Why few "highly-effective" teachers are found in the poorest wards

Bill Turque's recent article points out that teachers deemed "highly effective" are spread unequally across the District. Only 5 percent of those deemed the best teach in Ward 8, known for the lowest achieving schools and staggering poverty. (And Bill, I'd like to know how many of those were actual classroom teachers who had a hand in teaching core subjects, rather than specials like P.E. or art.)

Turque began to touch on why this distribution of inequality exists, but allow me to further explain why such "inequality" exists. As a teacher in what I consider to be one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city, my colleagues and I are confronted with unique challenges that very few others experience. We work with students who are products of broken, drug-riddled homes. An unacceptable number of my students have at least one parent who has been in prison, and several whose parents are currently in jail. As such, we are rarely just teachers. Instead, we function as social workers, ad-hoc parents, disciplinarians, and at times, bouncers. (I recently had a student attempt to choke me as I broke up a fight. Mind you, I teach second grade.) No matter how hard we teach, it's difficult to make a meaningful difference when there is no support or structure at home. If this wasn't the case, my school, and others, wouldn't be so relentless in building parent-teacher relationships through any means possible. This further highlights why I no longer think education is THE problem in this country; education is part of the problem, but lack of social services is the larger problem. (This of course could be entire blog post in and of itself and something that most ed-reformers, unfortunately, scoff at.)

In any other school, we would be highly effective teachers. Instead, we are merely effective because we can't just teach throughout the day. I, for example, lost IMPACT points because two students weren't observed to be completing an assignment during an observation. Why? One had a high fever, but mom would not come pick him up from school so instead he slept at my desk. The other's mother neglected to refill his ADHD medication prescription so he was off-the-wall for a week. These situations do not happen in other schools. We have to wear so many different hats at our jobs. While our administrators recognize we are worth our weight in gold, IMPACT will not reward us because it has limited scope to go beyond the classroom.

I do not believe IMPACT's financial incentives will help redistribute the "quality" of teaching. Call me cynical, but it is an immense sacrifice to take on the teaching positions in the less desirable wards. I do not think there are many chomping at the bit to leave their west-of-the-park-school to teach in Anacostia. In fact, there are very few days that I don't fantasize about what it would be like to teach elsewhere.