A Reformy Confession
Via Bruce Baker on the Twitter machine - the very reformy National Council on Teacher Quality admits that even the best teachers aren't the X-Men:
As someone who runs a teacher quality organization, clearly I'd love it if that statement were even remotely accurate but,to be blunt, it's dead wrong. The 'teachers matter' refrain has been spouted so much in the past ten years that, predictably, we've lost important perspective. The truth is that SES and family background still swamp school effects by a 3:1 margin.In spite of these odds, we can still have daily reminders that teachers matter plenty. But we do schools and teachers an injustice by inflicting upon them superhero powers, especially when we also wrongly insist that superhero status can be achieved just by being basically smart and stupendous results are possible no matter what curriculum is used.Make no mistake about it. Overcoming the learning deficits of many poor and
