US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said at the White House on July 7 that he’d like to encourage more experienced teachers to work at schools in high-poverty communities, the Washington Post reports.
Suggestion No 1: Get Teach For America out of there, I say.
But Mr Duncan has other ideas. For one, he suggested it might be a good idea to work effectively with teachers’ unions. “Proactive labor and management agreements must be part of the solution,” he was quoted as saying.
The gist of the announcement, though, wasn’t about labor unions, but about the need for states to develop and implement plans to get more experienced teachers into high-poverty schools and keep them there.
“When a school or a school district or a set of schools in a disadvantaged community has disproportionate numbers of inexperienced teachers, that’s not a good thing,” the Post quoted him as saying. “As a nation, we’ve had far too few incentives, and, frankly, lots of disincentives for the hardest-working and the most-committed teachers and principals to go to the communities who need the most help, and we have to get together and reverse that.”
Even though little evidence ties ineffective teachers with the lower academic performance seen in high-poverty schools, the US Department of Education is creating a $4.2 million technical assistance center to help states and schools with their plans. One way the feds hope to help the process is by shining a brighter light on the problem through increased transparency, for example.
Lower academic performance at high-poverty schools has needed no brighter light for some time. For example, on the 2013 fourth-grade reading test in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, students who weren’t eligible for free or reduced-price meals scored an average of 237 points, while those who qualified for free lunch scored an average of 206 points, a significant difference from their more affluent peers.
Here’s the letter Mr Duncan sent to state school chiefs.
He also talked with a small group, made up mostly of teachers, who teach at high-poverty schools around the country, coming away with the understanding that they feel their schools don’t have enough resources to teach effectively. However, he also saw that some very dedicated teachers remain at high-poverty schools because they feel well supported by other teachers there and by school leadership.
