The Dallas Morning News Scott Parks Column: Good Teachers Are Schools’ Biggest Secret

By Scott Parks, The Dallas Morning News

Jul. 2–Summer is a good time to think about education. We’re all too busy during the school year to do much more than react to daily events.

Let’s start with a simple premise: Teachers are the make-or-break variable in a child’s education.

So, how do we identify the good ones and encourage them to keep working where they’re needed most?

The Education Trust, a Washington D.C. think tank, has issued yet another report pointing out the reality that teachers in higher-income, low-minority schools make more money than teachers in poor neighborhoods populated by blacks and Hispanics.

The problem arises when the good, experienced teachers leave a poor school to work at a rich school.

The answer, according to Education Trust, is to remedy the salary gaps between rich and poor schools. This is pretty orthodox thinking.

Why do experts always focus on salary as the key to attracting and retaining good teachers? Most research shows that creative people don’t work primarily for money. Teachers teach because the work is meaningful and important.

Let me bring you some unorthodox thinking about how schools in any neighborhood, rich or poor, can retain good teachers. And it’s not about money. It’s about love and about the need for educators to trust parents with information about teacher performance.

A dirty little secret among educators is that they do not want anyone outside the school district’s administrative chain of command to sort out good teachers from bad.

The whole system is built to keep school communities in the dark and perpetuate the absurd notion that all teachers are “good.”

The following made-up conversation between a parent and a principal demonstrates how this myth serves educators who want maximum flexibility to assign students to classrooms.

PARENT: Ms. Salazar, I would really like you to put my little Juanito into Ms. Jones’ class for fourth grade. Everyone tells me she’s the best of the four teachers in that grade.

PRINCIPAL: Oh, Ms. Garza, all of our fourth-grade teachers are terrific. You can’t go wrong with any of them. Don’t you worry. Bye-bye, now.

Principals want to dispose of “bad” teachers in their own way and on their own timetable without pressure from parents.

Therefore, parents are purposely denied objective data or credible information on teacher competence. They can only guess which teachers are good.

Teachers are the only public servants in Texas whose annual performance evaluations are specifically exempted from state open records laws. So, parents cannot see them.

For all the talk about imposing “accountability” on public schools through high-stakes standardized tests, just try to figure out which fourth-grade teacher’s class did best on the TAKS test.

In the ed biz, it’s called “classroom-level data,” and it could arm parents with valuable information about teachers. Ask for it, and watch your principal’s head explode.

Professional educators don’t trust parents and the public to put annual evaluations, classroom-level TAKS data and other information into perspective.

Secrecy has consequences. It means parents really can’t show their love for good teachers because they don’t know who they are. Often, they misdirect love to a “bad” teacher just because she happens to be nice.

This system is anti-democratic and focuses too much on salary as a panacea to keep good teachers in a school.

Our history and tradition call for openness. Democracy is metaphysical. We trust “the people” with information, which allows the body politic to help solve society’s problems.

Can you imagine someone arguing that information about our president — a list of campaign donors, for example — should not be made public because we can’t trust “the people” to assess it properly?

Here’s my suggestion.

School districts should distribute teacher information packages to school communities each year. The packets would include:

— The teacher’s last annual evaluation.

— The latest available data on the percentage of the teacher’s class that passed TAKS and the percentage that received the “commended” ranking.

— The teacher’s years of experience compared with the faculty average.

— The teacher’s salary compared with faculty average.

— The teacher’s certifications and the number of times it took the teacher to pass the certification exam.

Armed with this information, parents could play a role in keeping good teachers in place.

Several years ago, I visited Maple Lawn Elementary School, a predominantly Hispanic school in Dallas. Juanita Nix, the principal, posted classroom-level TAKS data in the hallway.

There, for the world to see, were bar charts depicting the percentage of students who passed or failed the TAKS in each classroom. Under each classroom’s chart was the teacher’s name.

In the secretive education community, this was heresy.

Ms. Nix, a grandmotherly veteran of many education wars, acknowledged that the TAKS information caused more parents to request certain teachers for their children.

She took the requests and dealt with them. “If we’re gonna have accountability,” she told me, “then let’s have accountability.”

Indeed.

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