By John Thompson.

The Washington Post’s Emma Brown provides an excellent overview of the “the elephant in the room,” which is the real reason why the inequitable distribution of teaching talent helps undermine inner city schools. Brown borrows that phrase from David Sapp, director of education advocacy and legal counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which has filed lawsuits related to teacher churn and the resulting heavy use of substitutes. Sapp correctly says,

There are a narrow set of schools where this happens all the time, and until that gets really unpacked and resolved, there’s only so much that can be done to close the achievement gap.

Neither will we address the teacher quality gap until we tackle the rhinoceros in the room, corporate school reformers who have adopted their weird vision of “teacher quality” as a silver bullet for reversing the effects of generational poverty and discrimination. Ironically, just a few days later, the TNTP’s Dan Weisberg illustrated the reality-free nature of accountability-driven reform. He cited the opening of high-challenge schools with large numbers of substitutes as “low hanging fruit,” which could be easily solved by central offices speeding up their hiring process. Although Weisberg later contradicted himself when he acknowledged that there are rational reasons for top teachers fleeing inner city schools, he made it sound like it would be easy to recruit and retain teachers in the most challenging schools. In other words, rhinoceroses like Weisberg who still support test, sort, reward, and punishment, are still ignoring the complex truth Emma Brown chronicles.

After billions of extra dollars have been invested by Weisberg’s funders on their theory that individual teachers should be held accountable for reversing the legacies of poverty and oppression, Brown cites Matthew Kraft and John Papay, who find that urban school districts hire 1 in 6 of their teachers after the school year begins. She then went down a list of districts and their numbers of classrooms without teachers. It culminates with Detroit which needs 135 teachers, more than 5% of its teaching positions, and which only has 90 substitutes.

Brown then cites a former-central office administrator in North Carolina turned principal who tells the hard truth about why teacher instability remains a problem in struggling schools, “The number one reason why people leave is it’s hard.” She had to hire 56 of her approximately 140 teachers this summer, and the result of turnover is that 86% of her staff have less than three years of experience. The principal fears that, “The bottom line fact is I will have great people and train them up, and they’ll transfer and go to a school that’s not quite so complex.”

I’d add that the transience of inner city teachers is the mirror image of students’ mobility. In the few honors classes I taught throughout my career, incoming students could always tell me what they were studying at their previous schools. In “regular” classes, I don’t recall a student who remembered what their previous history class was studying. About half of my new students couldn’t recall their previous teacher’s name, and some had been out of school for so long that they couldn’t remember the previous school’s name. After test-driven, market-driven school reform drove my school to the bottom of the state’s high schools, I had a student transfer in or out on a daily basis.

Brown also cites a 2007 North Carolina study which found that 25% of low-income middle schools had persistently high teacher absenteeism even though the rate in more-affluent middle schools was 1 in 12. That pattern has prompted a surge of groundless teacher bashing.

During the 1990s, my school had the district’s highest teacher attendance rate, as we should have with a staff of forty-something Baby Boomers. We mostly had the same teachers a decade and a half later when we were continually berated for having the school system’s lowest attendance rate. It was not our fault that our school ate its young, making it impossible to keep new teachers. We were constantly condemned, “Obviously, you all don’t want to come to school!” But, in fact, it was the need to care for elderly parents, heart disease, cancer, and premature death (with stress being a major factor) which caused our absenteeism.

Emma Brown provides some refreshing objectivity in explaining that

it is not uncommon for veteran teachers to feel that they are fending for themselves without instructional support or consistent, school-wide expectations for student behavior.

She then describes a teacher at Washington D.C.’s Ballou High School. The teacher left Ballou “after she started having anxiety attacks and chest pains that she attributed to job stress.” The teacher understood that her students “knew ‘I loved them to death. But everything that was out of my control was literally out of my control, and it was driving me crazy.’”

I saw the same pattern with my colleagues, but I believed I was exceptionally good at pacing myself. I was still energetic up until the last week of the year, and then I collapsed in exhaustion. During the last couple of years, I started to get sick at my stomach every time I was covered with a student’s blood. I then realized that I had to leave the full-time classroom or I’d be like so many of my friends and be prematurely felled by illness.

The rhinoceros in the room remains the competition-driven, punitive reform movement. I doubt many of them have a clue about the regularity with which teachers cradle our unconscious students. These non-educators still dismiss the pain that our children bring to school. They still pretend that teachers with “High Expectations!” and who accept “No Excuses!” can become like heroes in a Hollywood movie who single-handedly turn schools around. Their cheap and easy solution is to use high stakes testing to drive veteran educators out of the classroom. They still contend that the way to recruit top teachers is to make our job tougher, less joyful, and to use value-added models, that are unfair to inner city teachers, to fire educators who don’t embrace their theories.

What do you think? Why can’t reformers understand that the poison they’ve dumped on urban teachers has been flowing down on our students? Teaching in the inner city, for all its painful moments, was still the most wonderful job I could imagine. If we embraced humane methods of school improvement, wouldn’t more teachers choose to teach in high-poverty jobs?

Rhino image by Martijn Munneke, classroom image by the US Department of Education, used with Creative Commons license.