As I discussed yesterday, when it comes to measuring teacher effectiveness (it’s all the rage in national education policy these days), I, as an educator, want multiple measures to be used.

Yesterday I conceded the use of student test scores via bubble tests to measure my effectiveness because I know that this is a deal breaker for the policy makers in D.C. On this point they are intractable and if politics is the art of compromise, then fine — I’d rather accept multiple measures that include test scores than have no seat at the decision making table and have a host of ridiculous other stuff rammed down my throat.

And ram they will.

So what measures do I want? Yesterday, I said I wanted peer evaluations to count. Today I am going to ask for administrative evaluations.

Yep, I want them. But, the quid pro quo is that I want my administrators to be evaluated by the teaching staff as well. And I want the federal government to use whatever stick they will use to punish me for not meeting their targets to be the same stick they use to admonish admins who do not meet their targets.

Let’s level the playing field. Teacher effectiveness is related to administrative effectiveness so while we are re-inventing the “assess our school professionals wheel” let’s do it properly, huh?

We need to implement an administrative effectiveness tool side-by-side with this new teacher effectiveness tool.

It’s not biting off more than we can chew. It’s called doing it properly one time instead of perpetually re-doing it over and over and over again.

Truly, I repeat, it makes no sense not to do all of this at the same time. (Or else, let me guess, eight years from now some genius is going to look up and say, “Ya know, teacher effectiveness is related to administrative effectiveness. Maybe we should measure them, as well?”)

Suddenly, that cantankerous VP who makes every teacher’s life hell but sucks up to the Assistant Superintendent like a lap dog will not have a place to hide. Conversely, the principal that really goes to bat for their staff yet takes it on the chin from the Assistant Superintendent will have a means of not being forced into the role of subservient lap dog.

Let the admins measure my effectiveness. But theirs must be assessed as well.

And then we get to the juicy stuff… the district level measurements of effectiveness.

Why should they not also have to answer to the assessment and accountability God? I am not joking, either. A great Supe gets a lotta love from the peeps in the district. I know, I have seen it many, many times. And a bad Supe operates almost with impunity nowadays.

Tyrants in a fiefdom, unchecked and protected only by mammoth buy-out clauses.

Look, there are basically three levels to classroom education that are being funded by the state and nation: the classroom level, the administrative level and the district level. (The state level already has to answer in part to the Federal level and the state’s voters — plus, that realm of accountability is only growing these days so I don’t want to tread into that muck too much).

Admins, please feel free to measure my effectiveness. But know that your own effectiveness will be measured by me as well and whatever consequences can be meted out for my underperformance will apply to you as well should your measurements not measure up.

Justice is blind, no one is above the law, and take that, Mo Fo!

Fair is fair.

The VP who comes at 5:30 a.m., leaves at 7:45 p.m. and does the work of three distict level employees… give ‘em some love.

The bonehead principal who only has two more years to retirement and is playing out the string trying just not to cause any waves nor expend too much effort.

Meet your maker!

This game is gettin’ fun now, huh? Suddenly, everyone is accountable and teachers can’t be the only ones demonized with data.

Multiples measures for measuring teacher effectiveness will continue tomorrow… post is growing too long.

As I mentioned the other day, I am a big believer in goals. So much so that I always write them down.

Yet often, when I think of goals, I think in terms of career and professional aspirations. In a way it seems as if this is the way I am wired. (As is the rest of America. We are all about “productivity”. Buncha A-type personalities in the new land, that’s for sure.)

So today I am going to begin with “personal” goals, the non-professional elements that make for a life and not simply a career.

“Be a GREAT father, husband, friend, teacher and business associate.” That’s HUGE to me. And being a writer, I choose my words carefully. It’s not an accident that I use the word “great”. Why? Cause I want to be better than merely good. Now of course, I don’t always rise to the occasion (not hardly!) but I do find that having set my intention to aspire to this level helps me a great deal over the course of a year — especially as opposed to the way I used to live, simply meandering from experience to experience, never having a core set of inner principles to guide me. (BTW, can you hear the Covey influence on my life? That stuff works I tell ya!)

