Parents Make Better Teachers
Charter schools are hiring young educators who only stick around for a few years. Bad move.
Are charter schools failing to realize the value of veteran teachers?
Photo by Fuse/Thinkstock
In this week's New York Times, Motoko Rich described how many charter schools are now exclusively hiring teachers and principals in their early 20s who work for just two to three years before leaving education altogether. Instead of deploring this trend, charter programs have embraced a pool of eager, young, and idealistic college graduates, many in or fresh out of Teach for America, who are willing to work long, grueling hours for low pay and with no promise of a sustained career path.
The Times focuses on the resulting turnover and inexperience among these educators.Studies show that schools with high rates of teacher attrition perform poorly on average and that many educators don't hone their skills until their third year in the classroom or beyond. The Times article, however, neglects another downside to charters' emphasis on youthful hiring: Many schools launch with few or no adults on staff who know first-hand what it's like to be a parent.
If you aren't a parent, maybe this won't strike you as odd. It wouldn't have struck me that way more than 20 years ago when I joined Teach for America in the program's first year and taught for three years in New York City's public schools. I was single, childless, and clueless about even the most basic aspects of child-rearing. My students' parents seemed like creatures from another planet, remote and distant from the job I thought I was doing. To the extent I understood family dynamics, it was solely from the perspective of the