It's about the Teachers

A while back, I had occasion to talk to a woman named Lillian Lopez about a bold choice she had decided not to make. Lopez, who lives in a barrio on the east side of Oakland, Calif., is a Mexican-American mom with dark red hair and a firm and plain-spoken way of making her point. She was the front woman for a remarkable grass-roots effort by low-income parents to flee Oakland's famously lousy school system and create a handful of new charter schools. Yet while she appeared on television and before the school board, fighting vehemently for the right to build alternative institutions, she herself wasn't planning to take part in the move. Her son Alex would stay where he was, in an overcrowded, low-performing, dilapidated district school called Jefferson Elementary because, she confided to me, Alex had a good teacher.

So, despite the physical dangers – her older son had been assaulted in a school in the same district – and an apparently intractable bureaucracy, she would keep Alex where he was. Later, a run-in with the principal would change her mind, but the bottom line was that she was prepared to suffer an awful lot for just one good teacher.

The truth that motivated Lopez was the same one that presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has made the main plank of his education platform: In schooling, a good teacher matters more than anything else. In June, Kerry gave a series of speeches on education that set him up for a battle with George Bush over what has become the president's signature domestic-policy issue. Many liberals had hoped that Kerry would attack the testing requirement set forth in Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which has become increasingly unpopular, especially among teachers' unions. But Kerry, who had voted for NCLB, instead challenged two longstanding, and fiercely defended, union prerogatives: seniority-based pay increases and rules virtually guaranteeing veteran teachers tenure. The candidate proposed a "new bargain" – a $30 billion, 10-year plan of federal grants which would allow districts to raise the pay of teachers whose students consistently test above average, while at the same time making it easier for schools to fire bad teachers. "Greater achievement ought to be a goal," Kerry said, "and it should be able to command greater pay, just the way it does in every other sector of professional employment."

As the campaign moves forward, Kerry's teacher plan may prove to be very clever politics. By challenging the teachers' unions, Kerry gains centrist credibility in an area where he has bucked the liberal line before. (During his 1998 Senate race, he called for an end to teacher tenure.) It also gives Kerry a signature reform that contrasts him with Bush. And his plan ought to resonate with a lot of parents like Lillian Lopez, who know from experience that better teachers are the key to truly improving schools.

But if the plan makes for good politics, is it good policy, too? Is it focused on the big problem? Would it be a credible solution? And is there more Kerry should be doing? The answer to all four questions is yes.

School Daze

Improving schools in poor neighborhoods has become arguably the most important civil rights issue of our time. It was Bush's pledge to "leave no child behind" that lent moral weight and authority to his legislation. But despite the consensus assertion that children in even the poorest environments can learn, some still suspect that public schools just can't do much for children who live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, where crime is rampant, too many families are dysfunctional, and the culture too seldom encourages academic achievement.

Look carefully at the education reform literature, however, and you'll find evidence that is both hopeful and frustrating. The hopeful finding is that good teachers can make all the difference. Over the last 15 years, dozens of studies examining failing schools that have been turned around have shown that the secret to success is high quality teaching. OneTexas study showed that putting strong teachers into weakly performing classes nearly closed the gap between poor and affluent students' math scores. The Teaching Commission, a blue-ribbon bipartisan panel headed by former IBM chief Louis Gerstner that has studied the available school reform data, concluded: "The proven value of excellent teaching all but demolishes the notion that socioeconomic status is the most important determinant of what kids can learn."