Last night we witnessed an obvious outrage—Top brass assigning a rookie homicide detective to a tough case because they want it stalled until after the municipal elections. “We’re pulling a veteran off a pending case and giving it to a rookie so as NOT to make timely progress on said case?” Normally, we learn, the division simply would never think of doing such a thing. “You won’t catch anything as a primary for the first few months,” Kima is told when she shows up to her new job. “Give you time to learn the basics.” The message is clear: Assigning a rookie to do a tough job before she is ready to handle it is a practice so stupid as to be generally unthinkable.
Clearly, the writers are using this plotline to comment on what's happening way over in the education subplot: Where is the same sense of surprise and outrage when rookie educator Prez gets assigned to teach children in West Baltimore—some of the most educationally needy youngsters in our society? In fact, after seeing so many awful “white knight urban teacher” movies, I applaud The Wire’s writers for being relatively honest that, however well-intentioned and hard-working Prez might be, he’s just terrible at his new job. I don’t have the space here, but I would love to see someone list every major teaching blunder Prez has committed in just the past two episodes.
And make no mistake: His students will pay the price in lost learning. Over the past ten years, “value-added research” has revealed that, in general, students assigned to rookie teachers make considerably less academic progress during the course of a full year than do their peers assigned to more experienced educators. Most novice teachers then experience a steep climb in effectiveness over the next 3-5 years. In a few speeches and some writing, I’ve referred to this phenomenon as a “learning tax,” one that pays for a long-term social good—helping new teachers get better—at the cost of lost learning for some kids.
By the way, I’m not attacking Teach for America—research shows that all of this is as true of credentialed teachers with degrees from an education school as for new teachers who enter, like Prez, through alternative routes. As long as most teachers learn on the job, some kids are going to have to be the guinea pigs.
But if we’re really having an honest national conversation about what it will take to close achievement gaps, why is no one asking an obvious question: If it’s unthinkable to assign a rookie homicide detective to a tough case, why is it okay to assign a novice teacher to educate kids who are behind academically and who face significant educational (and social) obstacles to begin with? In fact, some federal data suggest that poor and minority kids get more than their fair share of novice teachers! (Call that a “regressive learning tax,” since those kids can least afford to pay it.) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) required states to measure such inequities and come up with plans to fix them, but most states have all but ignored the requirement. That's a shame, and one reason I cringe when people say the education system already is doing all it possibly can to close the achievement gap; in reality, beyond some tougher pushing and prodding via NCLB's accountability system, we're not even really trying very hard yet!
Sure, it might not be politically feasible to simply outlaw the practice of assigning rookie teachers to low-income and minority kids. But can’t we at least try to do that for our most disadvantaged kids living in very tough neighborhoods like West Baltimore? Or, if that’s not politically feasible, why not at least insist that disadvantaged kids who do get rookie teachers NEVER end up with a novice or weak teacher the following year, since research shows that getting several ineffective teachers in a row deals a crushing blow to long-term academic growth from which very few kids ever recover? But a dirty secret is that urban schools often do the just the opposite, practicing a kind of triage whereby academically stronger students get assigned to stronger teachers as they climb the educational ladder. So the system compounds disadvantage rather than confronting it.
p.s. Episode 4 also provided the solution to the “soft eyes” mystery from Episode 2, and it also turns out to be related to the rookie theme. Bunk tells Kima that soft eyes are the most important thing to have at a murder scene: “You have soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. You have hard eyes, you’re staring at the same tree, missing the forest.” So the “soft eyes” comment the experienced teacher made to Prez in Episode 2 was actually a kind of foreshadowing (or, since the term wasn’t explained until two episodes later, a kind of “retroactive foreshadowing”—who said The Wire is easy?). If Prez had had the soft eyes that seasoned teachers develop, he’d have seen what was happening between the girls in his class, and he could have intervened before the antagonism escalated into physical violence. As any good teacher can tell you, effective classroom management depends on seeing everything happening in the classroom, whether it’s related to your lesson plan or not. “Soft eyes, grasshopper.”
--- Guest blogger Craig Jerald
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