Also on my personal goal list is, “Take care of my physical health.” It’s why I am working to make a greater commitment to yoga. Truth be told, yoga has changed my life (and I am so the “level 1″ student that I am not sure if I’ll ever see level 2 — and yet still, yoga treats my body, mind and spirit exceptionally well. I am just a better human being when I do it with regularity.)

Then there’s “take care of my intellectual well-being.” For me this means I must make sure I carve out time to read and write.

Uhm, hello — don’t forget my emotional sanity. I need to make sure I laugh and participate in things that I find to be joyful while recognizing the potholes — the people and things — that make me feel tense, angry, frustrated, hopeless and so on… so that I can swerve away from them at every possible juncture. Look, I ain’t no effin saint and there’s a part of me that is more than willing to lay down with dogs so that I can mix it up and good — but I always wake up with fleas when I do so.

Goal setting helps me to remember this before I ever even encounter these people. (And you know who you are!)

And finally there’s the spiritual side of matters. The key this year for me — I mean it’s a really big goal — is to be more grateful. Gratitude often feels like the antidote for much of the stuff that gets to me and it makes me feel much more deeply connected to God.

That’s right, I said it. I believe (deeply) in God and gratitude really make me feel like I have a connection to this universal spirit more so than so many other things that purport to provide that for me.

No, it’s not the biggest list in the world. (Plus, I do have some specifics to which I will not speak in such a public forum.) Yet I feel that if I aspire to these goals and earn the grade of an A for effort in seeking to reach them this year, the actual results will all take care of themselves.

Focus on the process, know your larger personal aims and put in the hard work — these are my personal goals for 2010… and I think that it’s pretty clear to see that when I attain them (it’s always good to speak in the affirmative when goal setting; nothing wrong with assuming the accomplishment of any of these aims) the tackling of my “professional” goals will not only be much easier but more rewarding as well… because they will not come at the expense of what ought to be the most meaningful to me in my actual life.

Goals: The Personal Before the Professional

America’s definition of wealth is warped. And the definition of wealth we teach our kids is skewed as well. (After all, I should know. I think the way I have been taught to think about ideas such as “worth”, “value”, “assets” and so on are exceptionally demented being that the monetary association is always my first and foremost barometer for these definitions — when I know in my heart that family, health, service to others and so on are much more meaningful to me once I slow down and count up all my chickens.)

Let’s be honest, in the United States, people use money like a scorecard. We publish the salaries of movie stars, big-name athletes and CEO’s. The higher one ranks, the “better” a person is. And come on, isn’t salary — or lack thereof — one of the prime reasons so many people treat educators in a condescending manner? I tell ya this, a lot fewer people would hit me up with the ol’ ,”Oh you’re a teacher? I really admire the work you do. It must be so challenging yet rewarding,” pity-talk I often get at holiday parties if I was banking an 8 figure salary.

Instead, they’d be schmoozing me up for hot tips like, “Yo, let’s say I was at Bloom Taxonomy level 3 preparing for a unit quiz. Got any sweet “ins” on how I could get all the way to level six without sacrificing classroom management in the process of trying to hyper-engage all the different learning styles in my classroom?”

That’ll be the day, right?

Additionally, to the uber-rich, it often feels like — at least to an outsider looking in — that no matter how much money they have, it’s never enough.

What are they still seeking, I’ve often asked myself. I mean, how big of a steak can one person eat?

Interestingly, I came across this comment from Eli Broad, a man on the Forbes List of billionaires, about what the latest financial turmoil means to the people of our country. Broad says…

It’s not any longer simply about how much money you have, what your assets are worth. The happiest people I’ve found are in science. These people have three times the IQ — maybe I’m exaggerating. They have a higher IQ than I do. They love what they’re doing, they have a good family life, they’re satisfied. People are going to take a look at how we define wealth, and not just in financial terms. They’ll ask, what am I accomplishing? What am I going to leave behind? What am I doing with my kids? How am I going to help my community? I’ve not led a balanced life. If I had it to do over again, maybe I might lead a more balanced life.

