Poor kids need good teachers, feds say

White House wants better educators in high-poverty areas

WASHINGTON — The Obamaadministration is ordering states to devise strategies to get better teachers into high-poverty classrooms, correcting a national imbalance in which students who need the most help are often taught by the weakest educators.

“When a school or a school district or a set of schools in a disadvantaged community has disproportionate numbers of inexperienced teachers, that’s not a good thing,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters at the White House on Monday. “As a nation, we’ve had far too few incentives, and, frankly, lots of disincentives for the hardest working and the most committed teachers and principals to go to the communities who need the most help, and we have to get together and reverse that.”

The Education Department is directing every state and the District of Columbia to devise a plan by April 2015 to get more good teachers into their highpoverty schools.

“If we do nothing, if we don’t highlight the problem, then inevitably the kids who probably need less help get the most, and the kids who need the most help are getting the least,” President Barack Obama said as he sat down to lunch with Duncan and four educators from high-needs schools.

The Education Department plans to spend $4.2 million to launch a new “technical assistance network” to help states and districts develop and implement their plans.

States will be required to publicly report their progress.

Forcing states to be transparent about the quality of teachers in high-poverty schools will create pressure to make changes, Duncan said, so that low-income children will have equal access to good teaching compared with their more affluent peers.

“This is a really important exercise for the nation to undertake,” he said.

Asked what penalties states will face if they do not comply, Duncan said he hadn’t figured that out.

Theinitiative also doesn’t address the thorny problem of how to identify an effective teacher.

Low-income students tend to have teachers who have less experience and fewer credentials or sometimes no credentials at all, compared with those who teach in more affluent schools, according to the Education Department.

While there is little direct evidence that links those teachers to poor outcomes for students, low-income children clearly struggle academically.

On the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally administered test that often is called the nation’s report card, 24 percent of students who are eligible for free lunch were proficient on the fourth-grade math test, compared with almost 50 percent of their more affluent peers, Duncan said.