Hey. Nicholas Kristof and Michelle Rhee! Teachers Are the Keys, Not the Roadblocks to Reforming Schools

Nicholas Kristof's effusive essay on DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee left me with a sour taste. Here are a few snippets from Kristof's piece, in which he touts Rhee as gutsy and clear-eyed, and deserving of President Obama's firm support. (Marks of emphasis are mine.)

...Ms. Rhee, 39, who became Washington's sixth school superintendent in 10 years, has ousted one-third of the district's principals, shaken up the system, created untold enemies, improved test scores, and -- more than almost anyone else -- dared to talk openly about the need to replace ineffective teachers...

... The reform camp is driven partly by research suggesting that great teachers are far more important to student learning than class size, school resources or anything else. One study suggests that if black kids could get teachers from the profession's most effective quartile for four years in a row, the achievement gap would disappear.

As a result, Ms. Rhee has proposed that teachers surrender some job protections in exchange for the chance to earn more money...

...Washington's children shouldn't suffer indefinitely in broken schools just because of a collective-bargaining stalemate. It would help if President Obama firmly backed Ms. Rhee.

Wait a minute. Rhee is earning props for her hard-charging, shake-things-up, take-no-prisoners (take your pick of aggressive management-speak) style, but she's off-base by disproportionately focusing education reform efforts on firing lots of educators. Rhee's plan presupposes that there is a significant population of crappy teachers who have no business being in a classroom. And those space-wasters need to get the boot, ASAP! (Insert high-blown "for the kids' sakes" rhetoric here.) The reality is that painting all DC teachers with this broad brush of failure by association to a suffering system actually hampers efforts to improve schools.

It's also a myth that there is a shadow population of GREAT TEACHERS, touched with something like fairy dust, waiting in the wings to sweep in and replace the mass of self-serving BAD TEACHERS. Then "reformers" like Rhee can finally kick the union's doors down and throw those despicable baddies out by their collars. Accepting this false scenario, one can easily make the leap to cheerleading Rhee's entire package of reforms, which touts teacher scapegoating over comprehensive support.

The reality is that GREAT TEACHERS start out as green rookies, and they develop into greatness via reflection, experience, and institutional support. Great teachers are cultivated, not ordained. Teleporting the senior class of Harvard into all high-needs classrooms for a couple years won't solve the achievement gap; recruiting, training, and supporting a long-term corps of bright individuals who are dedicated to their craft will. This means keeping, not demonizing, the massive wealth of talented people currently laboring in struggling schools.

And what kind of schools are we setting ourselves up for when we expel teachers whose students don't meet certain benchmarks on standardized tests? Who will want to work with struggling or high-needs students, the ones who may make extraordinary progress in a school year with a dedicated teacher-- even if it's not the kind of progress you'll find on a Scantron report?

Rhee has turned up the volume on her desire to root out teachers, but lost in the noise is the fact that firing bad teachers--Rhee's centerpiece-- is only a tiny part of the massive puzzle of improving public education. (John McCain's disproportionate obsession with earmarks comes to mind as a similarly misguided fixation.)

The vast majority of teachers welcome accountability. Teachers also welcome recognition for excellence and fair consequences for falling short. True, the old tenure system in many districts is too ironclad. True, more people, following due process, should likely be shown the door. But as someone who has taught in public, private, and charter schools in New York City and Washington, D.C., I have met very few of these deadweights over whom Michelle Rhee is ginning up so much heat. It's a small minority that needs to go, and it doesn't mean the union should be shredded in the process, as Rhee seeks to do. (This is coded in Kristof's essays as "surrender some job protections.")

With administrative support, competitive pay, manageable teaching loads, and substantive professional development, the vast majority of teachers can boost their students' achievement, and be deservingly considered GREAT TEACHERS.

Nicholas Kristof is an important writer and activist. By giving a platform last year to Chicago teacher Will Okun, whose brilliant photo-essays on the New York Times website reached thousands of readers, he elevated the discourse in the mainstream media on education. On this issue, though, I'm worried by his rush to support mass ejections of hardworking, under-supported teachers.

The "Bad Teachers Everywhere" fallacy, pressed forward by Michelle Rhee, provides a dramatic and available villain in the education reform struggle. Unfortunately, it's not the right solution to what ails our schools.

Dan Brown is a teacher in Washington, D.C. and the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle. He is not a member of any teachers' union.

Comments

[BethB65]

I believe the "teachers are to blame" argument is a right wing construct with the aim of breaking up the teachers' unions, so the schools can be privatized and corporations can profit from these newly privatized schools. It's upsetting that Obama has given in to this rhetoric.

How do you judge good teaching?

-Standardized tests whose grades are inflated to make politicians and school systems look good and to keep property values intact?

-Grades which are inflated by parent pressure?

-Students who think test prep is good teaching because they are so used to being spoon -fed information and complain when challenged to think?

If you want a true assessment, how about a research paper upon graduating high school?

Anyone who cares about children learning and good teaching will support
1. working parents by making sure young children have adequate care through Head Start or other early childhood programs, so children can be ready to learn when they get to school
2. small classes where children can get the attention they need (no more than 25)
3. even smaller reading and writing classes, so children can learn these essential skills (too many students get to high school functionally illiterate)
4. giving teachers adequate time in the school day to plan enriching lessons, properly grade student work, and contact parents
5. effective professional development so teachers can learn and grow
6. providing teachers with the resources they need to do a good job

[Clausvz]

Kristof has no notion of how to identify the nation's "top quartile" of teachers year after year, but he uses the "top quartile of teachers four years in a row" quotation anyway. Even value-added measures of teacher effectiveness are very unstable. Teachers in the top quartile in one year often end up in the bottom quartile the next. Kristof wants to make his favored reforms seem much easier than they are, or perhaps he hasn't thought deeply enough about them. This is at least the second time Kristof used the "top quartile" argument. I wrote a blog posting about the first time here: http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/node/2335.

[sweetchuckd]

Not some of the teachers I read about on http://detentionslip.org !

[tommie123]

I applaud the author for working dilligently in DCPS and for sharing his point of view. As a DCPS parent and an education reform observer and advocate, however, I do not agree that the status quo regarding the DCPS/Teachers contract is best for our children, teachers, or community. Can our children afford to have bad teachers? How many bad teachers left on the job is acceptable in order to preserve tenure? The flip side of this is that the current contract ties pay rewards for teachers almost solely to achieving degrees (may or may not correlated to 'good teaching") and most importantly to years on the job. Is that the best approach to rewarding great teachers? I don't think so. Let's take a look at teachers who are doing a very good job and pay them for the work it takes to do a very good job. As to tenure, the vast majority of people outside of education work on the basis of regular performance review. Are the performance reviews most of us face at least annually always one hundred percent quantitative and objective? No, they aren't. But that's not the standard.