Haven’t we all been indoctrinated to believe that by reading the Forbes List of billionaires we are also reading a list of those who are the most happy and satisfied in life? Haven’t we all been served a glass of kool-aid that gets us to believe that the more we possess, the more we are fulfilled?

Are we now at the dawn of re-evaluating wealth? Does 2010 ring in a year when fulfillment is part of the equation in determining one’s “assets”?

Will the ghost of my “level of income equates to my level of value in this world” ever stop haunting me?

Cause that’s the tainted Kool-Aid I done drunk.

Our latest problem is that kids are coming to school with Gatorade bottles… filled with vodka drinks. Does every next generation of teen have to take the level of prior “defiance” of school rules and cultures to a new level? I mean once upon a time it was unheard of to chew gum in class. Now kids are swigging berry martinis in the middle of math class making a mockery of, oh… just about everything.

Of course pot has been an issue forever. The other day I joked to a colleague that I taught on Weed Hall. Then again, as TIME Magazine points out, smoking wacky tabacky is up. (Though cigarettes are down.)

We don’t even have the budget to do small things like hire a school nurse, staff a school librarian, and so on… and now we need people to screen through all their Jonas Brothers lunch boxes? (That’s a joke — Megadeath, Slipknot, The Game and so much more how my students roll — boy bands get very little play around here.)

Really, think about the kid that comes onto campus with a Tequila cocktail. Do you think they also have their homework? Do they also have an eye towards being well-prepared for the SAT?

Are they not an inevitable anchor on our school test scores so that when NCLB slams us for being an “underperforming high school”? When folks blame our campus teachers for being a bunch of lame-O’s are we allowed to say, “Well, I tried to teach to the difference between literal vs. figurative language but my student was too sloshed from the rum and coke they sucked down at lunch?”

If we caught any of the teachers drinking on campus, they’d be fired in a heartbeat, their professional reputation tainted terribly forever. But the kids? They just get a few days of slap-on-the-wrist suspension where they — I assume — just go home and drink.

I mean it ain’t like we expect them to be doing homework, right?

Students: we want them to take a deep drink FROM THE WELL OF KNOWLEDGE. Some are drinking, but they are missing the point.

In the fourth part of this series, I am going to chat about Why the “best” teachers are needed to teach our “middle level” students.

NOTE: Part I was, “Which students deserve our school’s best teachers?” Part II was, “Why our “best” students deserve our “best” teachers” and Part III was, “Why our “most challenged” students deserve our “best” teachers.” Coming soon Part V: A review of the discussion and a exploration of what I think I’d be forced to do if I were a principal trying to figure out which teachers to assigned to which classes.)

And so…

Why the “best” teachers are needed to teach our “middle level/average” students.

Who are the kids most short-changed on campus?

I’ll take it at face value that no one really thinks the AP/Honors/GATE crowd is the most short-changed. Are they short-changed? Well, in today’s schools, most every group can make a meritorious claim that they are being slighted somehow, but the “best” kids being the “most” short-changed? Nah. That dog just don’t hunt.

Is it the lowest performers on campus? Uhm, I don’t think so either. I mean, face it, they get special monies spent almost exclusively on them, special programs designed to meet their special needs, special attention from the district office all the way on down to the purchasing of special materials to try and meet their academic and socio-emotional needs. Really, what other student crowd on campus has people actually considering the whole child aspect of education today outside of our lowest performing kids? (Seriously, take a moment to think about it. With “low” kids, the whole child aspect of education is self-evident yet with all other kids, that’s just fluff stuff. So stoopid!) Sure, the lowest performers may certainly have disadvantages but as the most obvious squeaky wheel on campus, they also don’t get thrown into the broom closet — they get some grease.

