“From the moment students enter a school the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents—it’s the person standing at the front of the classroom. America’s future depends on its teachers” Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) declared. Hess is a Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies at AEI. He pointed out that “[t]here [are] 3.3 million teachers in K-12 district schools… [W]e’ve got about 10% or 12% of all Americans with a four-year college degree…in the workforce…teaching at our schools right now. He argued that quantity, in this case, does not equal quality: “we need more great teachers,” but asked, “[H]ow do we go about doing that?” He turned to panelists for suggestions.
Steven F. Wilson of Ascend Learning Inc. was one such panelist. Wilson spoke of his article, Success at Scale in Charter Schooling. The article outlined a study of successful charter schools and the programs they employ. The main focus is on a model called “no excuses” that uphold very high expectations of its students.
Wilson’s article asks, “Is the ‘no excuses’ approach sustainable, and can it be widely reproduced?” To find an answer to this question, he looked to a city with seventeen charter schools—Boston. He found that “[of the] seventeen charters in the city, seven are posting striking results on the state’s highly regarded MCAS test, with 75 percent or more of students in their final year at the schools proficient in math and English language arts (averaged across the two subjects). All seven dramatically outperformed the Boston Public Schools in English and math, where proficiency levels range from 33 percent to 50 percent, depending on the grade and subject.”
What is behind this high performance? “All but one of the seven high-performing schools hew to something like the ‘no excuses’ model,” Wilson explained. The tenets of this model include: “driven and highly educated teachers [who] lead their students in a rigorous academic program, [tight] align[ment] with state standards, [and an aim] to set every child on the path to college.” Wilson said, “The approach has been dubbed ‘no excuses’ schooling because teachers adopt high expectations for their pupils and stoutly reject explanations for low achievement from any quarter, whether from a child for failing to complete an assignment or from a district apologist’s appeal to demographic destiny.” The only school in his study that didn’t fall under the “no excuses” model followed a very similar plan, only adding small class size to the model.
Wilson found that “[t]here is no evidence that the schools enroll a population demographically different from that of the Boston Public Schools (although they may benefit from more motivated families).” So, he asked, “Do the ‘no excuses’ schools depend on rare human capital? If so, what does that mean for bringing the model to scale?” To find an answer, he “examined the educational background of the faculty of the subject schools.”
“Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges 2007 categorizes higher education institutions by their enrollment selectivity, with seven categories: most competitive, highly competitive, very competitive, competitive, less competitive, noncompetitive, and special.” Wilson used this scale to decide whether or not a teacher came from a competitive school. He also said, “Boston’s ‘no excuses’ schools draw their teachers from a labor pool with not only fundamentally different academic preparation for the classroom but also attitudes, expectations, and work habits different from…those of the traditional teacher labor pool.”
However, Wilson pointed out, there are not enough teachers to go around. “The number of candidates possessing the educational credentials and commitment required by ‘no excuses’ schools is obviously few… In 2006, approximately 1.5 million students graduated from four-year colleges. Of these, 9.5 percent, or about 142,000, attended a ‘highly competitive’ to ‘most competitive’ institution.”
Wilson lists two possible solutions to this problem. The first “is to expand dramatically the pool of teachers who come from top-tier colleges and universities. Imagine that one in ten graduates of top colleges entered teaching on a short-term basis and served for two years, akin to he Peace Corps, before entering the more lucrative professions for which they are typically destined.” He also said, “Recasting teacher preparation could also increase the number of candidates with the qualities that charter management organizations look for in their teachers.” He mentioned a study David M. Steiner, dean of Hunter College, conducted “of sixteen education schools.” Steiner “described the coursework required for teacher candidates as largely ‘intellectually barren’ and of little use in the classroom.”
“A second approach would be to accept that the labor pool on which ‘no excuses’ schools rely is too small to meet the needs of all the nation’s urban schools,” Wilson said. “The availability of teacher candidates who have attended the most selective colleges and universities and who are prepared to work extraordinarily long hours to ensure their students’ success is sharply limited… Anecdotal evidence indicated that ‘burnout’ and resulting staff turnover in many ‘no excuses’ schools are high.”
Wilson suggested turning to teachers that are already in the workforce. He pointed out that there are many educators who, regardless of the college they attended, can be great teachers. He asked, “Could they be equipped with a powerful set of tools that would permit them to produce gap-closing results and to enjoy a sustainable work schedule and pay scale that would permit them to remain teaching and raise a family?”
He continued, “’No excuses’ schools must rely on nearly heroic efforts by teachers… Each child presents his or her teacher with accumulated knowledge gaps that impede the acquisition of further knowledge and fuel a growing disaffection with schooling. Identifying and then filling these gaps across a class of twenty-five or more students, rebuilding their motivation to learn, and freeing them of destructive habits while also ensuring the mastery of new, grade-level material (which relies on mastery of prerequisite material) is indeed an extraordinary undertaking.” He said that “[e]xacerbating these defects are placement decisions that enroll children in classes by age rather than prerequisite knowledge, not teaching content to mastery, poor pacing of instruction, subjective grading, poorly structured lessons, and lax behavioral expectations.”
Wilson concluded, “Closing the achievement gap need not await wholesale transformation, the ‘no excuses’ schools suggest. But unless we act to overcome imminent limits in human capital, it may prove difficult to sustain and bring to scale the ‘no excuses’ model.”
Heather Latham is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
