricular activities, works on a department-wide curriculum planning project, or becomes a mentor to new teachers, she should be compensated for doing more work. Furthermore, I am not opposed to paying people more who take hard to staff or more difficult teaching jobs. While I reject the notion of market-based education reforms or of running schools like businesses, we can't ignore labor market forces.

Those with masters degrees, PhDs, and additional endorsements, such as National Board Certification, and more experience should be paid more. In general, the longer a person has been doing something, the better and more efficient they get at it, and experience especially matters in teaching. Furthermore, when potential and actual teachers invest time and money to advance their professional development, they should be rewarded for that, just as professionals are in other fields. That being said, there are many ways to skin that cat--education and experience should not be too rigidly defined. Work as teacher's aide? Teach for a year or two in a private school? Tutoring? Substitute teaching? Spent a summer in a program such as this one learning more about your content area? All those should apply in some way as education, training or prior experience.

The norm should not be a teacher working ten to fourteen hour days to do a great or even adequate job for much, much higher pay. The standard should be a forty hour work week with a reasonable amount of responsibilities, good working conditions at a fair middle class rate of pay that increases with more expertise and experience. As teachers get better at what they do and are able to take on more responsibilities or work more hours, then they should be paid more, but standardized test scores should have nothing to do with it.

Teacher, I Mean Teaching Quality Series, Part II: Teaching for Dummies

In my last post of this series, I discussed the myth of the innately talented teacher. So, you might ask, if great teachers aren't innately so, what, then, are the components of great teaching? People have spent entire careers and written entire books answering this question, but I'll take a crack at a brief and superficial explanation.


TEACHER TRAINING/EDUCATION
In the last post, I talked some about teacher education or teacher training. Before flying solo, aspiring teachers need education, training, and experience. Does that mean all teacher education programs work well? Absolutely not, but that doesn't mean they should be eliminated. I say they should be mended and not ended. Furthermore, the only route to teaching does not have to be via university programs; however, alternative paths should be equally rigorous and thorough. (School finance blogger Bruce Baker offered this data-rich analysis of the current state of ed school programs.)

I completed my master's degree in Education at a well-regarded program. Overall, the program is well-regarded with good reason. Even so, some of my classes were a waste of time and some of my internship experiences could have been much better designed. Some of the courses could probably have been eliminated from the program or fused with others. Otherwise, the useless classes were primarily so due to lack of preparation on the part of their instructors. The best courses were thoughtfully designed and executed, assigning rich and varied readings, facilitating stimulating discussions, giving useful and practical assignments, and offering insightful, actionable feedback (hey look at that--I just listed some components of quality teaching!) The student teaching/intern experience, however, is the most important piece of teacher training, so important, in fact, that it should be extended to a year or two. Cooperating teachers should be better vetted and compensated and teacher candidates paid an intern's salary. Again, some unconventional internship experiences should be considered as equivalent experiences, if only in part.

PREPARATION
Good teaching means preparing for classes, a.k.a., lesson planning, preferably in chunks called thematic units. The teacher should have a good idea of what he wants students to know and to be able to do. Lesson planning also includes being technically and logistically prepared for class: making copies, preparing power point presentations, reserving needed technology, giving feedback on student work. Teachers shouldn't necessarily have to write down and turn in lesson plans, especially if that's not how they plan best, but they should show evidence of planning in their teaching and reflections. After all, a teacher can easily write down and turn in great lesson plans without actually executing them well in the classroom. Preparation should also include on-going learning in teachers' content areas, pedagogy, management, and assessment.

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT
Classroom management is probably the trickiest and most important part of teaching. A teacher can be very knowledgeable about their content area and pegagogy and write great lesson plans, but without appropriate, positive, and effective classroom management techniques, it will be very hard to implement instruction. Of course, the key to management is engagement, i.e., if students are engaged, classroom management is much less of a factor. Even so, teachers must think hard about factors such as seating and classroom layout, facilitating student participation, dealing with peer interactions, navigating and discouraging negative or distracting behaviors, channeling students' energy positively and keeping them on task, recognizing effort and positive behavior, and giving useful feedback.

