jmucci@lbcc.edu

These numbers represent vast differences in millions of lives. Low-income African American and Hispanic students in different cities are sufficiently similar in terms of their academic needs, but their outcomes are so dramatically different.

The main difference between these children is that they are enrolled in different school districts. And research indicates that if the data were broken out for the same students in different schools, the differences would be more dramatic -- and more dramatic still if broken out for the same children in different classes.

What explains these differences? Schools and teachers. "Teacher quality is the single most important school factor in student success," the Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind recently noted. Given how much research supports this view, it is especially troubling, the commission found, that "teacher quality is inequitably distributed in schools, and the students with the greatest needs tend to have access to the least qualified and least effective teachers."

A few things need to happen:

First, we must attract teachers who performed well in college. Countries that do best on international tests draw teachers from the top third of college graduates. In the United States, however, most teachers come from the bottom third. Moreover, the bottom of that group is vastly overrepresented in our highest-needs communities.

Second, we must create systems that reward excellence rather than seniority by creating sophisticated evaluation systems that include student performance and merit-based tenure and compensation. We must make it easier to remove teachers who are shown to be ineffective.

Third, we must do more to attract teachers to high-needs students, schools and subject areas, such as English language learners, special education and other areas to which it is difficult to draw talent because of opportunities in other fields.