One of the best and most interesting recent articles about education disappeared beneath Thanksgiving leftovers and holiday shopping last Friday. It needs to be read and discussed. The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews tells the story of a young teacher who was rejected by the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows program, apparently for questioning the orthodoxy that good teachers should be able to raise the achievement of even the poorest kids. ”How do we address the outside influences if we pretend they don’t exist?” asks would-be teacher Erika Owens. Mathews is firmly in the “no excuses” camp, but to his credit he took Owens question seriously. ”It is too easy to make one side think they are being called racists and the other side think they are being called bullies,” observes Mathews, who opens his prodigious rolodex to ask a range of leading lights “Should teachers ignore poverty?”
“Full personal responsibility for student achievement and refusing to blame other factors does NOT mean we ignore the other factors,” KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg wrote to Mathews. ”It simply means we view other factors as challenges and problems that require solutions, and we view the possibility of solutions as fitting inside our personal sphere of influences vs. shrugging our shoulders and giving up.”
“You have to know the challenges our kids come with, take them seriously, try to provide resources to address them but at the end of the day they CANNOT be an excuse for low achievement levels. That’s the bottom line,” writes Michelle Rhee, ever the lightning rod. “If a teacher doesn’t believe it’s possible for a teacher or school to overcome those factors, that is actually okay. Those teachers should teach in Fairfax County or somewhere where the challenges are not as great.”
As in most debates on education, there’s a false dichotomy at work. Surely there is a difference between the teacher who walks into the classroom assuming poor children can’t learn, and simply ascribing every student failure to a bad teacher. Poverty matters, clearly. And just as clearly it is unacceptable for a teacher to lower his or her expectations of a student’s capabilities based on economic status. But where this laudable belief leaves the rails is when you hold the teacher accountable if she fails to get every child to proficiency.
I think we would agree, that America would be well served if we could clone Rafe Esquith, the legendary Los Angeles 5th grade teacher and author of Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire, and put him in every classroom. But listen to this great and heroic teacher speak heresy: “People who believe that ‘all children will learn’ have watched too many Hollywood movies about teachers,” says Esquith. “The idea that all children will learn sounds wonderful, but these words need to be surrounded with a little bit of realism.” Based on this attitude alone, Esquith likely would have been rejected by the same program as the young would-be teacher who wrote to Mathews. It should go without saying that this is pure lunacy. “Never stop trying,” is an essential character trait for a teacher. “Never fail,” is a silly and ultimately self-defeating standard. Plan A is to hound our best and hardest-working teachers from the profession not for failing to believe they can work magic, but for actually failing to do so? What’s Plan B?
As Mathews correctly observes, attitude matters. But there is a world of difference between filling struggling schools with fiercely committed teachers willing to take on the hardest challenge in education, and labeling them as failures if they do not succeed with every child. By that standard, Rafe Esquith, arguably the best teacher in America, is a failure.
Finally, I can’t help but be struck by Mathews own take on the debate. “The prevailing view that impoverished children cannot be expected to learn as much as affluent children is poison in any classroom,” he writes. Sure, but let’s be clear about this: One of the reasons — perhaps THE reason — poor children don’t learn as much as affluent children has nothing to do with teacher attitudes.
The reason poor children learn less is because they are taught less.
