Within a month, three articles appeared in national magazines describing great teachers–who they are, what they do, how they do it.  Check out The Atlantic, January/February 2010; The New York Times Magazine, March 7, 2010; and Newsweek, March 15, 2010.

high-achieving suburban high school

Perhaps the writers were making up for the put downs, blame games, and finger pointing, reasoning that, after all, some teachers must be doing a great job.  Otherwise, how would there be students at public university UC Berkeley, private school Harvard, or any of the terrific higher education institutions in between the coasts?

However, there are also plenty of reports about teachers in failing schools.  For example, the media flocked to Central Falls High School in Rhode Island when the board of education on the superintendent’s recommendation fired every single teacher because the school was performing on state tests at a persistently low level.

All that was reported was the fight between the teachers and the superintendent.  Couldn’t the Central Falls debacle be a story of what demographic and economic changes in the community let the school slowly sink until it was too late to address the problem?  Or why the school board let the problem fester for years and years?  Or why the superintendent and teacher leaders at the school site didn’t sit down and plan a satisfying turn around?  Hard to find clarification for the dismal picture of that school.

But as of March 15, 2010, the president and the U.S. Department of Education have taken on American education.  Revising No Child Left Behind to raise academic standards, turn around the most distressed schools, and develop tools to better evaluate teachers and principals.

And everyone is surprised?  Did every state think the issues would slither around the edges, lost in the tussle for school funds, while high-achieving students went to Stanford and the other kids got a finger wagged at them?

Speaking of which, this week California distributed its list of 188 persistently lowest-achieving schools in the state.  Mostly middle and high schools were placed on the list to go along with the state’s effort to get funds from Race to the Top, the biggest pile of money out there to help transform secondary schools.  Next application deadline is June 2010.

In the meantime thousands of teachers and students took to the streets on March 4 to advance comprehension of the disaster befalling California in which teachers will be laid off to balance school district budgets when the state can’t balance its own budget.

Which creates the question: what happens to good teachers with no money available?  Three possibilities have surfaced in the news.

First, great new teachers will be gone unless, as in San Francisco, the PTA gets families to chip in money and attract matching donors to make up the deficit.  Think that can rub out $1300 million?  Or the Educational Foundation asks each district family to contribute $375 to erase the $3 million deficit as in Cupertino.

Second, a school board in a district like Los Angeles, $200 million in the hole and 23 low-performing schools to turn around, will lay off teachers and improvement efforts will sit on the back burner to simmer and bubble.

Or third, school boards may take the cheap way out and let for-profit charter schools take over the low-performing high schools, getting the problem off the school board’s back.

As the three articles showed, the latest teacher preparation has improved a teacher’s ability to manage the class, understand the curriculum, and use best practices to teach.  No statistics tell how many and where are the great teachers.  There is an answer.

The truth is some great teachers work at Central Falls, just as they are found in every public school.  All schools could have many, but the effort to increase the number of good teachers is like the discipline needed by school boards to turn around low-performing schools.

It’s daunting, time-consuming, and depends on teacher-leaders, administrators skilled at communicating*, and, above all, resolute school boards willing to back the teachers doing the hard job.

*For one model of good communication go to the website for this blog: takecareschools.com.