But the middle level kids, the average kids, those are the ones who you’ll find in the broom closet.

Kids with a 2.0 – 2.9 grade point average are the invisible masses on campus. They don’t stand out because of their exceptional academic performance on the positive side of things and they don’t stand out because of their horrific academic performance on the negative side of things, either.

They are bland. They are mediocre. They are average.

And they are the majority! (Unless you live in Garrison Keillor’s world where all the children are above average… so clever!)

Face it, we are spending so much darn time trying to coddle the outer ends of the student spectrum, we absolutely leave the largest swath of kids — the ones in the middle — to… well, to remain in the middle. And the thing is, the kids in the middle are the kids with a high likelihood of reaping the greatest benefits from having the “best” teachers.

Why? Because the “best” teachers get kids to reach deep. To try hard. To plumb and explore and probe and rise to the challenge. You ever see a kid try to rise to a challenge, really take ownership over a school project with all their heart, soul and intellectual determination and… earn a C? Almost never. That’s because the Middle Level students are the ones who most often only need the right button pusher to convert them from being average and mediocre to be above average if not flat out hot-diggity-dog.

But do we push the middle? Do we challenge the middle? Do we set our schoolwide attention to the fact that if we focused our best efforts on our greatest population of kids — the ones in the middle — then we would, it stands to reason, make the most gains simply because we’d be so positively affecting the greatest numbers of students on campus.

Of course not, that would be almost too logical.

We’ve got the top 20% over here. We’ve got the bottom 20% over here. That means we’ve got 60% right smack-dab HERE and yet, where’s the love? We give it to the outer extremes.

And to just flat-out take the gloves off for a minute, could it not be claimed that spending the efforts of the “best” teachers on a school’s “lowest” performers is a bit of a waste of resources since these kids often do not value education as much as they should, do not meet the teacher half-way nearly enough of the time and often end up squandering the golden opportunities being presented to them. (Like I said, the gloves are off and I am tossing political correctness out the window right now to give voice to an argument I know is out there.)

Could it also not be said that to have the “best” teachers teach the “best” students is merely an unfair replication of the ugly part of capitalism whereby the rich just get richer? (And oooh, don’t the rich feel entitled to be and stay rich, even if it comes at the expense of others who appear to be kinda deserving of at least some of their resources?)

How about the kids in the middle, huh? Just maybe they’d rise up if only they were being educated by the “best” a campus has to offer — as opposed to the most mediocre a campus has to offer.

Imagine if we resented the notion of a student being average. We just loathed it. Like we found it far more repugnant than we find a kid with all F’s.

Imagine if we carved a moat in the middle of the school and said, you will either earn a 3.0 average or you will fail. No C’s, no D’s. Either A’s, B’s or F’s.

I’d venture to say that well over 90% of our C students would find a way to step up. And why? Because they are able to. Low expectations are the pandemic plague on the middle level kids but if you force them to be really solid or be nothing at all, they will roll up their collective shirt sleeves and apply some good ol’ fashioned elbow grease so that they can make the grade.

Our best teachers know how to get kids to reach for that aim. Our average teachers do not. Average teachers settle. This is why, if you put our “best” teachers in the rooms of our middle level kids, you will see a sea change in performance. It might just be the greatest difference between these two groups of teachers. Some teachers settle and other refuse to.

BTW, all this “serve the middle” stuff this is not just my own little theory. Maybe you have heard of a small little program called AVID?

Give the middle the “best” teachers on campus. So what if they are the most quiet. Only in education will what is most obvious and most sensible be so clearly overlooked.

In the third part of this series, I am going to chat about Why the “best” teachers are needed to teach our “most challenged” students.

