Dan Brown’s recent piece on the HP is a must read. Dan, an excellent charter school teacher (and author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle), has penned an insightful retort to Nicholas Kristof's “effusive essay” on DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and her vilification of teacher unions along the road to reform.
Dan’s essay raises several questions: Just how many terrible teachers are there who need to be removed immediately? Will test scores serve as the single arbiter of who is and is not an effective teacher? If principals are going to be the ultimate judge of who teaches, then are they ready for the task and do they know how to make sound personnel decisions? (Remember Rhee has fired one-third of the district’s principals. Are the ones she replaced them with any better? How do we know?)
You get my point — and Dan’s as well. The issue of improving teaching and learning is a bit more complicated than Mr. Kristof’s portrayal suggests.
Reformers might start with identifying the best teachers — using a mix of measures such as peer review, student work samples, contributions to school-community partnerships, test scores, National Board Certification. Then they need to give these successful teachers more opportunities to prepare and induct the next generation of teachers — and help design the teaching policy reforms we so desperately need.
Top-down solutions to the problems facing the teaching profession have not worked for 150 years. No doubt, unions have to change – and a lot. But so do many of our school administrators. Dan is not a member of any teachers' union — nor was I when I taught. Journalists should take note and try to see through the ripe rhetoric. Dan gets it just right in his headline: "Teachers are the keys, not the roadblocks to reforming schools."
