A recent report from Harvard researchers offers more compelling reasons why expanded learning options are so needed for struggling students. Based on data from four urban school districts, the Strategic Data Project at Harvard's Center for Education Policy Research found lower-performing students are placed with brand-new teachers far more often than their higher-performing peers.
Given high turnover in high poverty schools, and the reluctance of school boards to address it, you’d expect more of these match-ups there. But the researchers found them across all schools. And given what we know about the effectiveness of rookie teachers, the tragic impact is obvious: “The systematic placement of novice teachers with lower-performing students can be expected to compound these students’ academic difficulties and exacerbate achievements,” the researchers wrote. They termed it a “double whammy.”
That’s putting it mildly. There is no justification for saddling students with the greatest need with teachers who are often the least effective. It’s a clear case of public schools perpetuating a vicious cycle that they can, within their power, do much to help mitigate.
The practice isn’t good for teachers either. The researchers ask, “Is it the best strategy to develop and retain highly effective teachers by placing them in challenging situations when they are at a critical stage in their development as teachers?”
The report suggests potential remedies, including paying teachers more to work in tough schools. Maybe, someday, school districts will get around to doing that in a meaningful way. In the meantime, how can anyone deny parents the chance to find better odds in an alternative setting?
Editor’s note: Doug Tuthill responds today to a post I wrote yesterday about the failure of school districts and teachers unions to enact meaningful differential pay plans for teachers – and how that’s indicative of a bigger failure to help low-income students.
Ron, you raised some excellent points in your blog post about the unwillingness of the Pinellas County, Fla. school district to provide each student with equal access to a quality education. For nine years, I received supplemental pay to work in a magnet program that served the district’s academic elite, and for 11 years I was a leader in the local teachers union, which was complicit in the district’s refusal to provide equal opportunity. So your criticisms stung, but they were accurate.
This may be self-serving, but I’m convinced the cause of this leadership failure is not bad people, but an organizational structure and culture that favors the politically strong over the politically weak.
Growing up in Pinellas, I attended segregated public schools. When the federal courts finally forced the school district to desegregate, the focus was on ratios and not learning. The district closed most of the black neighborhood schools and bused those children to schools in the white neighborhoods because busing white students into black neighborhoods was too politically difficult. But white flight meant some forced busing of white students was necessary, so the district created a rotation system that bused low-income/working class white students every two years to schools where the black population approached 30 percent. (The court order said no Pinellas school could be more than 30 percent black.)
While working-class white neighborhoods lacked the political clout to prevent their children from being bused every two years, their protests were loud enough to force the school board to look for alternatives. In the early 1980s, the district started creating magnet programs to entice white families to voluntarily attend schools that were in danger of exceeding the 30 percent threshold.
These magnet programs were designed to provide white students with a superior education. Class sizes were small, textbook and materials budgets seemed unlimited, professional development opportunities were extraordinary and special pay supplements to attract the best teachers were impressive. In my case, when I quit my job as a college professor to teach in the International Baccalaureate (IB) at St. Petersburg High School (SPHS), my annual salary increased 28 percent.
The magnet strategy worked - especially the IB program. Affluent white families began voluntarily busing their children to attend our program, and in many cases students got on buses at 5 a.m. and rode over 50 miles per day to attend.
Unfortunately, desegregation via magnet schools increased the resource inequities that desegregation was suppose to reduce. (more…)
