Uber-reformer (and hedge fund manager) Whitney Tilson had this to say about my earlier post:
Kati Haycock, immediately after the quote you cite in the article, does a nice job of rebutting this nonsense:
No matter what measure of ?quality? you look at, poor and minority students?and not just those in inner-city schools?are much less likely to be assigned better-qualified and more-effective teachers. Core academic classes in high-poverty secondary schools are twice as likely as those in low-poverty schools to be taught by a teacher with neither a major nor certification in the subject. The percentage of first-year teachers at high-minority schools is almost twice as high as the percentage of such teachers at low-minority schools. The list of disgraceful statistics goes on and on.
Even if we dismiss traditional measures as imperfect gauges of true teaching quality, new studies employing more-sophisticated measures reveal the same inequitable patterns. When the Tennessee Department of Education analyzed the state's Value-Added Assessment System?which measures the impact of individual teachers on their students' tested academic growth?it found that ?low-income and minority children have the least access to the state's most effective teachers and more access to the state's least effective teachers.? Recently, researchers at the University of Virginia studying teaching practices and learning climate in more than 800 1st-grade classrooms were dismayed to find that lower-income and nonwhite students are much more likely than their counterparts to be placed in ?lower overall quality classrooms.?
We also have clear evidence of just how damaging those inequities are. An analysis of data from Los Angeles found that the impact of individual teachers is so great that providing top-quartile teachers rather than bottom-quartile teachers for four years in a row would be enough to completely close the achievement gap between white and African American students. In fact, attending to this problem is the most important step policymakers can take to address the nation's long-standing achievement gaps.
Fair enough, and the Tennessee and Virginia data are pretty persuasive. But the evidence indicates that you can find effective and non-effective teachers in both high and low poverty schools. There's a lot more difference in effectiveness from classroom to classroom than from school to school, in fact. Which raises questions about ?strip mining? (Rick Hess's term) the ?best? teachers from rich schools and sending them to poor schools.
-Mike Petrilli
