REPOST: How to get effective teachers in the most needy schools
How to get more successful educators to work in schools situated in lower income areas in order to raise teacher equity is a question that needs to be addressed. Jeff Byrant, an Associate Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future has some suggestions on what we can do in a recent article in The Washington Post.
Image Source: washingtonpost.com
This week’s media extravaganza over the latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, were the latest distraction from what really matters for the nation’s education policy.
As Valerie Strauss put it on this blog, “The scores … don’t mean much, if anything, but that doesn’t stop people from saying they do.”
Embracing the urge to say something about the “meaning” of PISA to the extreme, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took the release of the scores as an opportunity to stage PISA Day, a 5-hour (!) media event involving other groups who, as economists at the Economic Policy Institute explain, generally support a political agenda favoring policies that have been branded as “reform.”
What really matters, of course, are the real effects of the Duncan-led reform agenda on the ground. And what are those effects?
As Stephanie Simon reported at Politico, the agenda Duncan “began to advance in 2009 has now hit serious roadblocks.”
“States are balking at reforms they pledged to implement,” Simon elaborated, and “a noisy opposition to Duncan’s reforms has emerged.”
Further, “there’s no clear evidence that Duncan’s prescriptions are boosting student achievement, though his backers say it’s still too early to tell.”
The Bad Deal On Teacher Distribution
Particularly anger-inducing has been the way the Duncan/reform agenda has faltered on the need to expand access that poor and language-minority kids have to the best teachers.
Historically, schools that serve the most disadvantaged children have tended to have the least qualified teachers, as measured by preparation, experience, and other factors. So in the interest of “equity,” reformers made a deal with states. In order to receive grant money from big ED, and have certain federal laws waived, states had to impose an array of new personnel management policies. Among those policies were implementations of new teacher evaluation systems and pledges to uphold standards for “highly qualified teachers.”
For more on what can be done to help needy students gain access to high-performing teachers, read the entire article here.
Issues like these are of particular interest to Jamie Squillare, a primary school literature teacher in Boston. Visit this blog for more on her work and her thoughts on education issues.
