The Role Teachers Play In The Achievement Gap

I've been meaning to get to how teachers impact the achievement gap. They are arguably the most influential group, considering that teachers are the ones directly interacting with hundreds of students every day. Everyone else largely provides the scaffolding teachers and students work in. Obviously, bad framework makes it harder to progress, but not even the best-designed skyscraper will stand in the rain if it's made of cardboard. That's kind of what it's like to have a bad teacher.

A couple articles passed along to me highlight some of the problems with teacher accountability right now, and how painfully hard they are to fix. The first (available here) highlights how little accountability there is in teaching right now. There is practically no way to weed out bad teachers right now, and statistics back this sobering fact up. The second (available here) digs into the struggles with teacher unions.

The bottom line is that ineffective teachers are feeding the achievement gap. They are arguably the biggest culprit, and also arguably the most realistic area for improvement.

While I understand that it is a union's responsibility to protect its worker's rights, I wish teacher unions better recognized how badly it reflects on the good teachers when so the bad ones continue to pass through unchallenged. I believe it is in a teacher union's best interest to explore teacher accountability too, though that does not seem to be the mainstream thinking at the moment. There are sporadic glimmers of hope from time to time though.