The Best Teachers in the World by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8179-1566-7
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Published: 2012-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Great Leaders, Great Teachers

In an alternative world, teacher quality would not be such a problem. Teachers would be hired through an evaluation of formal credentials, work history, and performance during the interview process. Once on the job, teachers would be observed, coached, and evaluated. Some would be judged successes and rewarded with compensation or additional responsibility, such as coaching new teachers. Others would be judged unsuccessful and be encouraged or asked to leave. Performance would be gauged by some combination of objective and subjective factors. These actions and decisions would be taken by skilled managers held accountable for doing them well.

This is how talent development works in other professions and industries where individual performance is difficult to predict and measure, but crucial to the overall success of the organization.1 Managers are equipped, to whatever extent possible, with formal tools of evaluation, and employees are given appropriate incentives to perform. But in the end, the manager closest to the job is responsible for judging and developing talent and is rewarded for doing so. Indeed, this is the manager’s most important role—getting the best people possible in their respective positions and helping them to perform.2

In schools, the manager’s role would fall to the principal. He or she would be responsible for identifying prospective teachers with the potential to develop into effective instructors and good team members; for building a school organization where teachers have maximum opportunity to learn and improve; for recruiting and retaining veteran teachers who can get great results for students and help other teachers improve; for creating work conditions where quality teachers want to remain; and for making the tough decisions to remove unsuccessful teachers from the school. School districts could help principals in this role with evaluation tools and data. But the job of ensuring teacher quality would ultimately be the job of the principal.

If principals were actually able to perform this role, the problem of teacher quality would become quite different. It would become a fraction of the size. It would become less a problem of finding 3 million great teachers to lead America’s classrooms and more a problem of finding 90,000 great principals to lead America’s schools. These tasks are interdependent, of course, and policymakers must give careful thought to the conditions that will attract and keep high-caliber performers in teaching—and make the principal’s job that much easier. The teacher quality challenge does not quite reduce to just 90,000 principals. But if principals can in fact deliver on teacher quality, the problem does become more tractable. The evidence is they can. The problem is most principals have not.

From Teachers to Leaders

In 1994, two young teachers, fresh out of service to Teach for America, started a fifth-grade school program in inner city Houston, Texas.3 Working with forty-eight low-income students, half of whom had failed their state assessments the year prior, and emphasizing high expectations and relentless hard work, Mike Feinberg and David Levin helped 98 percent pass the state assessments in both reading and math by year’s end.

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