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> For instance, he said, simply increasing the salaries of all teachers in a high-need school district won’t have as much of an impact as identifying high-perf
by danans 9y ago
> For instance, he said, simply increasing the salaries of all teachers in a high-need school district won’t have as much of an impact as identifying high-performing teachers and increasing their salaries.
Teachers in high-needs schools are dealing much more frequently with students who have severe issues stemming from poverty, trauma, and lack of support in their families and communities. Those factors are equal to or greater than variation in teacher quality, which no doubt exists.
Arguments about the mechanism of teacher pay distribution distracts from the reality that many teachers in poor districts are functioning as social workers for the effects of poverty, neglect, and violence borne by the children before they arrive in the classroom.
Teaching in such environments will always be a lot harder than it is in stable middle class and higher income communities.
If poor schools are expected to bear the costs of the social dysfunction created by the larger society, then either the teachers should be paid for providing those services, or we should invest in other capacities, inside and outside the school, to mitigate the needs for these services in the classroom, freeing up teachers for actual teaching.
But until those things are addressed, it's just a convenient distraction to frame the fundamental issue as a problem of how to use teacher pay as a carrot.
- solatic 9y agoI think your viewpoint invites wider questions on how the problems in such environments ought to be solved and what such environments ought to look like. In a word, what's lacking from these communities is, in a couple of words, stability and security. Some children have parents who are either homeless or constantly on the verge of homelessness; some children have parents who have difficulty putting food on the table; some children come from households with absent or abusive parents. How, exactly, would hiring more social workers for schools solve this problem? Ought social workers be able to go into childrens' homes and intervene in some way? Put food on the table, pay the parents' past-due bills, catch abusers red-handed and put a stop to them? I'm not so sure this is the answer, because apart from the fact that doing so falls somewhere on the spectrum between absurd and enablement, in extreme cases, society already removes children from abusive homes to put them in foster care. And it doesn't seem to me like the numbers and research bear out about outcomes for fostered children being on par with children from more privileged backgrounds. Instead, funding needs to be directed towards stabilizing the parents' environment. That means more public works projects (for stable employment), more affordable apartments (for stable housing), longer school days with funding for post-schoolday extracurriculars and funding for free daycare for younger children (so that parents can stay at work while their children are looked after), exchanging prosecution for funded treatment for drug addicts. When the parents have a stable environment, then the child has a stable environment.
- danans 9y agoI tend to agree that addressing the problems at the roots is better than dealing with them when they manifest in the classroom. Most of the proposals you put forward, however, boil down to a transfer of resources to high-needs communities, which is (so far) politically untenable in many places.