For me, the following are key to effective classroom management (which is not to say I was always able to do them consistently):

• staying organized.
• consistent and transparent routines and lesson plans, so that students know what to expect.
• fair, limited, but consistent rules, so that students know what is expected of them.
• a focus on catching students being good rather than on catching them being bad.
• treating all students with respect and empathy.
• allowing respectful and reasonable disagreement.
• disciplining students discretely and so that their dignity stays intact.
• choosing my battles wisely.
• providing options, choices, and a sense of ownership for students whenever possible.
• acknowledging the significance of peer relationships (I taught mostly secondary school :)
• avoiding rigidity, e.g., allowing some movement and relevant chatter within the classroom. 

PRESENTATION
Once lessons and units have been planned, the teacher must decide how she will present the material or demonstrate the skill she wants the students to know and be able to do. Before presenting, teachers should have or gather some idea of the students' prior knowledge of or proficiency in the topic or skill. Then, they'll need to show students why the topic is relevant or interesting. There are many ways to present (similar to what I said earlier, there are entire courses just on this aspect of teaching): traditional lecture, using exemplars, via text, using visuals, using technology, etc. Some caveats, though: teachers should avoid trying to "present" too much material or too many skills at once, nor should the "presentation" part of the lesson take too much time. While engaging and effective presentation can be and often is creative, it should avoid gimmicks. For example, I doubt the effectiveness of expecting kids to learn new material "cooperatively" without any knowledge of what it is they are supposed to know and be able to do, nor would I advise, for example, teaching map skills by way of a podcast. (For more on limitations of the learning styles theory, check out this article.) Furthermore, quality teaching is not rigid and does not get bogged down in attachment to methods that are simply part of the latest trends or ideology. Best practices and methods must be chosen and blended based on how effective they are and how particular groups or individual students respond to them.


PRACTICE/RETENTION
Once the material and/or skill has been presented, the teacher must consider how students will practice and hopefully be on the road to retention or mastery, or developmentally appropriate mastery, of the material and skill. Again, the road to mastery can take many forms, but the practice should match the skill. If students, for example, are learning about osmosis and note-taking then they should probably take notes on a text, lecture, or demonstration of osmosis.

ASSESSMENT/EVALUATION/REFLECTION
Once students have been presented with the material and skill and been given a chance to practice and work towards retention, the teacher should assess student knowledge and performance of skill. Even more so than presentation, students' learning can and should be assessed in varied ways; assessment does not necessarily mean tests. This part of teaching serves the dual purpose of assessing student knowledge and the effectiveness of the teaching. Integral to the assessment/evaluation process should be teacher and student reflection on what they've learned, how they learned it, and how it was taught. I will dedicate an entire post in this series to teacher evaluation, so stay tuned. . .

RELATIONSHIPS
This component, similar to classroom management is not technically part of instruction, but is very important nonetheless. Quality teaching is not possible without strong and caring, but professional and appropriate, relationships between a teacher and her students. That being said, a good teacher-student relationship can fit many molds. I don't mean at all to imply that the connection should be a personal one, but there should be a connection and the student should be able to trust and respect the teacher and vice-versa. Furthermore, knowledge of students' educational background, aspirations, and family situation (without, of course, overstepping boundaries or violating students' privacy) can really help to inform teaching.


In conclusion, quality, effective teaching is thoughtful, well-planned, ordered but not rigid, clear, content-rich, respectful, applicable, engaging, and interactive. The components of teaching described above are carried out successfully by trial and error and after some experimentation. Also, how they are implemented is heavily dependent on the population and even individual students in front of the teacher. That's where the teacher education and training piece is so vital: hopefully, teacher candidates learn what has worked and has been effective from others who have already taught, from those who are currently in classrooms, and from research that has studied programs and policies BEFORE they have the immense responsibility and task of being in classrooms themselves. Of course, learning should forever continue on the job, but it's imperative to start with a strong base. Finally, these components, successfully executed, don't exist in a vacuum, that is to say, without adequate resources, support, and leadership. More on this in future posts. . .

Teacher, I Mean, Teaching Quality Series, Part I: The Myth of the Innately Talented Teacher

Last week (or was it the week before last?) I introduced my series of posts on teacher, I mean, teaching quality. Today's post is about the myth of innate teacher talent.

