“The idea that teachers should be effective in producing student learning outcomes, and that such teachers should be distributed to all students, not just those in districts or schools with more resources … is now dominating the education policy space.”

Paul Teske, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver

Executive Summary, Improving Teacher and School Leader Effectiveness (Aug. 2009)

We all want good teachers to find their way into classrooms and schools where students are not achieving at grade level.  We want strong teachers to work with such boys and girls and teenagers in the belief that solid teaching can lead to more than a year’s worth of progress, and that given several years of such teaching, many more students will be performing at the level expected in our reading, writing and math standards—and much more.

But how to get such teachers into these very classrooms is worth debating.

Here I think Race to the Top uses language—and behind it, a kind of top-down thinking—that we must oppose.

My argument is simply stated this way: Teachers aren’t pawns to be “distributed.”  Schools hire. They should choose who will work in their buildings. The state and districts and non-profits and lots of well meaning folks might try to recruit good teachers to come in to our community and our low-performing schools, but they shouldn’t DISTRIBUTE teachers. By doing so, we surrender to another kind of DIRECT PLACEMENT FROM ON HIGH.

Yes, it’s the word DISTRIBUTE that gets my goat.

In the Notices of the Federal Register of July 29, 2009, we read that the Race to the Top Fund “requires States to have made significant progress in the following four education reform areas in order to receive a grant: implementing standards and assessments, improving teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in teacher distribution, improving collection and use of data, and supporting struggling schools.” (All bold is mine.)

Further on, we read that among the “19 selection criteria that the Department proposes States may address when submitting their applications,” one is: (C) (3) Ensuring equitable distributions of effective teachers and Principals.”

What does this call for? “The extent to which the State has a high-quality plan and ambitious yet achievable annual targets to increase the number and percentage of highly effective teachers and principals in high-poverty schools, and to increase the number and percentage of effective teachers teaching hard-to-staff subjects including mathematics, science, special education, English language proficiency, and other hard-to-staff subjects identified by the State or LEA. Plans may include, but are not limited to, the implementation of incentives and strategies in areas such as recruitment, compensation, career development, and human resources practices and processes.”

(Note: Incentives and recruitment connote something very different than distribution. Can we please focus on the former, not the latter?)

Why is this notion of DISTRIBUTING highly effective teachers so offensive to me?

1. This teacher doesn’t want to be distributed, thank you very much. Please don’t treat me as something to move around and place in a setting where I may or may not be a good fit.
2. This teacher, whose principal in 2005 nominated him for The Governor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, in part because (or so she wrote) of his being ”extremely effective in raising student achievement,” has since applied to work in several Denver charters where there is high poverty, and none of the schools wanted to hire him. I might have wanted to be “distributed” there; some government agency might have wanted to place me there, if my record as a teacher seemed worthy enough; but the schools found better candidates and, probably wisely, concluded I was not the right fit for what they wanted in their faculty.  And isn’t this how it should be?  We must start with the school and its choice, not with a distant agency looking at the chessboard and saying: This pawn will go HERE.
3. I recently visited classrooms in a charter school in its first year and was overwhelmed by the high quality of the teachers.  I believe they found themselves at the Thomas MacLaren School in Colorado Springs for several reasons:

• the school’s mission was so appealing to them—it fit their beliefs about how kids learn best and about the kind of culture they wanted to nourish and be part of;
• the school head and its board understood the art of teaching well enough to be willing to hire based on the person, not the credentials, so that not having all the paperwork to be “highly qualified” did not matter;
• the teachers were energetic and motivated and passionate enough to take the job—to make an enormous and perhaps risky commitment—even though they had some idea of the huge demands of helping to start a school, to have four or five preparations, and to work in a setting where many policies are not yet fully articulated, where so much is yet to be created;
• they were wanted. They were seen as men and women who would click in this school, reading and discussing these books, with these kids, keen on this school’s mission.

Here is where the idea of our Innovation Schools—with waivers about the power to hire and fire at the school site, which borrows from the charter school model, which borrows in turn from the private school model—must be integral to our new approach to who teaches where.  The old model—the district will send you a teacher—must die.  How ironic—no, how tragic—it would be to enable more schools the authority and responsibility for choosing their staff—and then to decide, Oh by the way, we’ll distribute teachers your way too.

Instead, let the schools show potential teachers that this will be a place that matches their beliefs about teaching and learning, about the values they want nurtured.  Let an interview give both sides—the school and the teacher—an opportunity to see if this is a good fit. I’ve been hired by five schools and a couple of colleges and rejected by as many.  When rejected I try to content myself that they know better than I do whether I would have been the right person for the job.  It’s a marketplace, and it can be painful. But it is much better if choice—on the school’s part, and on the part of the teacher who believes this is where he or she can give their best—is central to the equation.

So please, don’t distribute us. Let us choose, and let us be chosen.

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