Sunday, June 30, 2002

Rookies in the Schools
…in a report to Congress, Education Secretary Rod Paige stated accurately that teacher quality is a key determinant of student success. But his definition of a high-quality teacher was alarming in what it left out: it dismissed the need for any knowledge of teaching and child development — or even student teaching experience.

Secretary Paige concluded that while states' licensure of teachers should require more verbal and subject-matter competence, "burdensome education requirements" should be eliminated.

This is a recommendation that all but guarantees that our poor and minority youngsters living in the inner cities will continue to be left behind. It is a promise to maintain the achievement gap in academic performance between rich and poor, urban and suburban, and black/Hispanic and white/Asian children.

At one extreme in America's separate and unequal public systems are schools for affluent suburban children in places like Scarsdale, N.Y.; Lake Forest, Ill.; and Pacific Palisades, Calif. These school systems treat teaching as a profession, not to be practiced until after careful training. At the other extreme are the schools in our inner cities, like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, largely for poor and minority children. They treat teaching as a trade — something to be learned while doing the job.

By buying homes in wealthy communities, parents in the affluent suburbs pay entrance fees of hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their children to the schools in the first group. These schools, recognizing that children's performance depends on effective teachers, pay far higher salaries than inner-city schools do. They also expect much more in teacher preparation. They ask their teachers to exhibit not only verbal ability and subject matter proficiency, but also knowledge of teaching. They want their teachers to know about teaching methods, classroom management, child development, differences in how children learn, curriculum design, assessment of student performance, learning disabilities, educational technology and much more.

In these school systems, the job of teacher is seen as something akin to the job of a doctor. It is not enough to have strong basic intelligence or mastery of basic science to be a doctor. We require doctors to be educated in medical theory, have substantial clinical experience and learn in internships.

In the inner-city schools, teachers typically come with a rudimentary level of knowledge and then learn how to handle a classroom on the job. Accordingly, salaries are low. The reality is that a growing proportion of the teachers being hired in these schools are unable to meet their states' certification requirements. They often lack adequate preparation and knowledge in their subject fields and may not have any knowledge of education.

What Mr. Paige's recommendation means is that for poor and minority children we are willing to accept something far less under the definition of a "highly qualified teacher." This teacher can be a rookie with absolutely no prior experience teaching — or even time in a classroom. The research shows that such novice teachers have very high attrition rates in inner-city schools. Requiring no professional training should assure a continuing line of inexperienced teachers learning by trial and error and making their mistakes with the children who need the best teachers in the country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/29/opinion/29LEVI.html

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