Bruni: The track for better teachers

More than halfway through Joel Klein’s forthcoming book on his time as the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, he zeros in on what he calls “the biggest factor in the education equation.”

It’s not classroom size, school choice or the Common Core. It’s “teacher quality,” he writes, adding that “a great teacher can rescue a child from a life of struggle.”

We keep coming back to this. As we wrestle with the urgent, dire need to improve education - for the sake of social mobility, for the sake of our economic standing in the world - the performance of teachers inevitably draws increased scrutiny. But it remains one of the trickiest subjects to broach, a minefield of hurt feelings and vested interests.

Klein knows the minefield better than most. As chancellor from the summer of 2002 through the end of 2010, he oversaw the largest public school system in the country and did so for longer than any other New York schools chief in half a century. That gives him a vantage point on public education that would be foolish to ignore, and in “Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools,” which will be published next week, he reflects on what he learned and what he believes, including that poor parents, like rich ones, deserve options for their kids; that smaller schools work better than larger ones in poor communities; and that an impulse to make kids feel good sometimes gets in the way of giving them the knowledge and tools necessary for success.

I was most struck, though, by what he observes about teachers and teaching.

Because of union contracts and tenure protections in place when he began the job, it was “virtually impossible to remove a teacher charged with incompetence,” he writes. Firing a teacher “took an average of almost 2 ½ years and cost the city over $300,000.”

And the city, like the rest of the country, wasn’t (and still isn’t) managing to lure enough of the best and brightest college graduates into classrooms.

“In the 1990s, college graduates who became elementary-school teachers in America averaged below 1,000 points, out of a total of 1,600, on the math and verbal Scholastic Aptitude Tests,” he writes. In New York, he notes, “the citywide average for all teachers was about 970.”

In an interview with him after I finished the book, I asked for a short list of measures that might improve teacher quality.

He said that schools of education could stiffen their selection criteria in a way that raises the bar for who goes into teaching and elevates the public perception of teachers.

“You’d have to do it over the course of several years,” he said.

But if implemented correctly, he said, it would draw more, not fewer, people into teaching. He said the curriculum at education schools should be revisited as well. There’s a growing chorus for this; it’s addressed in the recent best-seller “Building a Better Teacher,” by Elizabeth Green. But while Green homes in on the teaching of teaching, Klein stressed to me that teachers must acquire mastery of the actual subject matter they’re dealing with. Too frequently they don’t.

Klein urged “a rational incentive system” that doesn’t currently exist in most districts. He’d like to see teachers paid more for working in schools with “high-needs” students and for tackling subjects that require additional expertise.

“If you have to pay science and physical education teachers the same, you’re going to end up with more physical education teachers,” he said. “The pay structure is irrational.”

In an ideal revision of it, he added, there would be “some kind of pay for performance, rewarding success.” Salaries wouldn’t be based primarily on seniority.

Such challenges of the status quo aren’t welcomed by many teachers and their unions. Just look at their fury about a Time magazine cover story last week that reported - accurately - on increasingly forceful challenges to traditional tenure protections. They hear most talk about tenure and teacher quality as an out-and-out attack, a failure to appreciate all the obstacles that they’re up against. They hear phrases like “rescue a child from a life of struggle” and rightly wonder if that, ultimately, is their responsibility.

It isn’t. But it does happen to be a transformative opportunity that they, like few other professionals, have. In light of that, we owe them, as a group, more support in terms of salary, more gratitude for their efforts and outright reverence when they succeed.

But they owe us a discussion about education that fully acknowledges the existence of too many underperformers in their ranks. Klein and others who bring that up aren’t trying to insult or demonize them. They’re trying to team up with them on a project that matters more than any other: a better future for kids.

Frank Bruni is a columnist for the New York Times.