To Hell with Good Intentions
School Reform is Failing America's Children
Public school students rallied in front of Newark City Hall in April 2014 to protest reforms under Superintendant Cami Anderson, depicted here as a "liar." Photo: Newark Student Union
The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?
Dale Russakoff
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27 (cloth)
Dale Russakoff
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27 (cloth)
I was the worst teacher in the Houston Independent School District.
I know this from a meeting with a district administrator in the spring of 1993. Hired as a sixth-grade teacher a few days before the start of the school year at Rusk Elementary School, I had come to Houston as part of a large group of young and idealistic Teach For America corps members. My ambitions exceeded my abilities. I knew the subject matter, but I was shaky at classroom management and I knew little about the lives of my students, one-fifth of whom lived in nearby homeless shelters. Nor did I know much about the city; when I arrived in Houston after six weeks of Teach For America summer training in California, it was my first visit there or, indeed, to the state of Texas. Still, when the principal observed my classroom that fall to carry out a state-mandated teacher evaluation—the Texas Teacher Appraisal System, or TTAS, as it was known—she rated me as “above average.”
As I got to know the school, I learned about its chronic low performance and history of administrative and teacher turnover. The school seemed to be in crisis—parents, teachers, and students were all complaining. Together with some other new teachers, I made proposals to the principal for some modest reforms to disciplinary procedures and class scheduling.
I came to realize that the principal—also in her first year at the school and her first job as a principal—didn’t care at all for me, an outsider with an Ivy League degree and a batch of reform ideas offered up a mere few months after arriving. When she returned to my classroom in the spring for my second required evaluation, I received a terrible score, placing me in the lowest ranking on the TTAS scale: unsatisfactory. I went to visit the district supervisor for TTAS, and she informed me that she had never seen such a low rating. I recall the wry smile, kindly signaling her understanding of the desperate situation at Rusk: “Congratulations, Mr. Reich. According to this assessment, you are Houston’s worst teacher.”
A few months later, Rusk Elementary School became ground zero for a new citywide effort in education reform. The superintendent, Rod Paige, who would later serve as secretary of education under President George W. Bush, “reconstituted” the entire school. Every administrator and teacher was reassigned, and a new principal was brought in. It was a particularly severe form of top-down reform: evacuating the building of all adults and starting again with a fresh team. When I was interviewed by the new principal, I stressed my To Hell with Good Intentions | Boston Review:
