From the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents, it’s the person standing at the front of the classroom.
The words are President Obama’s. If he’s right about this — and we think he is — it means we need more measures to sort out the good teachers from the bad ones. It also means looking for programs that are doing a better job of preparing teachers.
That’s why we are so interested in a new study showing that Teach for America teachers outperformed their traditional-training-program peers.
Teach for America goes outside the traditional education establishment to attract high-achieving college students to train for teaching jobs in the neighborhoods that need them most.
In the US Department of Education-commissioned study, conducted between 2009 and 2011 and involving about 4,500 students from 45 schools, Teach for America teachers performed better overall on the year-end standardized math test. The study, by Mathematica Policy Research, used a randomly assigned method to place traditionally taught teachers alongside those from TFA and Teachers Fellows (a program similar to TFA).
The findings may not sound controversial, but they are a mortal threat to those most invested in maintaining the rotten status quo.
Last year, for example, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis, asserted that Teach for America helps “kill and disenfranchise” students. Meanwhile, former University of Illinois education professor, Bill Ayers, has called the program a “fraud.”
Our view is simple: If the answer to failing schools is attracting and training better teachers, we need new and better ways to do it — and new and better ways to measure the results. It’s telling that instead of fighting these measures as the unions do, programs like Teach for America are eager to show what they can do.