<p>My theory is that the teachers who are really bad end up teaching the weakest students, because their parents are less likely to complain about poor teaching. The better teachers and the parents of higher-ability kids want the same thing, and they usually get it. The parents of the weak students may defend their kids from disciplinary claims, but they’re not going to complain about pedagogy.</p>
<p>If you force the best teachers to teach the weakest students, and have weaker teachers teaching the best students, the good teachers and the good students will bail for private school.</p>
<p>A teacher wants to teach those who want to learn. It doesn’t get more basic than that.
I don’t care what the initial level is–if somebody wants to learn there is somebody there who wants to teach them. It’s a very sorry state that those who want to learn get lost in the shuffle.</p>
<p>In many major cities, the schools with the low achieving students also tend to have a danger element to them and are simply not desirable for that reason to a lot of the teachers. It’s one thing to want to work with kids who are challenged academically, and need innovative teaching methods, and a whole other when there are environmental concerns over which you have no control or impact.</p>
<p>This danger element is not limited to low achieving students in the major cities. The violent stalker harassing my client’s granddaughter a few years back was doing so in one very well-off upper-middle class Midwest suburban town.</p>
<p>The phenomena of moving to the burbs is not all about the money. At least in the case I know most intimately, my friend got tired of teaching in a school with kids who needed to be in special ed or have more support, but instead were dumped in her classroom. Think 10 year old who can’t read put in a 3rd grade classroom. Class sizes were large. Many children had unaddressed behavioral problems. She felt she was being set up to fail. </p>
<p>BTW the most stressful thing in her opinion about teaching in the suburbs is the annoying parents. :)</p>
<p>If attracting & retaining good teachers in challenging communities is such a problem, then why not do what another public sector organization does? The U.S. State Dept offers its foreign officers incentive premiums for hardship locations. E.g., taking on a diplomatic posting in Cairo will pay better than taking on a diplomatic posting in Vienna. I have friends who voluntarily bid for postings in places like Eithiopia & Pakistan. They even take their school age kids with them. My friends who went to Pakistan got their car ambushed by gunfire, but then again that could happen in an U.S. inner city neighborhood, too…</p>
<p>Foreign services officers are also unionized-- I’ll bet most of you didn’t know that…</p>
<p>Car ambushed by gunfire in the inner city? How quickly we forget about Sandy Hook/Columbine. We always want to point fingers at dangerous inner city schools, but were those 2 locations in the inner city?</p>
<p>Why would lower-acheving students want to get a better education? Then they might not be satisfied with the eventual minimum-wage job at Wal-Mart. </p>
<p>Students are getting exactly the kind of education that best suits our corporate overlords.</p>
<p>Nope. Not at all. Just wanted to correct poster who said State Dept people brought their kids to Pakistan. (Given a choice of unaccompanied posts, DS actually chose Iraq.)</p>
<p>Also US does not have any State Dept people in Iran.</p>
<p>If you are actively engaged in educating your kids or seeing that they get proper attention, then your kids are highly unlikely to be among the low-achieving students.</p>
<p>I feel compelled to point out that the study says “less-experienced” teachers… not “the worst” teachers. And I don’t think the two go hand in hand. New teachers, fresh out of the oven, are often the most enthusiastic, ambitious and eager to make a difference. And sometimes, the much-lauded “experienced” teachers are burned out, fed up and just going through the motions. My kids have had great teachers, and not-so-great ones, from all ranges of the experience spectrum.</p>
<p>Our state dept friends did a posting in ethiopia w their school-age kids. I don’t know if their kids went with them to pakistan (their pakistan posting happened such happened a long time ago). Another very experienced friend recently went to afghanistan because it was offered as a career stepping stone.</p>
<p>But u are missing the forrest for the trees. My point is: the State Dept offers incentives to entice effective people to work in challenging locations. Maybe the same should be considered for teachers.</p>
<p>GMT, right now it is very very tough to get a teaching job in the high performing school districts. Getting a job at all is the incentive. IMHO, teachers hired in the last 2 years in most urban districts are intelligent, well educated and likely to succeed.</p>