In “What Makes a Great Teacher?” (The Atlantic, January/February 2010), Amanda Ripley tells us that Teach for America has succeeded in linking certain personality traits with teacher “greatness”-that is, the ability to drive up test scores. According to Teach for America staffers, those teachers who achieved “big, measurable goals” in college – particularly grade point average and “leadership achievement” – have a greater chance of bringing up their students’ scores than others. “If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size,” Ripley explains, ”that’s promising.”
But Ripley’s article neglects to ask: What makes a great education? Teach for America, too, has forgotten to ask this question. The researchers seem indifferent to the purposes of school, the content of a curriculum, or anything beyond the test results. Worse, their findings directly affect their admission practices:
Last year, Teach for America churned through 35,000 candidates to choose 4,100 new teachers. Staff members select new hires by deferring almost entirely to the model: they enter more than 30 data points about a given candidate (about twice the number of inputs they considered a decade ago), and then the model spits out a hiring recommendation. Every year, the model changes, depending on what the new batch of student data shows.
If the “new batch of student data shows” that those who were presidents of clubs in college are likelier to bring up test scores, then apparently Teach for America will give preference to former presidents of clubs. By their reasoning, if the data showed that thieves and bandits brought up test scores, then TFA would recruit thieves and bandits.
Do we really want our teaching faculty to consist entirely of a “perfect” personality type, be it leader types or others? Let us say we filled a school with straight-A leaders. Wouldn’t we be missing something? Don’t we also want teachers who love to delve into their subject, who would rather read Far from the Madding Crowd than lead a club? Don’t we need a few teachers who in college stayed up all night debating a philosophical question and got a B on their chemistry test the next day?
Such a system operates on an empty conception of education. The only meaning lies in the results. So we are letting the results on dumbed-down tests determine who our teachers should be? We think the “right” sort of teachers will make our schools right? Let us instead begin by defining education. Is education preparation for a test? Yes, but it is much more. It should give students knowledge, ideas, and works that will stay with them throughout their lives. It should teach real subjects, not watered-down versions. Literature, not literacy; history, not social studies; biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, languages, music, art, and drama should fill the curriculum. Teachers will seek out this sort of school.
In a school with an excellent curriculum, students respond to both the teacher and the subject. The teacher brings knowledge, insight, and a special way of conveying the material. Some do it with humor, others with solemnity. Some are structured in their presentations, others ruminative. Some are stern and formal, others less so. Some lead solitary lives; others have large families. Some may be organizers, others quiet contributors. A liberal arts education teaches us that there is more to humanity, even within ourselves, than we have recognized before. There is room for many personalities in a great school; what unites them is their knowledge, passion, and contribution to the school’s endeavor.
Teach for America’s attempt to identify the personality traits of a successful teacher-and to select candidates possessing those traits-amounts to social engineering. It reflects a lack of educational vision. It is deadly for the teaching profession and for our schools.
Diana Senechal
Diana Senechal taught for four years in the New York City public schools and has stepped back to write a book. Her writing has appeared in Education Week, GothamSchools, the Core Knowledge Blog, Joanne Jacobs, and Common Core. She has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale.
The interesting question is not What Makes A Great Teacher?, but rather What Makes a Passable Teacher? Since the NEA and the LEA’s don’t care about this question, the tests–and TFA–must.
Now, what makes a passable teacher in Connotton Valley, OH may not be enough for a kid growing up in the urban precinct described above. The 23yr veteran interviewed might neither harm nor inspire kids biding time in her class in rural OH; the same teacher kept in place in urban DC consigns these kids to another generation of missed opportunity.
Teaching as Leadership, the book from which the article rises, won’t claim that a model will solve all problems. It addresses one of many vectors. But look at how it breaks from the past:
Ed Schools have never been much interested in leadership. The instructors at ed schools are researchers. Research is primarily what they pass on to their charges. Not good. Contrast this with US Army and USMC officer training, which focus like a laser on leadership.
Leadership won’t help if your objective is wrong; as plenty of curricula are. Yet one problem at a time.
The problem addressed in the article is getting the right teacher candidates into these slots so critical to urban youth. (Race To the Top has another problem to address: getting the wrong people out of those slots.) If you have two B- students from Kent State, which do you select to entrust with these kids?
Back to the nature of Ed schools. If you’re an ed student who has problems with the coursework, at least your tenacity will be tested. Yet a more intellectually ready ed student will remain unchallenged. How then to measure that candidate’s tenacity?
What TFA is looking for is to assure that the most highly adaptive and determined candidates end up in front of the kids with the most need. Stepping beyond just state certification is a good measure.
Having myself come to this from the improve-the-curriculum side, I’m with you on that part of the solution.
Toward that end, getting curious, demanding, practical teachers into the classroom is one requirement for implementing a great curriculum.
Diana,
You articulate very well the depressingly narrow conception of a good teacher that many administrators have: high-energy, youthful, cool, super-organized, a team-player. Eccentric nerds not welcome (the kids won’t bond with them). Crusty old folks not welcome (gruffness has no place in our shiny, happy schools). Teaching faculties are becoming ecosystems that contain but one bland species. Which makes them about as lovable and interesting as the tidy, single-crop, chemically-treated, fields that fill the Central Valley where I teach.
[...] schools and teacher preparation programs assume their students’ content knowledge, rather than fostering [...]
[...] The gap between professors of education and their liberal arts colleagues has been called the “widest street in the world.” (Read the latest issue of AFT’s American Educator for a history of this divide.) Teacher preparation programs assume their students know and love the content they will teach. But, even in alternative certification programs, which attract exemplary candidates, content is simply not addressed. [...]