Sue Shuff: Champions of new teacher pathways know what ain't so

Commentary

I think it was Will Rogers who authored the famous line: "It's not what they don't know that worries me, it's what they know for sure that just ain't so."

It doesn't matter if it's the secretary of education ("Minnesota takes a solid step on teaching," March 8), a former school board member ("The next step in producing great teachers," March 7) or the director of the local program ("Open new paths to top teaching," Feb. 9) -- all of whom have written to these pages in recent days: The claim that alternative teacher training or Teach for America are going to transform education and close the achievement gap is not only counterintuitive but is unsupported by the evidence.

One of the largest studies of the effects of TFA on student test scores, in the Houston area, concluded that certified teachers produced better results than TFA teachers, who had a negative or insignificant impact.

Studies done with much smaller samples were inconclusive, but even those that showed promise did not identify the potential variables, and the gains were much too small to come close to making a difference in test scores.

In addition, most studies show that all teachers are least effective in their first two years. Even the director of the local TFA acknowledged that only 30 percent of participants try teaching.

Other studies find that 80 percent of those leave after a few years. The last thing any school needs is teachers churning through its staff every two years.

The head of the National Secondary School Principals compared reading scores with the rest of the world's and discovered that when schools with high poverty rates were factored out, American schoolchildren came in second.

An in-depth research project at Johns Hopkins University concluded that children in classrooms across the country learn about the same amount in any given year. The difference in their test scores is related to what happens in the rest of their lives.

When we address that, we'll make a legitimate start at closing the achievement gap.