Are great teachers good enough?
Harold Kwalwasser, August 23, 2011I have an article up on Valerie Strauss’ The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post.
We love to talk about teachers – good teachers, bad teachers. Our entire narrative about schools seems to revolve around finding good teachers and firing bad ones.
In a way, it’s not surprising. We love to reduce complex issues to “people stories,” especially when we can paint one kind of people with white hats and pin black ones on somebody else.
As appealing as it is, there are two problems with the “good teacher, bad teacher” narrative. The first is that it plants certain unspoken images in our heads, which we often wind up accepting as true without examination. We unthinkingly know what we know – to our peril.
UPDATE: some lively discussion in the comments of the article online. To one commenter’s point about the value of TFA, I responded:
Thank you all for reading the posting and weighing in. I want to add a couple of thoughts to some of the ideas you all have expressed. First, regarding TFA. Even though the studies of their effectiveness are all over the map (driven in some cases, I suspect, by partisan consideration on one side or the other), the real “take away” of the TFA debate should be this: No teachers, even the smart kids TFA recruits, are great teachers in the first two years. It takes at least 3-5 years to learn the craft, according to most observers. In schools dependent on TFA continuously, it means that at least some slots are perpetually filled by people who have not developed their full potential. The lesson learned: the traditional sources of recruiting and training are not yielding a large enough crop of quality recruits that would obviate the necessity of a TFA.