Let me start by saying how glad I am that Andy Smarick is guest-blogging on Flypaper. I've known Andy for many years and think he's one of the smartest thinkers in education (see this great Education Next piece by him, for instance), and also among the world's nicest guys.
Now that I've said that, let me eviscerate his most recent post. Well, not eviscerate, but raise some concerns. Andy critiques a paper by Steve Wilson that we excerpted in Gadfly last fall. Andy writes,
Wilson found that the vast majority of teachers in the best urban charters are graduates of the nation's most elite colleges. ??He concludes that if we want to scale up these great charters we have two options: Either recruit a much higher percentage of graduates of these colleges into the charter world or make the job of teaching in a ???no excuses??? charter easier.Personally, I found this conclusion extraordinarily frustrating, bordering on elitist. I don't know Mr. Wilson personally, but he cares about low-income students and has a very good reputation and an impressive and laudable background, so I don't want to be too critical. But I have to point out that there is another option: ??Realize that there are very talented people who didn't graduate from the nation's elite universities!
That's a fair point. But as even Andy later admits in his post, it's not fair to call Wilson "elitist" when he is merely reporting on a phenomenon spotted in high-flying charter schools. In his Gadfly article, Wilson writes:
I found that more than half of these??[high performing Boston charter schools']??staff members had attended elite undergraduate institutions (Barron's "most competitive" rank, which includes the Ivies, top liberal arts colleges, and first-tier state schools like UCLA), and fully 82 percent had attended at least a "very competitive" college (Barron's second-highest rank). That compares with just 19 percent of public school teachers generally.
Wilson then runs the numbers on what it would mean to take these schools to scale:
Each year, about 142,000 students graduate from highly selective postsecondary institutions (Barron's top two ranks). Even if one in every ten of their graduates entered teaching for two years (the average tenure at many no-excuses schools) before moving onto other careers, they would provide for only six percent of the 438,914 teachers currently working in the 66 member districts of the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS). Simply put, we might have enough of these teachers to staff a few hundred more No Excuses schools, but not a few thousand more, and certainly not enough to reach every disadvantaged child in America.
So let's run another thought experiment. Let's say there are twice as many "talented" people in lower-tier colleges as there are within top-tier ones. Even if Wilson's optimistic scenario above came to pass, we'd still only have 18 percent of our teaching staff made up of high flyers. So Wilson's larger point (and one I've made before) still stands: we need to develop school models that work with mere mortals. Andy, back to you.