NOTE: This was the question raised in Part I: which students deserve our school’s best teachers?
(I have already made the case in Part II as to why our “best” students deserve our “best” teachers and coming soon, an argument for Part IV: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students… as well as Part V: A review of the discussion and a exploration of what I think I’d be forced to do if I were a principal trying to figure out which teachers to assigned to which classes.)

Why the “best” teachers need to teach the “most challenged” students.

Let’s be honest, our “most challenged” students are all-too-often getting the short end of the stick. They are almost always being taught by either our most inexperienced teachers or our tenured “Lemon” teachers in schools today and this creates an almost, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg” syndrome when it comes to identifying the cause of their perpetual, continued low academic performance.

So which did come first, the student with low skills even after more than 5 years in the same school system or the student continuing to have low skills even after more than 5 years in the same school system because they have been under the direction of the Lemon level or newbie educators for most of their career? (NOTE: Newbies, please do not take offense — I only intend to disparage the Lemon teachers. We were all new once and trust me, I wish I could go back and apologize for all that I did not know, wasn’t able to accomplish and so on, to my first two year’s worth of kids — but often what newbies lack in experience they make up for in gusto and effort so while there are certain things about riding a bike you just can’t learn until you have been on the bike for a little bit, there is no fault to be found in people who are just learning to ride their bike — especially when they are often busting their butts to do so. Therefore, when you read the chart below consider that newbies deserve an * which means they get to remain uncategorized until year 4 in the classroom — my own arbitrary number based on my own idea that it takes at least 3 years to get a real grip on this job.)

For point of reference to clarify this all (in case you are just joining), I have divided school educators into 3 categories:

• Best teachers
• Average teachers.
• L’s (the L can stand for “Low” or “Lemons” – fill in your own mental blank).

*Newbies And I have divided students into 3 broad categories:

• AP/Honors/Best
• Middle Level/Average
• Challenged/Low

Obviously, political correctness got tossed out the window so that I could open a “real” discussion. Additionally, I am speaking in generalizations — it’s the only way I can proceed without hyper-qualifying this commentary to death.)

Okay, back to the main point…

Come on, folks, don’t you think we could greatly increase the achievement in our lowest performing students if we set our nation’s “best” teachers to the task in a front and center type of way? The answer seems self-evident.

And really, don’t the kids who are currently behind the academic eight ball deserve a chance to have their classrooms provide for them the best shot it can in order to get these kids on the right track so that the rest of their life doesn’t suffer from the tainted glow of being poorly educated in this society?

As for the top students (who most frequently get a school’s best teachers), could it also not be argued that they are already “gettin’ theirs” in a host of other places anyway?

Yet can the same really be said of the “lowest kids” on our campus? They usually have the least amount of support at home, the most obstacles in front of them at school and the greatest need for top flight professionals to come in and work some magic with them.

But what really happens most frequently across our nation is that the “lowest” kids come to school and get… the “lowest on the totem pole” teachers.

It’s like the game is rigged. The lowest performing students are being overwhelmingly matched with the L teachers… and administrators all over are closing their eyes and hoping that some kind of miracle is going to sweep over the “bottom tier” landscape while their best teachers are off running well-oiled classrooms that prime the top students for an AP curriculum.

Look, we’ve all seen what miracles can be done by great teachers. We’ve all seen the mountains that can be moved. Maybe some of us have even been the beneficiaries of being on the receiving end of a terrific educator’s efforts and gone from, “Ya know, I never got math until poof! Mr. Jaime Escalante was my teacher.”

“Or English until Ms. G. showed some belief in me.”

(BTW, Hollywood certainly seems to believe that our “low” kids can blossom into amazing young adults if only a “best” educator in the school gets to be in the front of their classroom.)

Now let’s take a sec to examine the idea of having a new, first year educator teach the “challenged/low level kids”. It’s their first year on campus, first year as an educator, they are bright-eyed, bushy tailed and then thrown into the most challenging circumstances in any of the classrooms on campus (even though they still do not know where all the bathrooms are located on campus). They get kids with academic skills years below grade level, students with both diagnosed and undiagnosed learning disorders, unstable emotional lives, far-from-ideal home lives, a personal history of shame and belittlement in the realm of academics, and classroom behavior that ranges from the merely disruptive to virtually felonious.

