A new report was released by The New Teacher Project, asserting that our schools were losing the very best teachers. They are the “irreplaceables.”
The report got the red treatment, with Secretary Duncan there to salute its findings. And it was funded by three billionaire foundations: Gates, Walton, John and Laura Arnold (big supporters of Michelle Rhee).
It seems that schools are losing their “best” teachers (the irreplaceables) and holding on to the ones who should have been fired.
Context helps. After Michelle Rhee left her brief teaching stint for TFA, she became an entrepreneur, as most good graduates of TFA do.
She created The New Teacher Project to find and place new teachers in urban districts where they are needed.
An altogether laudable idea, but in true TFA-style, having a good idea and making it happen is never enough.
It has to be the best idea in the universe. And the people who do it are the best ever. And those who don’t agree are awful people.
TNTP began issuing studies and reports to prove that their brand-new teachers were miles better than those jaded old veterans in the classroom. As time went by, there would be no doubt that the very best of all teachers was the one who had never taught before but came armed with enthusiasm and desire and a readiness to stop at nothing in the pursuit of higher test scores.
This is what Shanker Blog said about this latest report. In three of the four districts in the report, the data are based on only one year of data. As we have seen in many studies, one year of data is not reliable. The ratings are unstable. A teacher who somehow gets big score gains from her students in one year will not get them the next year; the teacher who look like a do-nothing this year is “irreplaceable” the next year.
Are there wonderful, outstanding, star teachers? Yes. Are there awful people who shouldn’t be there? Yes.
Is it necessary to turn all of American education upside down to root out the small number who are awful?
This is just one more useless salvo in the ongoing attempt to prove that America’s teachers are responsible for low test scores.
The current obsession with using test scores to find the best and fire the worst is wrong. Start with the fact that the tests weren’t designed for this purpose. Recognize that some excellent teachers don’t see huge gains year after year because they teach the gifted or the slowest or ELLs. Some very bad and uninspiring teachers can get score gains by doing endless drill and rote. And you have a formula that produces no improvement, just demoralization.
Someday these bad ideas will go away. Whenever it is, it won’t be a moment too soon.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As the new Nazi appointees flooded into the demoralized German social institutions in the middle Thirties, they behaved in the same manner that our current educational fascists (Rhee, Duncan, et al) do.
As far as I am concerned anything with Rhee’s name attached to it is POISON.
And anything funded by Gates and his cronies always come to the conclusions that he wants in the end anyway. So, it is meaningless to the real educators in our country.
Rhee should be an embarrassment to TFA. Someday, but not soon enough, she will slither away.
Ok let’s see: only 20% are irreplaceable (what an awkward word, but never mind) and the rest are no better than first year teachers. Take away–let’s hire cheap first year Teachers, oh yeah, and a few “irreplacables.”
Here’s the formula for success: fire anyone who has worked as a teacher more than 3 years. Hire new ones. Success.
“red carpet treatment”?
I keep telling people, this is exactly how the private schools get good teachers. They get fed up with what is going on in public ed !
According to free market principles don’t the best teachers go to the highest paying schools.
They go to public schools, which do pay the best. I am not talking about tiny academies for the rich, either. Those aren’t typical private schools. You are lucky if you make more than 20k or 22k in those places.
Not really..depending upon where you live…most accomplished teachers end up in the suburban town they live in or a nearby town. This is not to say there are not outstanding teachers in the cities because there are many. I don’t see many teachers in my state flocking to private schools. I do see experienced teachers retiring early and getting out of the profession for good.
As one who grew up in the catholic parochial system in the St. Louis, Mo area (where 15% of the students attend “private” (mainly Caltholic schools) I was subjected to some of those teachers and a number weren’t very good at all. The private schools pay quite a bit less and offer few benefits in comparison the public schools. Generally speaking, inexperienced, low quality teachers end up in the private sector and the more sought after teach in the public schools. Now some teachers teach in the private schools for reasons of religious belief, understandable from a certain point of view. But to suggest that “good” public school teachers leave the public schools for the private ones is stretching it a tad and has no basis in reality.
Agree 100%.
I ditto Duane!
In all honesty, there’s a pretty big difference between most Catholic Schools and high end private schools. Or would you really have us believe that “private schools…” like Sidwell Friends School, Maumee Valley Country Day School, Lakeside School, Phillips Andover, and Deerfield Academy “…pay quite a bit less and offer few benefits in comparison the public schools”?
rdsathene,
I don’t know about the “elite” private school pay. My exposure to non public education mainly has been with the religious schools around St. Louis. Perhaps the elites pay more. I don’t know.
No, it’s that teachers who teach at private schools are there because they can’t get public ed jobs. Private schools typically pay far less than public.
rdsathene,
I can’t speak to the uber-elite private schools you mentioned, but I’ve taught in two private schools–one in Texas, one in Tennessee–that have a good number of National Merit Semi-Finalists and Finalists per capita, and they both pay substantially less than the public schools in the area. The staff quality was much the same as a solid public school.
The trade-off for lower pay was freedom from standardized testing, smaller class sizes (around 15-19 students/class), and greater autonomy in the classroom. For teachers who can manage with a smaller paycheck, private schools are rather appealing.
Understood.
Unless I missed something, the HuffPo article doesn’t mention what TNTP proposed as a means of keeping the “irreplaceable” teachers. I have no doubt, though, it involves merit pay.
Besides the problems associated with basing a study on one-year’s worth of value-added scores, the TNTP and other pro-merit-pay folks don’t seem to understand what teachers find fulfilling. Would I like to earn a larger salary? Sure. I think teaching is an underpaid profession. But merit pay amounts to working for commission based on questionable measurements. I don’t see how that’s enticing. Not to mention the research that has demonstrated that merit pay has little, if any, effect on test scores.
But the real issue is that teachers aren’t driven by remuneration. Teaching is fulfilling when teachers are respected as professionals and have freedom to educate students in the full scope of their subject matter, not just the skills that transfer easily to standardized tests.
POP QUIZ:
What do you call plutocrat funded “research” that isn’t peer reviewed and is conducted by an organization that has already drawn a priori conclusions? Answer: A policy paper.
Pretty much everything one would ever need to know about The new Teacher Project (TNTP) is summed up here:
TNTP is “a leading voice on teacher quality.” – American Enterprise Institute
With extreme right-wing credentials like that, how can TNTP go wrong with Arne Duncan? Nice the ED department is shilling for private corporations like TNTP. Glad my community’s tax resources are being used to promote junk science like VAM/AGT instead of being using in the classroom or school libraries. You know, stuff that actually promotes learning, instead of testing.
TNTP’s board features members from reactionary Ed-Trust and even Bain & Company, Inc.. The former, of course, being Mitt Romney’s “sister” company from which we get Green Dot Charter Corporation’s nasty little Marco Petruzzi from.
Here’s my take
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2012/08/thompson-smart-retention-is-the-tntps-latest-simplistic-silver-bullet.html