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Posted: Saturday, 20 June 2009 9:27AM
BLOG: All It Takes Is a Great Teacher
Jessica Siegel Reporting
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 “All it takes is a great teacher.” That’s the philosophy of the Equity Project, the new charter school opening in Washington Heights in New York City in September, which is touting teachers’ salaries of $125,000 a year to attract the best. It’s hard to disagree with that point of view, on one hand, because many of us have had teachers who have changed our lives.
Now that I’m on Facebook, I get email from students I had 25 years ago—the same way I wrote to my own 9th grade English teacher, who had an incredible effect on me. I have no issue with outstanding practitioners earning $125,000 a year. The classroom is the heart of the school.
The teacher-student dynamic is the key to whether students learn. I agree teachers should be making that amount of money, rather than it going to corporate lawyers or stockbrokers. Who has the biggest impact on the next generation? And where did those people get us?
My problem is with the notion that in exchange for that money these teachers can do it all. In this new school, designed by entrepreneur Zeke M. Vanderhoek, who taught for three years in the New York City schools and made his fortune founding a test prep company, teachers will have class sizes of 30 students and will have to take on, in addition to their teaching responsibilities, everything ordinarily done by assistant principals (there will be none), filling in when colleagues are sick since they won’t be hiring substitutes and following up on long term truants since there will be no attendance coordinators.
The best teachers, in addition to turning on kids to their subject and to learning in general, also don’t say “that’s not my job.” They talk to students after class who are going through family difficulties, give a call to parents to ask what happened to the child who hasn’t been in school for several days and take aside a student who is acting out because something is going on in his or her life.
But they and their students should have a support system. I taught at Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side of New York City at a time when students had to walk by crack dealers to get to school, had students in my class who went home to an apartment with no heat and hot water, had a gay student who was partying at clubs until 4 in the morning.
Clearly they and I needed some help in navigating those kinds of problems. And then there’s the question of class size. Mr. Vanderhoek was quoted last year as saying “I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30 kids and nothing else than take the mediocre teacher and give them half the number of students and give them all the technology in the world.” These kinds of false dichotomies are exactly what get education, and especially educational experts with little experience in the classroom, in trouble.
Of course, every kid, especially the most needy, deserves an outstanding teacher. That’s the key. But when you teach 170 students a day (34 students per class x 5 classes), as I did when I taught high school, or 30 students in a class at the Equity Project, how can you give those kids the individual attention that they need?
Especially, if you recognize, as I hope everyone does now that writing skills are essential to succeed in higher education and in life, and that writers, young and old, develop their skills best through continual writing and revision, which requires constant teacher feedback. Until education experts, and this includes entrepreneurs who have “the answer,” recognize that we need outstanding teachers, lower class sizes and support services in order to teach the deserving 1.1 million students in the New York City schools, the Equity Project will be another flash in the pan social experiment, which will prove once again, that teachers don’t last and these kids can’t learn.
Jessica Siegel, an assistant professor of education and journalism at Brooklyn College, is the subject of Small Victories by Samuel G. Freedman (HarperCollins, 1990). He followed her and her students through one year at Seward Park High School.
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