On Teacher Quality

Yglesias thinks I said something that I didn’t in my post from earlier on school reform:

Erik Loomis stands up for teachers by asserting that their professional skills are irrelevant to poor children:

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If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. But if this is seriously what you believe, then you ought to support a policy of layoffs and larger class sizes in low-poverty districts, across-the-board pay cuts for teachers, and re-purposing of the funds into a larger EITC or Child Tax Credit. I think that’s a terrible idea. I think that well-run schools are a worthy investment of public resources and that some teachers are capable of doing a great deal to help children overcome disadvantaged circumstances. What’s more, I think one of the main mechanisms through which income as such does impact student learning is that low-income families have difficulty buying into well-managed schools staffed by great teachers. But to increase the number of people able to attend well-managed schools staffed by great teachers, you need to actually increase the number of well-managed schools.

You don’t need to buy into any particular person’s view of what would do that, but for God’s sake don’t run around saying that in-school factors are irrelevant to student learning and then trumpet that as the One True Pro-Teacher philosophy.

Obviously we want good quality teachers. When did I say anything countering that? But teachers are incentivized to teach at the best quality schools for obvious reasons–easier classroom discipline, more involved parents, higher wages (depending on district and state), professional prestige, etc–that reflect the divide between poverty and wealth. What’s more, the ideas proposed by school reformers double down on these problems by tying test scores to teacher pay and employment. This gives quality teachers absolutely no reason at all to stay in low-income classrooms because if they can’t raise test scores, and they can’t very much because poverty and its concomitant issues of student preparation and parent involvement are far, far more important than the quality of the teacher in student outcomes, they get canned. So instead, you have several obvious answers by teachers–go to the better district, take a job that doesn’t tie your next meal to conservative talking points, or rigging the test scores.

It’s not that we don’t want good teachers. Many, many teachers are very good. Some are less good. That’s no difference than any other profession. But their ability to shape student education does not exist in a vacuum. If you want better school performance, you have to fight poverty. And if you really think that teacher performance is the central issue, the obvious solution is to raise their salaries to a high enough point that the profession attracts the most talented undergraduate students, which it absolutely does not today. And I don’t see a lot of these reformers making teacher pay their #1 issue.