ELEVATING THE PROFESSION

EFFECTIVE TEACHERS ARE ESSENTIAL TO STUDENT LEARNING

Being an educator is arguably the most important job in America: Teachers are the single most important factor in determining whether and how well students learn. Studies show that a teacher’s influence on student achievement is 20 times greater than any other variable, including class size or poverty.5

While good teachers help all students, at-risk students stand to gain the most: Four consecutive years with a top-performing teacher can erase the black-white testing gap.6

In high-poverty, high-minority high schools whose teachers have above-average qualifications, students were almost nine times as likely to have college-ready academic skills as their counterparts in other high-poverty, high-minority schools with lower teacher quality.7

In spite of the powerful impact that good teaching can have on our most vulnerable students, and despite solid evidence that we have been shortchanging at-risk students, we have not recruited enough effective teachers to high-need schools and areas. The facts are striking:

• 84 percent of Illinois schools with the most low-income students had teachers from the bottom quartile in teacher quality.8
• Of those classes taught by less effective teachers, 89 percent were located in urban schools with high concentrations of poor and minority students.9

It’s also true that being an educator is one of the toughest jobs in America. The system is practically designed to inhibit teachers from doing their best work:

The training that teachers receive before they go in the classroom does not match the needs teachers report having once they enter the classroom.10 Most new teachers are left to sink or swim on their own, behind a closed classroom door and without help from more experienced teachers.11

• Students move from grade to grade, classroom to classroom, with little regard for how such or how well they learned the content last year, and most teachers aren’t given data on what their students do or don’t know.12
• In most traditionally-organized schools, there isn’t enough time in the school day to collaborate with other teachers to share data, align curriculum or strengthen instruction. Too many schools don’t have the leadership or culture that would enable such professional learning communities.
• School principals too often don’t have the skills, expertise, time or control over budgets and staffing to support teachers, align resources to school needs or build a great team.
• Personnel policies —those governed by state statutes, collective bargaining, district human resources offices and sometimes the “we’ve always done it this way” approach—do not differentiate at all among excellent teachers, average teachers, teachers who could improve their practice with help and those teachers who should seek employment in other professions.13
• Hiring and transfers in and out of schools are not governed by what really matters—whether teachers are a good fit and can help improve the school. For example, when budget cuts force teacher dismissals, the rule of thumb is “last hired, first fired.” How well a teacher contributes to the school’s quality or to student learning does not matter.

As a result of all of this dysfunction, teachers have little incentive—or support—to be great or to help their colleagues be great.

In short, we ask teachers to beat the odds on a daily basis, without providing them with enough support and without addressing the fundamental working conditions, practices and policies that could elevate teaching into a truly great profession.

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