Continuing on reforms that can be taken to support impoverished communities, especially the minority communities in our urban areas, this post will consider other additional steps to support struggling communities.
Recruit the Best Teachers to the Most Difficult Places
Teaching in impoverished communities is usually very difficult. I teach in a mostly middle-class area. I remember a colleague of mine talking to one of her teaching friends about some of the struggles we were facing. There was a third-grade student writing inappropriate words on the bathroom stalls. When she told her friend, who taught in a Title 1 school, she laughed at her. She replied that her school had third graders smoking and fighting in the bathroom. Not that my school is perfect or that it doesn't have its issues, but it is different from some of the more difficult places. Many teachers, when they have the chance, if they are in a more difficult school, they look for ways to find a way out.
However, these struggling communities need the best teachers. Many times, students in more affluent communities have many advantages over poorer students. They may have greater parental support, more opportunities for tutoring, and additional resources like computers with the internet and books. Therefore, for the sake of equity, policies need to be put in place that encourage the most qualified and skilled teachers to teach in the most difficult schools.
What may be done to recruit the best teachers? First, as was discussed in the last post on very small class sizes, teachers often enjoy teaching in smaller class sizes. Teachers feel like they know the students more and have more of an impact on their lives when they have fewer students to teach. Second, teachers, though they don't go into the profession to become wealthy, do believe they deserve fair compensation--especially if teaching in more difficult schools. Therefore, giving teachers a bonus to work in more difficult schools would be a good incentive to draw the best talent. Third, give the teachers more control over the curriculum and pedagogy (teaching strategies). Too often teachers at traditional public schools grow frustrated with changing curriculum and policies each year. Instead, districts and school administrators should partner with teachers in developing a curriculum that meets the standards and teaching strategies that impact the students' lives while being respectful of the teachers' personalities. There are many other things that could be done to recruit the best teachers to impoverished communities.
Provide Professional Development
Doctors, lawyers, and other professions regularly receive professional development in their fields so that they stay on top of the developments in their discipline. They might include conferences, online training, retreats, and bringing in discipline experts to teach new skills. Teachers, on the other hand, have much less opportunity for professional development and usually don't receive the same level of expert training. This results in educators who are unaware of the developments in their field. Even if the best educators are recruited to low-income areas, if they are not trained regularly and well, they may not be able to best serve the students they are assigned.
One of the most important things schools should be doing is using the best teachers they have to mentor new or struggling educators. In a moment, I'll tell a story about a very poor educator I had when I was in high school. I attended the school for three years--my freshman to junior year. During that time, I never had an administrator or experienced teacher sit in any of my classes to evaluate the teaching skill of my teachers. Schools should build a culture of accountability and development, and this can be done by having the best teachers observe and coach other teachers.
Retain the Best Teachers but Not the Failing Educators
I don't think all or most educators in impoverished communities are bad teachers, but there are ones who need to be removed. Unfortunately, many school unions have too much power, and it can be very difficult to remove failing educators from public schools, especially if they don't have problems in their classrooms and parents aren't complaining (lazy teachers, which I'm about to given an example of, often don't have frustrated parents because kids get decent or great grades while doing very little or nothing). During my junior year of high school, I had a history teacher who for the whole year only taught us during the Civil War unit--about two or three weeks. The rest of the year, he assigned a chapter for us to read and the three questions at the end of the chapter. After completing the assignment, which would usually take about ten minutes, we could sleep, talk, or rap so long as no one caused significant problems (I wasn't complaining about this teacher's class when I was a student, but now see how much I suffered by not understanding the American history he was supposed to be teaching me). This is not good education, and this happened in a school where the largest student population by race was black (a little under half of the student body was black and around 35% was white). Now, this doesn't characterize all schools in minority and impoverished areas, and this one teacher didn't reflect all of the teachers in my former high school. However, there does seem to be more of these kinds of teachers in impoverished communities (this appears to be more about class than race).
There needs to be better ways of identifying poor teachers in impoverished areas for the purpose of training or removing. As I argued in the first section, struggling students and schools need the best educators--not those happy enough to let students sit in their classrooms doing almost no work. At the same time, there are terrific educators in some challenging schools and more tools need to be added to public education to help retain these teachers (greater pay than peers, more professional development opportunities, greater recognition of their efforts, leadership roles, let them lead teacher development programs, give them spots on school boards that make important decisions, give them preferred parking--do whatever is possible to keep them at the school). Far too often, good teachers spend their time at difficult schools and then leave for positions at schools where things aren't difficult--and often they make more money which incentivizes good teachers to leave more difficult schools.
Written by Michael Naaktgeboren
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