EVENTS

Date:	Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Time:	4:30 PM -- 6:00 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

WASHINGTON, APRIL 3, 2009--In his speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce last month, President Obama emphasized the need for great teachers in America's schools. On March 30, panelists convened at the American Enterprise Institute to discuss whether his strategy of recruiting an "army" of teachers is a feasible one. The conversation, moderated by AEI's Frederick M. Hess, raised tough questions about teaching quality, colleges of education, and the challenge of finding the talent to propel school improvement.

Drawing on his recent AEI working paper, Steven Wilson--founder and CEO of Ascend Learning, Inc., a charter school management company in New York City--noted that successful charter schools in Boston hire their faculty disproportionately from the ranks of America's most competitive colleges and suggested that the expansion of such schools is limited by their reliance on unique human capital. "Already, scarcity is impacting the expansion of the Boston model." Wilson observed. "These schools are beginning to cannibalize each other for staff." Hess asked panelists to consider whether it was possible to recruit enough talent into our schools and, if not, what else might be done.

North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey, opened with seventy-two students in 1997 and later expanded into the Uncommon Schools charter network. Founder Norman Atkins recalled that he immediately faced the question of scale, with local leaders asking him: "When will you be expanding to serve the other 400,000 students in the Newark system?" In order to export the success from Uncommon Schools' classrooms, Atkins founded Teacher U, which trains, certifies, and graduates teachers while they are working in New York City Public Schools. Teacher U instills its teachers with the mission of closing the achievement gap, hires instructors who exemplify the strategies they are teaching, videotapes teachers to draw insights from practice, requires teachers to show measurable outcomes in order to earn their master's degree, and creates a "whatever it takes" mentality.

Kaya Henderson offered a ground-level perspective on the need for great teachers in the most challenged urban districts. Henderson, deputy chancellor for community relations and human capital for the District of Columbia Public Schools, stated that there are fewer exceptional teachers than we might think. "We do not believe that we can build our system on rock star teachers," she said. "But we can create a high-performing school system on solid performers." Henderson emphasized the importance of the school environment, including supportive leadership, professional development, and an intolerance for "pervasive mediocrity."

The director of Harvard's Teacher Education Program, Kay Merseth, asserted that the problem with school improvement is not a human resource one. Merseth drew from her own recent study of successful charter schools and asserted, "The things that made these schools successful is not necessarily the quality of the teaching force." Instead, "systems and structures . . . trump mediocre instruction." Merseth emphasized that the number one reason that teachers leave is that they are not supported in the schools and that a more apt question for mission-driven organizations is not "where did you go to college," but "do you get what we're trying to do here?"

Steven Wilson agreed with Merseth on the importance of systems. He credited the success of a charter school in Springfield, Massachusetts, to a "coherent system of curriculum, assessment, pacing, tutoring--it's a complete system. Every piece of it works together and it produces reliable results. We need to invest in those kinds of systems." Both Merseth and Henderson tempered their support of prescriptive systems, calling for a balance that maintains a teachers' creativity.

Panelists also took up the issue of rethinking the teaching profession and teaching preparation programs. Referencing the time she spent working with the New Teacher Project, Henderson emphasized the importance of bringing in people from other professions. "We went after mid-career professionals . . . we tried to help districts think more critically about where teachers came from--not just from schools of education but people with deep content knowledge and experience out in the world actually had a lot to offer our students." Kay Merseth considered housing teaching preparation programs in districts, rather than universities, and said, "I think it is high time we broke up the cartel of higher education institutions thinking that they are the only ones who can award teaching credentials, because they're not." 

--JULIET SQUIRE

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