The current crop of education reformers claim that the crisis in our educational system is due to the lack of talented teachers. This view--that the solution to the “teacher problem” is almost purely one of talent and one not of education, experience, or other school-based conditions--is as wrong as it is disturbing. The architects of new school reform and Race to the Top are blindly focused on the qualities of people who become teachers and on the process of credentialing, hiring, and removing them while missing the boat almost entirely on the practices of these teachers and on the conditions that support (or discourage) those practices.

The questionable claims of Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, provide supposedly scientific foundation for these claims, finding that "the quality of the teaching is the most important factor in student achievement.” Hanushek and his supporters quickly make the leap that quality teaching springs forth from quality teachers, manifested in high scores on standardized tests. Their pedagogy is somehow mystically better than their "low quality" colleagues.

Under the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) legislation, schools are required to have a certain percentage of “highly qualified” teachers (I’ll return to this in a moment). One goal of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is the establishment of national standards. Under NCLB, schools’ making AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) includes meeting a certain benchmarks on standardized tests. This has been problematic because the rigor and content of those tests and their accompanying standards is up to each state and hence vary greatly. Likewise, “highly qualified” translates to “certified by the individual state." Certification requirements vary from state to state. In Washington, D.C., for example, there are three pieces to teacher certification: general knowledge and general education, which can be determined by Praxis I or SAT scores; content knowledge, which can be determined by Praxis II tests and content-area courses; and, pedagogy, which are either approved teacher training programs, such as found at universities or training done by programs like TFA (Teach for America) and NTP (New Teachers Project). Such programs provide only five weeks of training and viola! you’re certified to teach in a high-poverty school. The ideology behind this is that talent, talent, and talent matter.

"Building a Better Teacher," Elizabeth Green’s article in a March 2010 issue of The New York Times Magazine, takes a refreshing look at teaching strategies as opposed to “innate” teacher qualities. Green describes Michelle Rhee’s efforts as DCPS Chancellor to bring a "different caliber of person" into the profession, i.e., high achievers from selective colleges who arrive at teaching through TFA-like programs. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has reaped praise on such programs and ideas. Attracting individuals from top notch colleges who might otherwise go into business, finance, medicine, and law instead to teaching is a laudable goal. I don’t doubt that these kids are bright or that they have potential, but without adequate education, support, and relevant experience, despite their SAT scores and pedigree, they are likely to struggle and leave the profession.

Rhee, Duncan, and Bill Gates are certainly not alone in their beliefs. Again, according to Elizabeth Green’s report, on the topic of teacher quality there is a,

". . . belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable 'voodoo.' You either have it or you don’t. 'I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,' Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year."

I agree some dispositional qualities can lend themselves more easily to teaching than to other professions, for example, presence. Presence exudes and inspires confidence and it gets students’ attention. At the end of the day, though, the teacher who studies, practices, and employs the most effective ways to engage, instruct, manage, and assess their students will prevail, presence or no presence. Without some grounding in practice, without thoughtfulness about what students should know and to be able to do, how they best acquire information and skills, and how best to assess their learning, a teacher can have all the charisma and presence in the world, but she won't be a successful teacher.

Although teacher certification and education programs need revamping, the solution is more training and experience for aspiring teachers, not less. Teacher preparation programs, such as TFA and conventional ed school programs, would be much more effective and their teachers more likely to succeed and stay in the profession if they compelled candidates to commit to longer terms of service and required something akin to a two-year student teaching internship along with relevant courses and seminars BEFORE tossing their candidates in the deep end.

In short, the idea of magically talented teachers is a myth. Certainly gaining admission to an elite college does not automatically confer someone with quality teaching know-how or certify that they will be a great teacher. Good teachers are not born; rather, they are made with desire, education, knowledge, experience, support, and hard work. Michael Jordan may have some innate abilities that helped him to get where he was, but he was a superstar because he was driven, he practiced, and he was the hardest working guy on the court.

The idea that anyone with high SAT scores would inherently be a great teacher is silly and it's elitist. But I don't doubt that given adequate training, support, and experience, anyone with commitment, compassion, and perseverance can become a great teacher.