Rookies Redux

Michele over at the AFT’s NCLBlog responds to my post on The Wire and rookie teachers by implying that I’m a hypocrite for making a qualifying remark about Teach for America. However, as Eduwonk also points out, Teach for America has submitted its corps members to a sophisticated evaluation by the respected research firm Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., which found that TFA recruits perform significantly better than typical novices and even slightly better than typical experienced teachers. One reason might be that TFA recruits candidates with much stronger academic backgrounds. Another might be that its corps members strongly believe schools can impact learning, rather than blaming kids and families for poor educational outcomes—even citing “teacher quality” as the single biggest cause of the achievement gap. (Those zany young radicals!)

But that does raise an interesting point. Not all new teachers are created equal. Teachers who enter the profession through some routes, programs, or ed schools might be better prepared than their peers or might learn more quickly on the job. If a truly just society would never unthinkingly assign rookie teachers to its most disadvantaged students, a truly rational one would make exceptions for programs or institutions that routinely supply stronger candidates. Not just TFA, either: Some states are experimenting with ed school evaluation schemes that track the success of graduates by measuring how much academic growth their students make in the classroom, and, as Louisiana discovered, some programs produce new teachers who are even more effective than veterans.

Bottom line: We should be talking about this problem more openly and honestly and we should do more to address it, but at the same time the issue is complicated and it’s dangerous to over-generalize. In fact, I suspect The Wire will use Kima’s situation to make the same point in subsequent episodes. She’s smart, persistent, and she takes her job very seriously. Despite her inexperience, she’ll probably make more progress on that case than anybody expects—including the politicians who want it stalled until after the elections.

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald