A Great Teacher?

FOR YEARS, THE SECRETS TO GREAT TEACHING HAVE SEEMED MORE LIKE ALCHEMY THAN SCIENCE, A MIX OF MOTIVATIONAL MUMBO JUMBO AND MISTY-EYED TALES OF INSPIRATION AND DEDICATION. BUT FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, ONE ORGANIZATION HAS BEEN TRACKING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF KIDS, AND LOOKING AT WHY SOME TEACHERS CAN MOVE THEM THREE GRADE LEVELS AHEAD IN A YEAR AND OTHERS CAN’T. NOW, AS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION OFFERS STATES MORE THAN $4 BILLION TO IDENTIFY AND CULTIVATE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS, TEACH FOR AMERICA IS READY TO RELEASE ITS DATA.

By Amanda Ripley

Image: Veronika Lukasova

ON AUGUST 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math.

One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor’s math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a ZIP code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools—not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it’s worth noting, not a very hard one).

After a year in Mr. Taylor’s class, the first little boy’s scores went up—way up. He had started below grade level and finished above. On average, his classmates’ scores rose about 13 points—which is almost 10 points more than fifth-graders with similar incoming test scores achieved in other low-income D.C. schools that year. On that first day of school, only 40 percent of Mr. Taylor’s students were doing math at grade level. By the end of the year, 90 percent were at or above grade level. As for the other boy? Well, he ended the year the same way he’d started it—below grade level. In fact, only a quarter of the fifth-graders at Plummer finished the year at grade level in math—despite having started off at about the same level as Mr. Taylor’s class down the road.

This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter. Put concretely, if Mr. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. And if these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would likely diverge forever. By high school, the compounded effects of the strong teacher—or the weak one—would become too great.

You can find the entire article on-line at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/