Bad teachers?

In my 33 years in the classroom, I have known some truly great teachers. I've also known teachers of average abilities. There have also been some that I would place in the "above average" and "below average" categories.

As with the medical or legal profession, not every teacher is a superstar. If someone is above average there must be those whose abilities are below average. That's the only way you get to have an "average."

But what about those teachers who just should not be in charge of a classroom? When I think back on my career, I can name some but, if I'm counting on the fingers of my right hand, I wind up with a leftover finger or two. I'm willing to bet that that's your experience too.

New York is a state in which a teacher can be terminated at any time during the first 3 years without a reason needed. Administrators have a full 3 years to determine where on the superstar-to-abomination continuum each probationary teacher falls.

Tenure simply means that termination must be for a reason, and that reason must be documented. That's hardly a guarantee of a job for life. And, given enrollment changes, elimination of programs, etc., even superstar teachers with tenure can find themselves without a job.

The current crop of education "reformers," however, would have us believe that our public schools have been invaded by a plague of locusts disguised as "bad teachers." If only we could get rid of those "bad teachers," our schools would once again have graduates who would rank right up there with the best in the world.

Just how many "bad teachers" do we have? Is it 5%, 10%, 15% of inservice teachers? What if it's 25%? Suppose we find a way to eliminate the worst-performing quartile of our teachers tomorrow, would our schools rival those of Finland? You and I both know that if the bottom 25% of teachers in our school district were replaced by teachers with the abilities of those in the top 75%, there would not be much difference in the performance of our students.

Yet we are being told that we need to spend precious resources preparing for and giving a mind-numbing array of tests to students in order to ferret out these "bad teachers."

Isn't it just possible that there is another cause for poor school performance? Two newspaper columns from the last few days seem to agree with this thought.

Donn Esmonde, writing in the Buffalo News, says that he loves the annual lists ranking public schools by performance. Why?

"...I like the rankings, which are based solely on test scores, for one reason – they confirm what education experts have said for decades: The biggest factor in how well kids do in school is not quality of teachers, variety of programs, class size, access to computers or how often pizza is served in the cafeteria. No, it’s socioeconomics."

Scott Waldman, education columnist for the Albany Times-Union, points out that the high-performing schools are "low needs" schools in which most homes have two parents who are college-educated. Most of the bottom-performers are "high needs" schools with large number of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. According to Waldman: "The higher a school's concentration of poverty, the less likely a student is to graduate, according to recently released figures by the state Education Department."

"Study after study has shown that poverty has a tremendous effect on a child's schooling. Children in poverty are more likely to move frequently, to come to school hungry, to miss a large number of school days. These districts have a far higher percentage of special education students and students who speak languages other than English at home."

Let's put it another way. Suppose every school in America had exactly the same resources. We would expect that children of two-parent college-educated homes would still do better in school compared with children who lived in poverty.

In a rational world, we would try to even out the educational opportunities by sending more resources toward the poverty schools and less to the "low needs" schools?

Well, our educational system is a very irrational world. In our real world, who gets the best-equipped science labs, the fanciest auditoriums full of the finest equipment or the opportunity for the most and best field trips? Not the "high needs" kids!

Could it be that our educational problem is not an infestation of "bad teachers," but an educational system which takes the students who are most likely to do well in school and gives them additional resources while giving less resources to those with the greatest need?

Let's give the last word to Esmonde:

"I don’t want to diminish the good work that teachers do. But, for the most part, test scores are not about how good a particular school’s teachers are. Instead, they reflect the background of the kids they teach."

"Doubt it? Then imagine this: Take all the kids from, say, Buffalo’s Burgard High and send them to Williamsville East for a year. Take the Williamsville East kids and send them to Burgard for a year. You don’t have to be a school superintendent to guess what would happen: Test scores at Burgard would skyrocket, test scores at Williamsville would nosedive."

"It would not be because the Burgard teachers suddenly upped their game, or because the Williamsville teachers lost their touch. It would be about who is sitting at the desks."

"...There is no reason for suburban teachers to check the school rankings and feel smug. Just as there is no reason city teachers – of whom my wife is one, although not in a classroom – to feel defensive. But given what is at stake, I think there is every reason to understand what these test scores are really about."