Root Canal Reform

One morning earlier this month, I woke up with a severe tooth ache. I could not understand why this was happening, since my dentist has always told me that I take good care of my teeth. Upon visiting the endodontist, I found out there was a crack in my tooth that was imperceptible to x-rays. Bacteria was able to enter through the crack and kill the nerves. At that point the root became a festering cauldron. The only solution was to drill into the tooth, extract the festering material along with the dead nerves, fill the void with benign material, and cap the tooth. The tooth is now dead on the inside, but remains functional.

If you have ever experienced uncontrollable pain, you know that your mind wanders in strange places. Once the endodontist had performed his magic, it dawned on me that a root canal is an apt metaphor for current standards-based reform efforts using Race to the Top funding. Our poorest schools are suffering. The standards-based storyline for this suffering is that there a too many low quality teachers in our poorest schools. Many of the new teacher evaluation systems required for Race to the Top funding are designed to root out festering teachers. By extracting the festering teachers or even closing down whole schools with too many festering teachers, the argument is that performance will improve.

However, lacking in these discussions is any robust plan for replacing all of the festering teachers. Our poorest schools have the most difficult time filling vacancies. Just like a root canal, the plan seems to be that nothing is better than something. By filling the void with inert material and capping it with zero tolerance discipline, we can end up with functional schools that are completely dead on the inside.

What root canal reform ignores is all of the evidence indicating that it is the team that matters more than the individual. More than a decade ago, Hank Becker found that teachers could perform above their abilities if surrounded by good teachers. Researchers in Australia have found that high performing teacher teams have a strong process of enculturating new team members and building collective responsibility. Researchers at the Consortium on Chicago School Research have found that strong teacher teams, built on a foundation of trust, are a powerful tool for improving student performance. Instead, root canal reform fosters mistrust, which destroys teams.

An alternative to root canal reform focused on individual teachers could be reform by the Lenovo stat, which is the NBA's tool for measuring the power of teamwork. Shaquille O'Neal is among the most dominant centers in the NBA, yet during the 2006 NBA finals, the Lenovo stats show that surrounded by the wrong teammates, his squad performed worse than any other combination of players. It is not the quality of the individual players that matters, but the quality of the combination of players that makes the biggest difference. Applying these principles to education recognizes that teaching is a team effort and that districts need to think very carefully how they compose teams before they lay all the blame on individuals.