President Obama recently said (LA Times, 3/11/09) "It's time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones. From the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents, it's the person standing at the front of the classroom." Obama then went on to call for merit pay for teachers. This seems to be an all too common perception--that the problem with schools today is bad teachers and teacher unions.
Obama and similar critics are, how shall I say it, just plain wrong. Numerous studies have shown that the most important predictor of student success is the socio-economic status of the student's parents. Chapter 5 of the book Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner has an interesting discussion of the different important components and why and how they matter. Over a 6 year period I was a substitute teacher in approximately 105 (almost all elementary) different schools in San Diego County. I know from personal experience that this is true. One of the first things I discovered is that it is not good schools that make for good students, it is good students make for a good school. In a so-called "good school" I was a much better teacher even though I was the same teacher that I had been the day before in a "bad school." In a good school teaching is easy and fun; in a bad school it's like having teeth pulled without an anesthetic. In a good school you can concentrate on teaching; in a bad school you have to spend an inordinate amount of time establishing and keeping order in the classroom.
Having been to so many schools and probably 300-400 different classrooms and seeing and talking with other teachers at these schools, I can tell you that the problem is NOT that there is this large percentage of incompetent, or even substandard teachers. While I did see some less than stellar teachers, I would estimate that they made up less than 5% of the teachers. Almost all teachers are dedicated, hard-working, and competent. However, that is not true of principals. I saw a lot of poor or worse principals and one really bad administration (San Diego Unified). This is a much bigger problem than poor teaching.
There is a big problem with merit pay. How do you measure merit in teachers when there are so many variables in student success? In addition to the socio-economic status of the families and attendance areas, there are other things which non-teachers just aren't aware of. For example, even within the same school you can have substantial variation between different grade levels. At the school where I was a student teacher, I taught a second grade class and then a fourth grade class. Both these classes were exceptional and so were the other classes at those grade levels. I charted the test scores for this school for the next several years. The next year the scores for the third grade and fifth grades were higher than the year before and the second and fourth grade scores were lower. The year after, the fourth grade scores were back higher again (the original second grade), the fifth grade scores went back down again, and the second and third grade scores were about the same. The original fourth grade class was now in middle schoo. The third year the fifth grade scores (original second grade) went up significantly again. During this time there was little change in staff nor had the school's attendance area changed. And yet, going by the scores, teachers did really well one year, not very good the next year and, in the case of the fourth grade, really good the year after. Why does this happen? I don't know, but it does because I have seen it in other schools where some grades are better than others. How do you account for something like this in assigning merit pay?
Additionally, sometimes there is wide variation in the same school and the same grade levels. I had the misfortune on several occasions to end up in classes that had an inordinate number of unruly students, when compared to the rest of the school or even the rest of the grade level. You know you are in for trouble when other teachers, upon hearing that you are subbing for Mrs. so and so express sympathy, give you somber warnings, and/or offer to help. Sometimes this is just the luck of the draw; once I think it was because the teacher I was subbing for had previously taught special education and the school must have thought she was best equipped to deal with problem students. Again, how to you measure merit when you have this kind of disparity?
I won't take the time and space to go into what changes need to be made (that's for a book I have started), but I can tell you that merit pay, charter schools, getting rid of teacher unions and some of the other proposed bromides are not the answer. It is not an easy fix, it is a systemic problem that will probably take one or two decades before significant progress can be made.
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