Al Sharpton and Matthew Perry star in...my blog post.

Thanks to Cathy for linking our blog to the Al Sharpton and Joel Klein article about teaching reform.  One thing that we discussed in the Tuesday night class was President Obama's endorsement of merit-based pay for teachers.  I thought the Sharpton/Klein article made several points relevant to the idea of merit pay that we failed to mention on Tuesday.  For example, the issue of higher pay for teachers at under-performing (typically inner-city) schools is part of President Obama's education reform and is mentioned in the article.  Sharpton and Klein write in favor of such a measure and I agree with them.  It's no secret that inner city schools perform below their suburban counterparts.  These are the schools that desperately need reform across the board, especially when it comes to hiring and retaining dedicated teachers.  If higher pay will help the problem of teacher retention at inner-city schools, then I'm all for it.  But it seems that we can't focus on higher pay until teacher efficacy is improved.

In the article, Linda Darling Hammond (Stanford prof.) is quoted, saying:

"analysts consistently find that the most inequitably distributed resource--and the one most predictive of student achievement--is the quality of teachers.  Many schools serving the most vulnerable students have been staffed by a steady parade of untrained, inexperienced, and temporary teachers."

Sadly, the teachers in this description, don't seem to fit the model of an education professional that we described in class.  There needs to be a new generation of passionate individuals to work at urban schools.  Teach for America and other programs are working on solutions to this problem.  But as you know, most TFA teachers commit only 2 years. We need individuals to dedicate more time.  If, as Dr. Linda-Hammond implies, quality teachers really are indicative of quality student performance, then maybe we can shore up some of the high-school dropout statistics that we are facing.  Maybe even a few of us born and bred southerners could give city-life a try.  Matthew Perry did and it seemed to work for him.  But after a quick Google search I see that Mr. Perry hails from Massachusetts.  Oh well.