http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903918104576500531066414112.htmlSuper Teachers Alone Can't Save Our Schools
By STEVEN BRILL
Wall Street Journal
August 13, 2011
A superstar teacher or charismatic principal rides to the rescue! Downtrodden public school children, otherwise destined to fail, are saved! We've all seen that movie�more than once, starting with "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me" in the late 1980s and more recently with documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery," which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement. And we know the villains, too: teachers' union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.
One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren't enough to turn around an American public school system whose continued failure has become the country's most pressing long-term economic and national security threat.
...
Mr. Levin acknowledged that he was at least free to try because he was not straitjacketed by a union contract. He could hire and fire as he pleased, set work hours, move the staff around�everything that he needed to make KIPP work.
"That's totally true," he said. But "if you tore up every union contract in the country, that would just give you the freedom to try�. Then you would have to train and motivate not 70,000 or 80,000 teachers"�the number now teaching in charter schools�"but three million," the approximate number of teachers in American public elementary and secondary schools.
As Mr. Levin explained to me, "You can't do this by depending only on the kinds of exceptional people we have around here who pour themselves into this every hour of every day."
"I feel overwhelmed, underappreciated and underpaid," a teacher told me one morning at one of the Success Charter Network schools in Harlem. Like KIPP, these are schools whose students consistently top the charts in achievement scores, often testing at or above the level of students in affluent nearby suburbs.
"I work from 7:30 to 5:30 in the building and then go home and work some more," the teacher told me. "I get disrespectful pushback from parents all the time when I try to give their kids consequences. I get feedback from my [supervisors], who demand that I change five or six things by the next day. I think we are doing a great job, so I keep at it. But there is no way I can do this beyond another year or two."
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According to the article, there are
47.4 million students in public schools
3.3 million teachers in public schools
1 million students in charter schools
72,000 teachers in charter schools
School reform predicated on finding 3.3 million "super" teachers will not work.
