Enough with the superhero teacher meme economists!

There’s a nasty narrative creeping into the national conversation New Zealand is having about education these days, that of the superhero teacher.

If you’re unfamiliar with the plot line, it goes a little something like this. There is a massive achievement gap in academic achievement and this gap is because of  bad schools. Since teachers are the most important things in schools, if the schools suck then it must be because teachers must suck.

Enter the superhero teacher.

Superhero teachers have the capacity to take any group of low-performing students and raise their academic achievement to heights on par with any student in the country, or at least reach them in a way no mere mortal teacher could.  But this special ability comes at a cost, the superhero teacher must devote every waking hour  (and some when they should be sleeping) to their students.  The natural corollary of this statement to some is that we need to staff every classroom with superhero teachers and then hey presto our problems as a country will be solved.

This narrative doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s been played out in many a Hollywood offering most notably Dangerous Minds where Michelle Pffifer was able to turn around a group of delinquent students into learners with the help of Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan and some chocolate bars as bribes. Of course anyone who has spent longer than 90 minutes in an actual classroom knows that the business of teaching and learning something new knows that resolving problems doesn’t happen in nice neat portions of time. It’s more like a slow accumulation of sabbaths than a sudden epiphany. Even LouAnne Johnson, the real teacher behind the movie, openly admits that the movie is only partially based on real life events.

Unfortunately the New Zealand Treasury is drinking some of that educational koolaid in this respect by advocating that things like class size don’t matter to the neediest students only teacher quality. Now I’m not saying that kids don’t deserve great teachers however the assumptions underpin the superhero teacher meme need some debunking so here goes.

The first is using research from  a series of studies back in the mid 1990s that state that the effective teachers can lift student achievement rates. I don’t doubt that having an effective teacher improves student learning. However it is a huge leap of logic to state that the effect that three great teachers have on students’ lives is so miraclous that it justifies having a few extra kids in each class to free up resources (read hire less qualified and/or experienced teachers) and indeed the bold claim that three accurate teachers in a row is life-changing doesn’t seem to pan out much in theory or in fact.

Of course anyone who spends time in a classroom knows those extra few kids make a difference. That’s a few extra pieces of assessment to analyize, more families to work with and then there’s that small matter of classroom management. Most teachers, especially at primary level, don’t spend much time with chalk and talk ie. lecturing entire classes of students about what to do and what to think yet larger classes will move us back towards that model if for no other reason than crowd control. Education needs to  become far more personalized yet the more kids there are in a class means the less time teachers get to spend interacting with kids one on one and bigger class sizes won’t help us achieve this goal.

More importantly underpinning the superhero teacher meme that is gaining traction in New Zealand is the idea that teaching is some  kind of innate talent.  Indeed the conversation that is emerging in New Zealand particularly around performance based pay and the emergence of Teach First New Zealand is that education policy is now becoming narrowly focused on the qualities of people who become teachers and on the process of educating, hiring and firing them while missing the boat almost entirely on the practices of these teachers and on the conditions that support those practices.

This mindset makes it easy to view initial and ongoing development of teachers as an inessential expenditure which what is already starting to creep into New Zealand teacher education with the government looking at disestablishing the 3 year undergraduate courses in favour of 1 year post-graduate courses or no initial teacher education in the case of Teach First New Zealand. Indeed we are now  based around the idea that attracting talent, if only for a few years, is far more preferable to a long-term vision of how to develop our average (ie. most of) our teachers over the long-term.

More importantly it allows the government to wash its hands of any the factors outside of school that effect students performance.

Your students are coming to school hungry and aren’t able to learn effectively? That doesn’t matter to a superhero teacher who will find ways to feed the children’s minds even when if their stomach’s are empty. You obviously aren’t trying hard enough.

Your students don’t have families that read to them or value and encourage school? That doesn’t matter to  the superhero teacher who will provide that sense of belonging and purpose. You obviously aren’t working hard enough.

Your students are absent from school because they are catching preventable diseases due to poor housing. That doesn’t matter to the superhero teacher who will shall make up for those lost days. You obviously don’t care about your students enough.

We are being led to believe that great teachers alone have the capacity to overcome these barriers and we need to hold teachers accountable to a set of standards which ignore the deeper causes of educational inequality.  Clearly those causes are policy kryptonite to our economists.