This study of the “scalability” of no-excuses charter schools was written by Steven Wilson, who is a supporter of this approach.
The no-excuses teachers agree that test scores are the most important outcome of schooling and the best preparation for college readiness.
He examined the education backgrounds of the teachers in several very successful charter schools in Boston.
83% were graduates of very selective colleges.
These teachers typically work 9-10 hours daily and are on call at any time to assist with homework.
They burn out and leave with frequency, because of the demands of the job and because they have other career ambitions.
This made him wonder about the scalability of the model.
To scale up to have a significant effect, he found, would require that half the graduates of elite universities enter teaching for at least two years, which doesn’t seem realistic.
He assumes that anyone who graduates from a selective college or university will make a better teacher.
Given the limited supply of elite graduates, he concludes that what is needed is tight and specific instructional systems, like the one he is involved in.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sorry but this just seems like more “research” to justify Teach For America and a way to avoid producing career teachers who require health benefits, tenure and a retirement plan. Just another ploy to deprofessionalize education and make more profits for charter school owners. What if that was proposed for the police and fire depts or drs and lawyers? They’d laugh them out of town.
Yes. The underlying assumption is that anyone recruited by TFA is a superb teacher.
Interesting. I attended local city colleges. I was never a great student. I performed poorly on my very first teacher’s licensing exam. 35 years later, I am a phenonmenal teacher with parents clamoring for their children to be in my class. If not for the patience, guidance and positive mentoring of my colleagues AND administrators, I probably would have become a “two-year” statistic.
You often hear education reformers, including President Obama, talk about how we must have the “Best and Brightest” from the most elite schools enter the teaching workforce to improve education.
I always want to say to say to them, the phrase “Best and Brightest” doesn’t actually mean what you think it means.
When David Halberstam used the phrase “Best and Brightest” for his book on the Vietnam War, he used it ironically to show how these so-called geniuses from the so-called elite colleges took the nation down the path of an insane policy that cost many lives. Even when it became apparent the policy wasn’t working, they continued to double down on it, throwing more soldiers and more money into the conflict, rather than admitting they had been wrong about the whole thing to begin with.
The parallel between the geniuses, the so-called Best and Brightest, in the Kennedy and Johnson administration who brought us the Vietnam War and the Best and Brightest in the Bush and Obama administrations, in the think tanks and non-profits who bring us education reform is striking. It is true that lives are not being lost due to the failed ed policies the reformers continue to pursue, but lives of students certainly are being worsened by these policies, futures, minimized. And as with the Vietnam policy, the reformers refuse to admit when the policies fail – merit pay doesn’t work, sure let’s try it again anyway! Teacher evaluations tied to test scores is untested – sure, let’s give that to the whole country even though we don’t know how it will play out!
I think you can extrapolate the “Best and Brightest” comparison to the rest of the culture and society as well. It is the “Best and the Brightest” that our so-called elite universities have to offer who have brought us such wonderful innovations such as collateralized debt obligations,securitization, Too Big To Fail Banks and all the other things that helped bring about the ’08 collapse (and will undoubtedly help bring about the next one too.) The Best and Brightest have brought us the idea that GMO is the way to feed the world, monocropping and corporate farming is the only way society can grow its food.
Frankly I think we need fewer “Best and Brightest” in our society and more people with the humility to say, “You know, maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am, maybe I shouldn’t hoist my untested policies upon the entire nation.
The “Most Ignorant and Arrogant” is a more fitting moniker. It needs work. Anybody?
I take that back. The kids who get sucked into TFA have not necessarily earned the arrogance label yet. Most of them who stick to teaching rather than administration seem to realize their ignorance.
It’s important to remember those 9-10 hour days identify time AT school directly instructing students. It is not unusual for a public school teacher to spent 9-10 hours a day working. However, those additional hours are spent preparing lessons, grading student work, and copying, etc. These poor charter teachers spend 9-10 hours at the school with students and THEN do the additional work of classroom teaching. Of course it cannot be scaled up! It is inhumane to expect people to focus that much on their job. If students from concentrated poverty need 9-10 hours of instruction a day, shouldn’t those schools hire two shifts of teachers? Then the schools could maintain that level of instruction without destroying the teachers. Of course such a solution costs money. These “reformers” want solutions that do not require investment. Instead, they want reform based on requiring teachers to work for free. This is why TFA and younger, non-unionized teachers are used for this work. Or, as a fellow grad student said in my ed policy class, “I thought of teaching, but it was too much work. So, I decided to work in education policy instead.”
Children need time to rest and play, just as teachers need to go home and take care of their personal lives. A ten-hour day is hard for children and adults alike.
Amen to that, Diane!
I am one of those people with an elite STEM degree.
I have volunteered at school as a guest speaker, a parent-chaperone, and occasionally given a lesson in an afterschool program.
I am nowhere near as good as the professional teachers, and nowhere near skilled enough to be more than an occasional Other Interesting Adult. It would be a travesty to put me in a classroom.
I’ve been a ‘rocket scientist’ and I find that to be quite a bit easier.
I support our teachers: they do a job I do not have the skills to do.
I would say that his claim that the charter schools are educating the same kids for less money is not likely to be true even given his observation that they are burning out teachers by expecting them to work too long for too little pay. I say that because Bruce Baker has been looking for this mythical school for some time, and I doubt he would miss any right next door in Massachusetts.
Even when charters get less public money, they typically don’t have the same expenses (home to school transportation, school lunches, and special education being typical places to look) and it’s pretty hard to get accurate information about money spent in conjunction with the school by supporter organizations and other outside fundraising, since that spending may not go through the school bank accounts/financials.
Check out the number of special education students and limited English speakers in Boston Public Schools compared to these charter schools where genius teachers from fancy universities are such a great success. BPS has 18.3% special education and 30% limited English speakers. The Edward Brooke has 7.4% special education students and .2% limited English speakers. The Edward Brooke, which is scary with their extreme military style discipline, has the lowest percentage of pesky resistant learners at the charters mentioned in this article.I can tell you after five years of teaching at a Boston charter that these schools are nothing more than test prep factories. I wonder how well these no-excuse reformers would do with special education students, kids who can’t speak English while planning creative, hands-on experiences in a democratically run class room.