Rethinking “a highly qualified teacher”

So, I usually don't take this space to talk about my research, not seriously anyway. I mean I talk about working with kids, churning statistics, and watching tons of Sesame Street videos, (which someone commented made me sound like a dorky, seriously over-qualified babysitter), but I just never think of a blog as the place to talk about academic stuff. If you want to read about low-income children, pathways of poverty and social resilience, go read a journal article.

But I make an exception today. Seeing how my life for the past two weeks or so has been all but consumed by this conference paper that I finally submitted an hour ago, I feel invested enough in what I worked on to share a little of that with you.

In a nutshell, my analysis focuses on the notion of teacher quality and whether or not a highly qualified teacher produces the same outcome for all children. I mean, it seems like common sense right? The more qualified a teacher is, the better children will perform. Well, yes. Sort of. Not really...

This is what I found:
The two lines represent the test scores of children from two different types of schools- the blue line represents schools where there are few minority children, and the red line represent schools where more than 50% of the children are students of color (these schools also tend to be much poorer). What the graph shows is that although test scores increase for all children as teachers become more qualified (duh, you would hope so...), there continues to be a persistent gap between them. Worse still, it seems as if the gap between children from low minority schools and those from high minority schools actually widens as teacher qualification increases. What this suggests is that not only are teachers not helping to close the achievement gap between the two groups of kids, as teachers become increasingly qualified, they actually appear to be exacerbating this gap.

Counter-intuitive you say? Not really if you think about it carefully. So here's my spiel: demographically speaking, in the next 20 years or so, America's school population is going to become increasingly diversified. Profoundly. In less than 10 years, 40% of this country's children will be children of color. But at the same time, teachers entering the teaching force are increasingly middle-class, female, and White. In other words, unless something is done, we're going to have on our hands a social and cultural chasm between students and teachers.

I argue that some schools of education are slow or unwilling to respond to this change. They are preparing teachers for a homogenous cultural and social world that does not exist and the result is that too many teachers lack the skills to work with diverse students and in complex social contexts. They get maybe that one token class on multicultural education where they receive pad and stereotypical conceptions of difference and diversity, easy answers to tough questions, and all in all, don't address the hard stuff. So, if higher teacher qualifications just means having taken more education courses which inadequately or wrongfully train teachers to work in conditions of high poverty and social disorder, it is any wonder why children in high minority schools benefit less than children from low minority schools when they get highly qualified teachers? The largely white, middle-class, female teacher population is simply ill-equipped to go into schools where so many of the children do not share their same social and cultural background.

I taught a class in multicultural education last year to a class of all White, middle-class preservice teachers. I want to think I did a decent job in getting them to think hard about what it means to teach in schools where the kids aren't growing up in the same way that they did. I made them uncomfortable and sometimes unhappy when I mentioned issues of privilege, access and equity. But I hope it was worth it. They need to know these things. They need to know that teachers must be able to teach ALL children effectively. As a teacher, you can't just go, "Oops, I'm sorry Jane, I just can't teach you as well as I can teach Mary over here. Have a good life." If we are truly as committed to education as we say we are, then we cannot tolerate a two-tiered education system that serves some students better than others.

We cannot afford to, because our children cannot afford to.