Teaching Inequality

Since the early 1970s, many states have been convulsed with high-profile crises and lawsuits focused on school funding. School districts and advocates have gone to the barricades on behalf of low-income students, fighting for their fair share of society's educational resources.

But no one every learned anything (or at least, anything worth knowing) from a stack of money. Dollars are a means to an end in education; good teachers are the end. Without them, disadvantaged students face long odds of catching up with their peers and succeeding in a world where the penalty for a poor education grows by the day.

That's why the distribution of good teachers to disadvantaged students is one of the most important education policy and civil rights challenges of our time. And why a new report from the Education Trust, titled: Teaching Inequality How Poor and Minority Students are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality and written by Heather Peske, is so welcome. (Disclosure: I helped with some of the research that led to this report while employed at the Education Trust).

Filled with a wealth of brand-new data from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio, the report shows how schools with the highest numbers of low-income, minority, and low-performing students consistently employ the fewest number of teachers with characteristics associated with classroom effectiveness, such as experience, certification, and knowledge of the subject being taught.

It's true that these are only proxy measures which don't always correspond with the best classroom instruction. But as the report notes:

"When all of the proxies tilt one way—away from low-income and minority students—what we have is a system of distributing teachers that produces exactly the opposite of what fairness would dictate and what we need to close
achievement gaps."

Illinois, for example, rolled a range of teacher characteristics into a single composite index, and compared those figures to school poverty levels. It found that 84 percent of the highest-poverty schools in the state—the top 10 percent—fell in the bottom quartile of teacher quality. That's compared to 5 percent of the lowest-poverty schools. As Illinois Senator Barack Obama said about the report:

"..if we do nothing about this problem, we will face a future that is both morally unacceptable for our children, and economically untenable as we face a globalized world."

It's also why teacher maldistribution could be--and should be--the next frontier in the struggle for fairness on behalf of disadvantaged schoolchildren. There are millions of schoolchildren out there who are just a few good teachers away from the life they need and deserve. Changing these numbers on their behalf is an obligation we all share.