John Thompson: Is Moving Strong Teachers to Struggling Schools a Viable Strategy?
Guest post by John Thompson.
In the pseudo-documentary/propaganda film Waiting for Superman, we were told of something called "the dance of the lemons," in which ineffective teachers are shuffled from one school to another rather than fired. One of the big ideas the reformers have dreamed about is the creation of a sort of "dance of the lemons" in reverse, whereby, instead of the worst teachers moving around leaving a trail of poorly taught students, we somehow lure the best teachers to go where they are most needed. After all, if teacher quality is indeed the largest factor within our control, we must somehow be able to direct better teachers to places where they are needed most. The results of the latest study ought to give even the most enthusiastic social engineer a bit of a reality check.
The latest study by the Institute of Education Sciences, "Access to Effective Teaching for Disadvantaged Students," by researchers from Mathematica and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) documents once again a terrible disparity between effective teaching in low and high poverty schools. It showed that "Teachers of FRL (Free and Reduced Lunch) students have lower value added than teachers of non-FRL students on average, with statistically significant differences of 0.034 standard deviations of student test scores in ELA and 0.024 standard