United States: Ineffective teachers debate

Budget, curriculum, class size — none has a greater effect on a student than her teacher. Given this, politicians might be expected to do all in their power to ensure that Americas teachers are excellent. For decades, they have done the opposite. The trouble begins long before a teacher enters the classroom. In Singapore, which recently came second in an international ranking of 15-year-olds skill in maths (America was 31st), the teacher-training programme accepts only students in the top 30 percent of their academic cohort. In America, most teachers are mediocre students. Only 23 percent of new teachers are in the top third of college graduates.Union rules make it extremely hard to fire teachers who turn out to be bad at their jobs. Younger teachers are usually the first to be given pink slips, even though seniority does not necessarily ensure quality. In 2009 Indiana and Florida fired young staff who had been nominated ‘teachers of the year. But the debate over bad teachers ignores an equally big problem: there has been little effort to identify good ones, let alone reward them. A survey by the New Teacher Project (NTP), a non-profit organisation, found that school districts labelled more than 99 percent of their teachers satisfactory. However America is slowly changing its way of recruiting, training and rewarding teachers. Last year 12 percent of seniors at Ivy League colleges applied to Teach for America, which sends graduates to teach at tough schools for two years. NTP has a prestigious Fellows programme that recruits and certifies new teachers. The Academy of Urban School Leadership in Chicago trains teachers in a programme modelled after a medical residency — part traditional coursework, part training in a classroom. Most difficult, however, is finding ways to evaluate teachers, rewarding the good and dismissing the bad. In 2009 Arne Duncan, Barack Obamas education secretary, outlined his reforms in a speech to the National Education Association (NEA), Americas biggest union. When inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules that we designed put adults ahead of children, Duncan insisted, then we are not only putting kids at risk, were also putting the entire education system at risk. Some members of the audience booed. Duncans guidelines for Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion (Rs.19,350 crore) programme paid for with stimulus money, include rewards for states that evaluate teachers in new ways. As a result, some states have removed their ban on using test scores to judge teachers. Others have gone much further. Tennessee, which won a grant, now requires districts to create new evaluation systems, with at least half of the score based on students progress. In Colorado, Delaware and Rhode Island, teachers rated ineffective for two consecutive years can be sacked. Despite this brewing battle, America has at least one model of peaceful change. In 2009 Hillsborough County, Florida, won a grant from the Gates Foundation to transform its way of evaluating, developing and rewarding teachers. Notably, the district is working productively with its union. I want to…