A year ago, Caroline County (Va.) schools had a lot of teachers to replace—again. The tiny, low-performing rural district north of Richmond needed to replace about 35 teachers in its four schools. The middle school alone had 19 vacancies, almost one-third of its 62 teachers. Interest in teaching at the school was minimal.
Some of those who left the district were new teachers who had struggled to meet the demands of the job. “Most of the time we could help make sure they’d make it through the year,” recalls superintendent Stanley Jones, “but they weren’t necessarily functioning. The tire was half flat.”
My work as a researcher and consultant takes me into classrooms in all sorts of schools. My primary interest is improving the quality of teaching in high-poverty, racially diverse schools. Lately, however, I have also been called upon to visit schools in more affluent communities—some of them extraordinarily affluent.
While visiting schools in a variety of districts, I began to notice something that puzzled me. Some of these schools, particularly those with large numbers of poor and minority children, are working against daunting—some would say unreasonable—expectations for improvement in test scores. In more affluent schools, these pressures are much less evident. Yet the kinds of instructional problems that surface in both types of schools are strikingly similar.
