He’s entertaining, but he’s not a born performer. Taylor ranks among the top 5 percent of all D.C. “It sounds like common sense, but it’s revolutionary.”īased on his students’ test scores, Mr. ![]() ![]() ![]() This is where we have to go-to look at what’s working and what’s not,” Duncan told me. States must try to identify great teachers, figure out how they got that way, and then create more of them. “It’s huge.”ĭespite the perky name, Race to the Top is a marathon-and a potentially grueling one to win, states must take a series of steps that are considered radical in the see-no-evil world of education, where teachers unions have long fought efforts to measure teacher performance based on student test scores and link the data to teacher pay. “This is the big bang of teacher-effectiveness reform,” says Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that helps schools recruit good teachers. But especially in a year when states are projecting $16 billion in school-budget shortfalls, $4.3 billion is real money. To be fair, that’s still just a tiny fraction of the roughly $100 billion in his budget (much of which the government direct-deposits into the bank accounts of schools, whether they deserve the money or not). As a result, he has been able to dedicate $4.3 billion to a program he calls Race to the Top. Thanks to the stimulus bonanza, Duncan has lucked into a budget that is more than double what a normal education secretary gets to spend. And they have done it using one very effective conversational gambit: billions of dollars. Bush’s landmark educational reform-to teacher accountability. They have shifted the conversation from school accountability- the rather worn theme of No Child Left Behind, President George W. Over the past year, President Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have started talking quite a lot about great teaching. The great teacher serves as a hero but never, ironically, as a lesson.Īt last, though, the research about teachers’ impact has become too overwhelming to ignore. Instead, we tend to ascribe their gifts to some mystical quality that we can recognize and revere-but not replicate. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools-even supposedly good schools-than among schools.īut we have never identified excellent teachers in any reliable, objective way. Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. By high school, the compounded effects of the strong teacher-or the weak one-would become too great. And if these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would likely diverge forever. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education-more than schools or curriculum-teachers matter. In fact, only a quarter of the fifth-graders at Plummer finished the year at grade level in math-despite having started off at about the same level as Mr. By the end of the year, 90 percent were at or above grade level.Īs for the other boy? Well, he ended the year the same way he’d started it-below grade level. Taylor’s students were doing math at grade level. ![]() On that first day of school, only 40 percent of Mr. On average, his classmates’ scores rose about 13 points-which is almost 10 points more than fifth-graders with similar incoming test scores achieved in other low-income D.C. He had started below grade level and finished above. Taylor’s class, the first little boy’s scores went up-way up. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it’s worth noting, not a very hard one).Īfter a year in Mr. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America’s video archive, available in February at )Īt the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C.
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