A Hard Truth About School Reform
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There
is a school problem this community needs to talk about even though
it's painful and difficult to solve. Graph: Low Achieving Schools Have More Inexperienced Teachers |
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Overall in San Diego County, there are 32 schools where a third or more of the faculty is consistently in their first or second year of teaching. These are also the schools where children of color, poverty and limited English skills are concentrated. Most of them are elementary schools in San Diego Unified.
In other words, novices are regularly teaching the children who are starting out their education with some of the biggest handicaps, and who would thus benefit greatly from having the most expert teachers.
This situation is obviously bad for the children. But it is equally bad for the teachers and disastrous for school reform efforts, such as those in San Diego Unified, that focus on the continuing professional development of teachers as the way to lift all students to high academic achievement. As long as they are taught primarily by beginning teachers, low performing students will never get the full benefit of these professional development programs.
For all these reasons, the Dialogue's Partners for K-12 School Reform has begun a campaign to build awareness of this problem and engage the community in helping to solve it. State Senator Dede Alpert and San Diego State University President Steve Weber, who are co-chairs of the Partners, describe this effort in an accompanying article.
What Can be Done? Some would say the solution is simple in principle, however politically difficult it might be to achieve. Just assign the proven, experienced teachers to the schools where they are most needed. The teachers' unions wouldn't like it, but it would solve the problem.
I myself used to think this was the solution. Then the Dialogue, on behalf of the Partners, undertook a series of focus groups with teachers and principals from "hard to staff" schools. The experience brought tears to my eyes, and I don't think I cry easily.
What drives teachers away from these schools, and sometimes out of teaching altogether, is the appalling lack of support systems, especially in the areas of student health care and counseling. A half-day nurse per week at a school where most families lack a primary care physician means teachers are saddled with problems they were never trained to handle. And the same is the case when, as frequently happens, there is no counselor available to handle students' emotional and behavioral problems, or when school policy says it is no longer possible to send misbehaving students to the principal's office.
Teachers, especially beginning teachers, can't succeed in this kind of environment, and it's unreasonable to imprison them in it. If this community wants experienced teachers at its neediest schools, then it will have to help in making these schools places where teachers can teach instead of serving impossibly as social workers.
This problem will never be solved if we think the schools alone should solve it.
Graph: The Most Extreme Cases of Concentrated Teacher Inexperience: 1998-2000
Click Here for Graph