Schools throughout America are failing. One doesn’t need to look far to see how badly schools are doing: Graduation rates of our nation’s inner cities, such as Milwaukee or Detroit, are disturbingly low, particularly when compared to the suburbs that surround these urban centers.
At the heart of the issue, and the way toward solving it, is the answer to the question: Why are some students graduating and others not? There are many different answers to this question, but nearly all of them cite household income, parental involvement (which generally has a strong correlation with income), bad teachers and level of parental education.
The next question asked is: How can we help these students graduate? Once again, there are many different answers to this question. Some say there needs to be more focus on ensuring that children are well-fed. Others say schools need to provide more support for students who aren’t getting enough support at home, or advise and encourage parents to provide the support necessary for success.
However, many of the proposed reforms focus on fixing problems that are both expensive and almost entirely out of the schools’ control and are perhaps not sufficiently focused on improving issues that schools do control. While we would all like to see increased funding for our schools, there are many constraints on government spending in the current environment, and solutions that rely primarily on increased spending are simply unrealistic in the current economic climate. Most school districts are worried about keeping all of the services they currently provide, and not even beginning to think about which additional services they can start to fund.
School administrators must focus on the most efficient way to spend what is arguably a sub-optimal amount of money. The most effective way to use the money efficiently is ensuring the best possible teachers are in schools educating students. While one can debate the merits of the best way to go about determining a “good teacher,” there can be little debate that giving school districts the ability to determine which teachers are best serving their students and assisting those who are underperforming, whether it is through additional training or replacement, is likely to be of greatest benefit to the students.
There are several different systems to determine the effectiveness of teachers through student testing, classroom observation or a mixture of both. All of them have drawbacks; none will be perfect, but they do serve as at least a relative measure of how well a teacher is doing. School districts throughout the country are starting to employ these types of evaluation to determine the effectiveness of teachers. Teachers’ unions justifiably argue these systems are sometimes imperfect measures of teacher effectiveness. Yet we still need some way to ensure that our nations’ students get the best teachers possible. And most of these systems, no matter how imperfect, are likely to be superior – in terms of improving the quality of education – to length of tenure as the sole measure of which teachers stay in the system.
Teachers are not the reason for the failure of nation’s schools, and most are dedicated, hardworking and doing the best that they can with the resources they are provided. Having the best teachers in our public school classrooms is the best way to overcome the disadvantages that lower levels of parental income and education create. In other words, even though teachers are not responsible for the disadvantages that many students have, great teachers are the most effective way to remove those disadvantages. Measures of teacher effectiveness, and the flexibility to make decisions based on those measures, are essential to improving the quality of our nation’s educational system.
James Mashal ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in economics and a member of Students For Education Reform.
