The Rhino in the Room: Time to End Disruptive Reform
By John Thompson.
The Washington Post’s Emma Brown provides an excellent overview of the “the elephant in the room,” which is the real reason why the inequitable distribution of teaching talent helps undermine inner city schools. Brown borrows that phrase from David Sapp, director of education advocacy and legal counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which has filed lawsuits related to teacher churn and the resulting heavy use of substitutes. Sapp correctly says,
There are a narrow set of schools where this happens all the time, and until that gets really unpacked and resolved, there’s only so much that can be done to close the achievement gap.
Neither will we address the teacher quality gap until we tackle the rhinoceros in the room, corporate school reformers who have adopted their weird vision of “teacher quality” as a silver bullet for reversing the effects of generational poverty and discrimination. Ironically, just a few days later, the TNTP’s Dan Weisbergillustrated the reality-free nature of accountability-driven reform. He cited the opening of high-challenge schools with large numbers of substitutes as “low hanging fruit,” which could be easily solved by central offices speeding up their hiring process. Although Weisberg later contradicted himself when he acknowledged that there are rational reasons for top teachers fleeing inner city schools, he made it sound like it would be easy to recruit and retain teachers in the most challenging schools. In other words, rhinoceroses like Weisberg who still support test, sort, reward, and punishment, are still ignoring the complex truth Emma Brown chronicles.
After billions of extra dollars have been invested by Weisberg’s funders on their theory that individual teachers should be held accountable for reversing the legacies of poverty and oppression, Brown cites Matthew Kraft and John Papay, who find that urban school districts hire 1 in 6 of their teachers after the school year begins. She then went down a list of districts and their numbers of classrooms without teachers. It culminates with Detroit which needs 135 teachers, more than 5% of its teaching positions, and which only has 90 substitutes.
Brown then cites a former-central office administrator in North Carolina turned principal who tells the hard The Rhino in the Room: Time to End Disruptive Reform - Living in Dialogue:
