What Makes a Great Teacher?

We are at Spring Break. Hooray. Breaks are welcomed, not because it is a chance to go on vacation but rather because it is an opportunity to recharge. My current plan is taking Saturday-Wednesday off from all things school, then spending at least one day in the classroom and another doing some planning/grading. How am I doing so far? Pretty good, blog reading aside.

In cleaning out my google reader, I stumbled upon a response to this article in the Atlantic Monthly. As a whole, I'm not really sure where to start. In the big picture, I think articles like these are written for educated people who wonder "what has gone wrong with our schools?" I'm not sure the motives of the Atlantic piece. Is it to make teaching seem accessible to anyone might consider a career change? Is it trying to advocate for a larger economy of scale for programs like Teach for America or KIPP? To be honest, I'm not sure what the motives are.

I'm on record as thinking that those programs (toss in most, if not all, charter schools and the Harlem Children's Zone as well) are not replicable on the broader scale. Using economic terms, which business people can relate to, you would seem to make a good thing great by increasing the economy of scale. You have less of a cost if you expand it to a broader audience. Have those programs had success? In some cases they have, their statistics bear that out. I say "their" because there has been one independent study of teacher efficacy in TFA (showing better math scores than public scores, but negligible gains in reading). Are they as successful as they are purported to be? No.

Keep in mind that charter schools (not TFA) have total control of their population, and have the ability to skim off those students that are low achieving for academic or behavior reasons. Do they say that they do this? Yes and no. In many cases they say that you can be asked to leave the program if you don't abide by their rules, which is essentially a blanket excuse for skimming without actually saying it. Ahhh but where do those "troubled" kids go? They dropout or they end up in public school, exacerbating the disparity. Each kid taken away from the charter school means fewer students in the equation for statistical purposes, while adding one to public schools makes the percentage look a few percentage points worse. In addition, the shelf-life of a TFA or KIPP teacher is typically 3-5 years. A revolving door of teachers is NOT what our public schools need. In my next post I'll look at the micro issues in the article.