Why We Need Good Teachers [A] The relative decline of American education at the elementary-and high-school levels has long been a national embarrassment as well as a threat to the nation’s future. Once upon a time, American students tested better than any other students in the world. Now, ranked against European schoolchildren, America does about as well as Lithuania, behind at least 10 other nations. Within the United States, the achievement gap between white students and poor and minority students stubbornly persists—and as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores continue to fall. [B] For much of this time—roughly the last half century—professional educators believed that if they could only find the right teaching method, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language—but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements. [C] Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate (天生的)—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess. Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of boring or marginally relevant theorizing and teaching method. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not. [D] It is also true and unfortunate that often the weakest teachers are degraded to teaching the neediest students, poor minority kids in inner-city schools. For these children, teachers can be make or break. “The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover,“ says Kati Haycock of the Education Trust and coauthor of the 2006 study “Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality.“ [E] Nothing, then, is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones. But here is the rub. Although many teachers are caring and selfless, teaching in public schools has not always attracted the best and the brightest. There once was a time when teaching was one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. But with social progress, many talented women and minorities chose other and more highly compensated fields. One recent review of the evidence by McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students. [F] At the same time, the teachers’ unions have become more and more powerful. In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure (长期聘用). It is almost impossible to fire them. In New York City in 2008, three out of 30,000 tenured teachers were dismissed for cause. The statistics are just as eye-popping in other cities. The percentage of teachers dismissed for poor performance in Chicago between 2005 and 2008 was 0.1 percent. In Akron, Ohio, zero percent. In Toledo, 0.01 percent In Denver, zero percent in no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from responsibility. The responsibility does not just fall on the unions. Many principals don’t even try to weed out the poor performers. Year after year, about 99 percent of all teachers in the United States are rated “satisfactory“ by their school systems; firing a teacher invites a costly court battle with the local union. [G] Over time, inner-city schools, in particular, surrendered to a defeatist mindset The problem is not the teachers, went the thinking—it’s the parents (or absence of parents); it’s society with all its distractions and pathologies (病态); it’s the kids themselves. Not much can be done, really, except to keep the assembly line moving through “social promotion,“ regardless of academic performance, and hope the students graduate. Or so went the conventional wisdom in school superintendents’ offices from Newark to L.A. By 1992, “there was such a dramatic achievement gap in the United States, far larger than in other countries, between socioeconomic classes and races,“ says Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “It was a scandal of monumental proportions, that there were two distinct school systems in the U.S., one for the middle class and one for the poor.“ [H] In the past two decades, some schools have sprung up that defy and refute what former president George W. Bush memorably called “the soft bigotry (偏执成见) of low expectations.“ Generally operating outside of school bureaucracies as charter schools, programs like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) have produced inner-city schools with high graduation rates (85 percent). KIPP schools don’t cherry-pick-^they take anyone who will sign a contract to play by the rules, which require some parental involvement. And they are not one-shot wonders. There are now 82 KTPP schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia, and, routinely, they far outperform the local public schools. KIPP schools are mercifully free of red tape and bureaucratic rules. KIPP schools require longer school days and a longer school year, but their greatest advantage is better teaching. [I] It takes a certain kind of teacher to succeed at a KIPP school or at other successful charter programs, like YES Prep. KIPP teachers carry cell phones so students can call them at any time. The dedication required makes for high burnout rates. It may be that teaching in an inner-city school is a little like going into the Special Forces in the military, a calling for only the chosen few. [J] Yet those few are multiplying. About 20 years ago, a Princeton senior named Wendy Kopp wrote her senior thesis proposing an organization to draw graduates from elite schools into teaching poor kids. Her idea was to hire them for just a couple of years, and then let them move on to Wall Street or wherever. Today, Teach for America (TFA) sends about 4,100 graduates, many from Ivy League colleges, into inner-city schools every year. Some (about 8 percent) can’t cope with it, but most (about 61 percent) stay in teaching after their demanding two-year tours. Two thirds of TFA’s 17,000 graduates are still involved in education and have become the core of a reform movement that is having real impact. The founders of KIPP, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, are TFA products. So is the most aggressive reformer in education today, Michelle Rhee, the education chancellor of the District of Columbia, who is trying to loosen the hold of the teachers’ union on a school system that for years had the highest costs and worst results in the nation. [K] It is difficult to remove the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out Using nonunion charter schools, New Orleans has been able to measure teacher performance in ways that the teachers’ unions have long and bitterly resisted. Under a new Louisiana law, New Orleans can track which schools produce the best teachers, forcing long-needed changes in school curricula.