This ed reform’s no joke
Young hotshots best veteran teachers
One sure indicator that you have arrived is that you are mocked. When you’re insignificant, nobody cares.
And so it is that Teach for America and other programs that put high-achieving college grads in low-income schools became the subject of a spoof on the satirical news site The Onion.
Following a fictitious account by an earnest young woman of her year teaching underprivileged kids, grade school student “Brandon Mendez” complains in a counterpoint that “dealing with a new fresh-faced college graduate who doesn’t know what she is doing year after year is growing a bit tiresome.”
The lack of experience of new teachers was one complaint that was heard in the early years of these programs, along with the charge that urban school districts used them to replace more experienced teachers.
Complaints of the latter sort have subsided in cities, including Boston, where teacher layoffs have been avoided, but the former concern remains. Can young teachers close the expertise gap with enthusiasm and energy alone, or do programs that put recent grads in the classroom like TFA and the New Teachers Project use lowincome students “like adopted puppies” for elite college grads, as The Onion thinks.
Many a truth is said in jest, but in this case it turns out the laugh is on the comedians.
A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that an early retirement program in Illinois reduced the average number of years in service of teachers from 27 to three without hurting student performance. In fact, the replacement of experienced teachers with newcomers produced gains in test scores, with the greatest improvements achieved in disadvantaged schools.
The program wasn’t a net cost-saving move, since senior public school teachers who were allowed to “buy” additional years of service and retire early will get bigger pensions from the state. What it exposed was the downside of defined benefit pension plans that keep people in the classroom long after they’ve lost their enthusiasm for teaching.
Like Massachusetts, Illinois uses a combination of age and years on the job to calculate teacher pensions. Private sector employees with defined contribution plans take benefits with them when they want to leave, making the decision to move on to a second career easier.
The study found that the cost to taxpayers of producing comparable gains in achievement would have been nearly twice as much as the expense of the early retirement plan.
With students, taxpayers and teachers both old and young making out better when a new broom sweeps out the classroom, it’s one education reform that’s no joke.