Issue Brief: How to fix our schools

Posted by on October 24, 2010

Blinkered focus

In a rebuttal of the “manifesto” by Chancellors Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and various other urban superintendents in The Washington Post, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute writes that contrary to the assertion that “the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income — it is the quality of their teacher,” decades of social science research have demonstrated that school quality can explain only one-third of the variation in student achievement. Focusing solely on teacher quality distracts from other equally and plausibly more important school elements like leadership, curriculum, and practices of collaboration. Blaming teachers is easy, Rothstein writes, while improving the other areas is more difficult. More importantly, focusing just on teacher quality “distracts us from the biggest threat to student achievement in the current age: our unprecedented economic catastrophe and its effect on parents and their children’s ability to gain from higher-quality schools.” Over half of all black children have a parent who has either been unemployed or underemployed during the past year, and 36 percent of black children now live in poverty. The consequences of unacceptably high unemployment rates for disadvantaged parents depress the achievement of their children. “It is fanciful for national policymakers to pick this moment to raise their expectations for academic achievement from children of families in such stress,” Rothstein writes, “and to single out teacher quality as the culprit most deserving of their public attention.”

Read more: http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ib286
Sample report regarding teacher effect: http://publiceducation.org/pdf/20101021_Distinguishing.pdf