Oh, and let’s not forget the English Language learners or special needs kid that get mainstreamed into their class as well.

Sound like this is a success story waiting to happen for a first year teacher? Of course not. However, we see it all the time. “They” get “those” kids.

And we wonder why our new teacher attrition rates are so high. Ha! It’s because we are utilizing a trial by fire approach with the furnace set to “Roar!” to welcome them into this profession.

Look, “challenged” students make for tough classes. No one will argue this. And what it takes is a skilled educator to reach these kids. It takes a pro, a person with a tool chest full of ideas, experience, know-how and self-confidence. It takes a teacher that knows how to be patient, demanding, light-hearted and a task-master all at the same time.

Plus, it takes intestinal fortitude to want to even tackle this type of challenge in the first place for an entire school year. (It’s a long haul; even if you are a top-flight pro teacher, that doesn’t mean working in these classrooms becomes any easier. You’re just better at it.) Furthermore, it takes an amazing amount of resiliency to know that often when you teach kids at this level it can often be “one step forward, two steps back” for a heck of a long time.

Emotionally that’s draining.

And in the realm of NCLB, it’s almost entirely thankless as well because a teacher who works in a 9th grade classroom with kids that have skills that are at the 4rth or 5th grade level gets virtually no credit on these tests when they elevate their students to a 7th or 8th grade level in one mere academic year — because NCLB measurements aren’t based on growth.

You either make “the cut” or you get “labeled” negatively without any tip of the hat for the productive achievement or positive progress.

Huh? It’s as if the teacher was sitting there reading the newspaper all year. The tests are all or nothing.

Look, let’s be honest — being that the “low” kids are often the most demanding group of students to teach on campus, many, many teachers shy away from the job. It’s hard work, it’s taxing work, it can also feel like unappreciated work. (It also begs the question as to why one is required to have the temperament of Mother Teresa to thrive in this profession, but that’s for another conversation.)

Yet really, has this current system not created a self-fulfilling prophesy with negative implications for all of us? I mean how in the world are the kids with the highest needs ever going to break out of their rut if they are not being given the best chance to do so by having our school’s “best” teachers work in their classrooms.

If we really want to elevate learning and test scores in our schools we need to raise the bottom percentiles. They are the weight dragging all scores down. If, as the cliche goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease than the lowest performing students should be getting more grease (i.e. the “best” teachers).

Would they not benefit? Of course they would.
Is it not sensible? Of course it is.
Could real strides not be attained? Of course they will.

And if we could increase the academic achievement of our lowest performing students could we not, perhaps, also make a dent in poverty. (The link is quite clear between level of education and poverty.)

And if we could increase the academic achievement of our lowest performing students could we not, perhaps, also make a dent in crime. (The link is quite clear between level of education and crime.)

And would it not be in the best interests of our society as a whole to both decrease the level of poverty and crime in our country?

Are we doing what’s most comfortable for the teachers or what’s best for the kids?

Clearly, our most challenged students deserve our “best” teachers.

In the second part of this series, I am going to chat about Why the “best” teachers are needed to teach our “best” students.

NOTE: This was a questions raised in Part I: which students deserve our school’s best teachers?
(Coming soon, an argument for Part III: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students and an argument for Part IV: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “challenged” students as well as Part V: A review of the discussion and a exploration of what I think I’d be forced to do if I were a principal trying to figure out which teachers to assigned to which classes.)

Why the “best” teachers need to teach the “best” students.

If you think about it, why should the kids who demonstrate the highest commitment to school and most value their own studies and education not be provided/rewarded with a school’s best teachers? Haven’t they earned it?

