The Super Teacher Idea

 

Super Teacher Michelle Rhee. Once hailed as perhaps the most important education reformer of the century, today she no longer plays any role in education. 

At the turn of the century, an idea came into education that teacher quality, and that alone, is almost the singular determinant of what will happen in a classroom full of teachers and kids. I call it the “Super Teacher” idea, and it runs something like this: In the presence of a great teacher, all kids’ learning will skyrocket, and if all of our teachers are great, it fixes nearly all problems in education. This idea has taken powerful hold among many policy makers and is illustrated in the 2010 film Waiting For Superman. The basic message of the film was that the education of our children is in the hands of mostly mediocre teachers who are protected by powerful teachers unions. If someone could just be strong enough to defeat the unions, fire the mediocre teachers and replace them with truly good teachers, we’ll ascend to some kind of plateau of great instruction and excellent academics. This idea has inspired a lot of educational ‘reform’ throughout the nation and the many teacher accountability measures one sees in educational laws were all born from the super teacher idea. 

Former educator Michelle Rhee, featured in the film, is an excellent example of this idea. Rhee taught from 1994 to 1997, and according to her, caused 90% of her students to score better than the 90th percentile on a national standardized exam. In 1997, Ms. Rhee quit teaching and founded a nonprofit dedicated to teacher reform. In 2007, despite her only having 3 years of teaching experience, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty made Rhee the ‘Chancellor’ of the DC school district where she served for the next 3 years. By 2010, Ms Rhee fired 241 ‘nonperforming’ teachers and put 737 additional educators on notice, including many administrators. After several years of chaos and turmoil in DC schools, the 2010 Mayoral election in DC revolved around 1 issue: Firing Rhee or keeping her on as Chancellor of Schools. When Rhee’s supporter was soundly defeated in the primary, she resigned after a 15 minute conversation with his opponent who had run on removing her. 

I call educators like Rhee “antichrist administrators”: people who buy into the idea that test scores are the solitary indicators of school success and are willing to fire anyone who cannot or will not raise these scores. Diane Ravitch’s book The Death and Life of the Great American School System tells the story of several of these antichrist administrators and they all follow the same pattern: The administrator is brought into a school district on a political tide of willpower to ‘do something about our failing schools’, they quickly begin to fire teachers and administrators based on the test performance at their schools, and eventually parents and community members retake the school board for the sole purpose of removing the antichrist administrator because of all the chaos and turmoil they’ve caused. 

Does the Super Teacher idea improve schools though? Rhee’s claims of her own success as a teacher turned out to be greatly exaggerated. In DC, test scores did go up moderately under Rhee. Cheating on the standardized tests also went up, and in the end, parents and community members weighed moderate test score increases against hundreds of teacher terminations, school closures, students being forced to go to different schools, and ultimately judged that it wasn’t worth it. Antichrist administrators represent the extreme conclusion of this idea, but policymakers throughout the states have bought into this notion to lesser degree and you can find evidence of this in all of the teacher accountability measures throughout the land. In order to assess the effectiveness of the Super Teacher idea, let’s look at some real educational problems in our state. 

To me, the greatest problem in our education system is the reality that 95% of our schools don’t have books. This reduces engagement-the amount of time and energy students spend with a subject-in every classroom it affects because teachers cannot assign homework and must pace their classrooms to the slowest students in the room. Does having great teachers overcome this problem? The greatest teachers in the world won’t and can’t fix this problem simply because it’s not teachers that decide whether schools will have textbooks or not. Principals don’t make that decision either. The decision of what material resources are found at the classroom level rests with district superintendents and/or the State Board of Education and the Legislature. 

Another big issue is that both teachers and administrators are held accountable for tests that they’ve never seen and that mostly cover subjects they don’t teach. My school typically offers about 146 courses in a term (about normal I think), and the standards of only 36 of these courses are covered on the ISAT. This means that my high school’s ‘definitive’ ISAT score does not measure 78% of the courses my students take and only 30% of my teachers can even try to prepare students for the ISAT. And if they do, they must prepare students for exams that no teacher is allowed to see with zero study materials. No matter how good our teachers are, they can’t fix this issue because they don’t make the exams and don’t pick which subjects will be tested or not and what study materials will be released. Neither do building and district administrators. These choices, again, rest with the State Board of Education and the State Legislature. 

I could go on here, but here’s the point: teachers are not the only thing (or educators even) that affect the outcome of student education. Education is a complex industry with several levels (classroom, school, district, state) and several players like teachers, counselors, administrators, legislators and school boards. All of us involved in education play different roles that ultimately influence the outcome of this, and sound education policy understands that. There’s another side of this too: teachers are the frontline workers in the trenches of this system. Blaming teachers for all woes in our system cannot fix these issues that teachers aren’t responsible for but does have the effect of demoralizing those teachers and their students. This is why I believe this idea has been such a cancer to our system since it began: the Super Teacher idea fixes nothing at the price of destroying teacher morale and causing good folks to leave the profession.