This article from Monday's New York Times describes a strategy - replacing a quarter of a failing schools' teachers with a squad of talented, experienced educators - that at once is among the most promising and the most challenging of effort to transform schools.
The promise lies in some of what we know about organizational culture and the change process. Change that relies on a single, charismatic leader, despite stories that often highlight such leadership, is not widely replicable or sustainable. Not only are there simply not enough of those people, but each school is a culture, one that carries forward not just teachers, but families and communities, sports teams and bands, and habits - both widespread, like dividing kids into tracks, and unique - like the school I worked at where the football players lined up (during school hours)on game day in the common area and banged heads and chests in a giant mosh pit while the whole school was expected to come out and add their voices to the frenzy. While TV movies can get made about the few principals who might break up such an actual or metaphoric mosh pit, few exist and few stay long after the turnaround...especially with Hollywood calling.
Mike McCarthy at King Middle School in Portland is one of those principals - but he did not change King alone, nor did he do so by importing 25 percent new teachers in one fell swoop. (Though ALL of the best principals, including one that I worked for, Pam Fisher, will tell you that the only way you change a school is to make it clear that you'll make it more miserable for the laggards than they will for you, few get the chance to do so all at once.) What Mike had was a partnership with Expeditionary Learning that anchored his work with teachers, and the teachers' work with each other and with students, to a set of ideas - a consistent, articulated set of practices that, over time, not only could his existing teachers learn and get good at, but when he had the chance to hire new, he could hire specifically teachers who were enthusiastic about and likely to succeed in that model.
The Teach Plus plan seems to have some elements that could overcome the reliance on personality, superhuman commitment, or both, and is much more promising than something like Teach for America, which has done very little of lasting value for anyone but the young people whose already sparkling resumes are burnished by being able to say they "taught" in an underprivileged school for a year or two. That depends, in part, on the degree to which it is also linked to some sort of unifying approach to pedagogy, professional development, and school structure. But if, like Teach for America, it relies primarily on the assumption that talented teachers can make a broken system work, it won't. There will be a few examples of successes, but ultimately, it is the system that breaks the people, not the people who break the system.
Hopeless? Not at all. Here's what you do. Take those 25% new teachers. Take 25% of the kids in the school. Take 25% of the budget and 25% of the space. AND - this is crucial - sign them up with any of a number of high quality, non-profit "replication" models - and give them three years to produce dramatically better results. And what about the 75 percent of teachers, students, and buildings left behind? The next year, do the same thing, only let teachers from among that leftover 75% apply, and hire those that meet your standards. The next year the same, and the following year the same. Within four years, every teacher and student in the country will be working in a a school 1/4th the size of the one they are in now. Every teacher will have been hired based on what they have to offer a school that holds itself to high standards for all learners. And these schools will actually cost taxpayers less over time, because we will not be paying for schools that send, in some places, half of their students to prison.
Could it really be this simple? Of course not...remember that culture thing? What is the percentage of Americans who both know more, and care more, about football than education? (I like football, by the way...I just like education more.) That percentage, whether teacher, parent, student or glory-day remembering fan, opposes any change that messes with the traditions that matter most - in this case, the aforementioned mosh-pit. Add to that those for whom school "wasn't great, but if was good enough for me, it oughta be good enough for you." Add to that the parents who send their kids to private school, the folks who think that organized education is the tool of Satan, or Obama (often the same people), and the teachers who taught their last effective lesson years ago, but still have years to go before retirement and don't physically harm kids, so get to keep their jobs forever. And then add to that all of those who sailed through fancy suburban schools or elite private schools and now have made their way to positions of influence in the Obama administration...maybe with a couple years in Teach for America on the resume during which they became "experts" ... well, you can see how the cultural challenges may present some obstacles to my simple and elegant plan.
Does that make my plan unrealistic? Not at all. It is still far more realistic than any attempt to force, by dint of charismatic leader, "A" team intervention, adopting new standards for students and/or teachers, or any of number of other great ideas that attempt to change the system by...ummm...leaving it largely the same. That's a race to the middle - or perhaps a mosh-pit.
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