Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work
(Courtesy of Teach for America’s video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org)

At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all

D.C. public schools—not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively

objective one (and, it’s worth noting, not a very hard one).

After a year in Mr. Taylor’s class, the first little boy’s scores went up—way up. He had

started below grade level and finished above. On average, his classmates’ scores rose about

13 points—which is almost 10 points more than fifth-graders with similar incoming test

scores achieved in other low-income D.C. schools that year. On that first day of school,

only 40 percent of Mr. Taylor’s students were doing math at grade level. By the end of the

year, 90 percent were at or above grade level.

As for the other boy? Well, he ended the year the same way he’d started it—below grade

level. In fact, only a quarter of the fifth-graders at Plummer finished the year at grade

level in math—despite having started off at about the same level as Mr. Taylor’s class down

the road.

This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most

stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other

variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter. Put concretely, if

Mr. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test

scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. And if

these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would

likely diverge forever. By high school, the compounded effects of the strong teacher—or the

weak one—would become too great.

Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school; but the school,

statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their

children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools—even supposedly good

schools—than among schools.

But we have never identified excellent teachers in any reliable, objective way. Instead, we

tend to ascribe their gifts to some mystical quality that we can recognize and revere—but

not replicate. The great teacher serves as a hero but never, ironically, as a lesson.

At last, though, the research about teachers’ impact has become too overwhelming to ignore.

Over the past year, President Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have

started talking quite a lot about great teaching. They have shifted the conversation from

school accountability— the rather worn theme of No Child Left Behind, President George W.

Bush’s landmark educational reform—to teacher accountability. And they have done it using

one very effective conversational gambit: billions of dollars.

Thanks to the stimulus bonanza, Duncan has lucked into a budget that is more than double

what a normal education secretary gets to spend. As a result, he has been able to dedicate

$4.3 billion to a program he calls Race to the Top. To be fair, that’s still just a tiny

fraction of the roughly $100 billion in his budget (much of which the government

direct-deposits into the bank accounts of schools, whether they deserve the money or not).

But especially in a year when states are projecting $16 billion in school-budget shortfalls,

$4.3 billion is real money. “This is the big bang of teacher-effectiveness reform,” says

Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that helps schools recruit

good teachers. “It’s huge.”

Despite the perky name, Race to the Top is a marathon—and a potentially grueling one; to

win, states must take a series of steps that are considered radical in the see-no-evil world

of education, where teachers unions have long fought efforts to measure teacher performance

based on student test scores and link the data to teacher pay. States must try to identify

great teachers, figure out how they got that way, and then create more of them. “This is the

wave of the future. This is where we have to go—to look at what’s working and what’s not,”

Duncan told me. “It sounds like common sense, but it’s revolutionary.”

Based on his students’ test scores, Mr. Taylor ranks among the top 5 percent of all D.C.

math teachers. He’s entertaining, but he’s not a born performer. He’s well prepared, but

he’s been a teacher for only three years. He cares about his kids, but so do a lot of his

underperforming peers. What’s he doing differently?

One outfit in America has been systematically pursuing this mystery for more than a

decade—tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and analyzing why some teachers can move

those kids three grade levels ahead in one year and others can’t. That organization,

interestingly, is not a school district.

Teach for America, a nonprofit that recruits college graduates to spend two years teaching

in low-income schools, began outside the educational establishment and has largely remained

there. For years, it has been whittling away at its own assumptions, testing its hypotheses,

and refining its hiring and training. Over time, it has built an unusual laboratory: almost

half a million American children are being taught by Teach for America teachers this year,

and the organization tracks test-score data, linked to each teacher, for 85 percent to 90

percent of those kids. Almost all of those students are poor and African American or Latino.

And Teach for America keeps an unusual amount of data about its 7,300 teachers—a pool almost

twice the size of the D.C. system’s teacher corps.

Until now, Teach for America has kept its investigation largely to itself. But for this

story, the organization allowed me access to 20 years of experimentation, studded by trial

and error. The results are specific and surprising. Things that you might think would help a

new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income

neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s

extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.

Thanks The Atlantic.com