After all, which teachers are”best” equipped to challenge these most advanced, most ready, most eager to learn young minds? And which teachers are best prepared to get them ready for the demands of education at the next level of their lives?

Which teachers do we want preparing our next generation of leaders because, truthfully, the top kids in our classrooms today show the highest likelihood of being the “top” leaders/discoverers/innovators in industry, science, medicine, politics, law and so on tomorrow?

It may sound like a silly cliche, but these “best” kids (and I use best in an academic sense, not a sense-of-worth-as-a-human-being sense) represent America’s best chance for tomorrow — and don’t they deserve the best of what we’ve got to offer them right now in terms of our nation’s best educator’s being made available to them today? On these children we are all, in a way, pinning our hopes.

Serving the needs of the top students with our best resources reminds me in a way of the 80/20 rule. Essentially, the 80/20 rule postulates that “20 percent of something is most always responsible for 80 percent of the results.”

I know around my school, the top 20% of our students absolutely carry our test scores. Take them out of the equation and we are looking the state taking us over as an entirely failing institution. We’d be toast! (And what school wouldn’t be?)

The top 20% of our students are also the ones most likely to attend a 4 year college and considering that we have over a 45% dropout rate (from freshman to senior in terms of non-matriculation), these students can also make a heckuva claim that they are the ones most in need of rigorous college prep at the pre-collegiate level.

And who better to prepare a kid to face the SAT’s and the AP exams than our school’s “best” teachers? I mean those tests are tough and a great educator can certainly make a great impact on student performance. (Not that tests like these are the end-all, be-all — and if you are familiar with my disposition, you probably know my feelings of BLARFF about bubble tests but still, low SAT’s = virtual exclusion from top-flight universities so let’s not be Pollyannish about the significance of honors and AP classes.)

In yesterday’s post, I divided school educators into 3 categories:

• Best teachers
• Average teachers.
• L’s (the L can stand for “Low” or “Lemons” – fill in your own mental blank).

If we put the L teachers at the front of the room of the AP classes, are we giving our top kids the best chance we can for them to be competitive in a hyper-competitive “get accepted to a university” culture?

If we put the “average” teachers in the front of the room of these classes, are we really cultivating the best and brightest minds in our schools in the most advantageous way we can? I mean how often do “average” teachers create outstanding results?

A school’s “best” students are the ones most likely to do all of their homework, dive most deeply into extra-curricular activities, show an overt thirst for academic challenges and demonstrate a willingness to go over and beyond the “normal course of student duties.”

And you’re going to tell me that kids like this aren’t most deserving of being placed with a school’s best teachers?

Plus, if you are a parent of an “honor” student and you find out that the “best” teachers on campus are not being made available to the “best” students because the school has a philosophy that dictates that the “best” teachers are going to be put with the “lowest” performing kids, aren’t you going to say, “Well, that’s great for them… but then I am going to send my kid to a different school, one where they get the “best” that can be offered to them… because, darn it, my kid has proven they deserve it — and they need it in order to excel later in life.”

The argument states that our best deserve our best. And if you are a school principal don’t you most probably agree? Paying short shrift to our “best” students by not providing them with the “best” teachers, well… how is this “best” for the whole school? What, are you going to put a first year novice teacher with the school’s top students when you have an opportunity to place a veteran with a strong track record in that very same class? Are you going to put a “tenured, worksheet-based, newspaper reading, leaves the moment the bell rings every day” teacher with the top students when you can put in “a hungry, lives for this job type of educator” who constantly seeks to advances their own professional capacities and takes leaderships roles in a variety of capacities of their own volition?

Dangerous as this is to say, there is a very solid argument to be made for why our best deserve our best if you are an administrator that is forced to choose.

And they are all being forced to choose.

(NOTE: Before you blast away at me, please remember that I am going to post in the next few days an argument as to why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students and an argument for Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “challenged” students. This is just Part I of a series — but all thoughts, comments, personal attacks on my intellectual inferiority and moral repugnance are welcome.)