The Cult of the Magical Teacher: Our National Delusion

For quite some time now, the American public has been told over and over again by movies, romances, newspapers, and politicians that the best teachers are miracle workers. We've been led to believe that great teachers (and in many cases, great teachers alone) have the capacity to take any group of low-performing students and raise their academic achievement to heights on par with any student in the country, or at least reach them in a way nobody else could. 

After all, Jaime Escalante did it in Stand and Deliver:

Erin Gruwell did it in Freedom Writers: 

And LouAnne Johnson did it in Dangerous Minds (with the super touching tagline: She broke the rules...and changed their lives):

Additionally, William Taylor brought a classroom with 40 percent of the students scoring on grade-level to a place where 90 percent of them were scoring on grade level.  Michelle Rhee's students "went from the 13th percentile in standardized national tests to the 90th percentile".  In only one year, 2005 National Teacher of the Year, Jason Kamras, managed to drop the percentage of his students scoring below basic from 80 percent to 40 percent.

All of these movies, articles, romances, and sound bites feed into a larger national narrative with a plot line that goes something like this: There are a bunch of poor, uneducated kids in this country because the schools have failed them with awful teachers (problem).  Luckily there are a bunch of idealistic, capable young people who are willing to give a few years of their lives to help them and save public education (solution).  The kids can be saved by teachers alone (conclusion).

Policy-makers, superintendents, and professional development gurus make a lot of these teachers' stories.  Over and over again, I've heard people like Wendy Kopp, Joel Klein, Alfred Tatum, Paul Vallas, and Michelle Rhee say things like, "You don't have to change a student's socio-economic status, their home life, or their history.  All you have to do is put a great teacher in front of them and they will succeed."  And this really isn't an argument you want to find yourself on the other side of.  If you disagree and argue that a student's home life does matter, you're easily dismissed as someone who doesn't really believe in children.  And who wants to be tagged that way in the middle of a debate?

"You don't think their academic abilities can be raised without changing their home lives?  Then you must be a racist or bigot.  How dare you assume they're not capable!  You must not be a very good teacher, or else you would have made great progress with them." 

"But, uh, I can never reach their parents.  I can never get them to stay after school.  I can never get them to attend Saturday school.  What else am I supposed to do?" 

"Well, if you were a better teacher, they'd want to come.  Maybe you should find a new line of work." 

And the argument is over, and it's pretty clear that the any-kid-can-make-great-gains-argument is triumphant.

But there are reasons to be wary of this narrative.  To begin with, most of the inspirational teacher movies you see, while based on a true story, alter significant realities, which delude the viewer into a misunderstanding of teaching.  Take Jamie Escalante as an example.  Stand and Deliver would have you believe that Escalante decided one day that he was going to teach calculus at a low-achieving school.  All the rest of the teachers told him he was crazy and apparently hoped he would fail.  But he did it, and they all passed the AP exam.  It implies that you can take any student, no matter what their ability or home situation, and teach them any advanced topic of study, such as calculus.  This didn’t happen in reality.  It took Escalante ten years to reach the success the movie depicts.  And he did it by building a strong math program from the ground up, not by taking students struggling with arithmetic in high school and getting them to calculus within a year.

Or take Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers.  If the movie is to be believed, Gruwell apparently only had one class of students for the entire day, and she was allowed to have the same class in the following years.  I know of no full-time teacher that’s afforded that luxury, especially in our most challenging schools.

Although many future teachers are inspired by these films, I’ve yet to meet a real teacher in a real school that isn’t somewhat offended by the ease with which reaching our most challenged students is portrayed: just give up your life for the kids and they’ll all go to college – not quite.  It’s also probably not a good sign when real teachers mock the techniques used by movie teachers.

Also, many of the teachers who are publicized for their students’ outstanding achievements lack proof for their claims.  Michelle Rhee famously has no evidence of her students’ rising from the 13^th percentile to the 90^th.  Another interesting reality plaguing many of these educators is that very few of them stay in the classroom longer than a few years.  Michelle Rhee stayed for three, William Taylor is in his third and getting ready to get his administrative certificate, Erin Gruwell left teaching after seeing her students graduate to work at the collegiate level, and Jason Kamras stayed for a whole eight after beginning with TFA. 

The magical teacher narrative would have us believe that you need very little experience in the classroom to be excellent, but also (if you pay attention to the details) that our best teachers don’t really enjoy teaching enough to stick with it (sadly research seems to bear this out).  But perhaps that’s because their success on paper belies their experience (Or maybe because they always had other ambitions in life beyond just teaching – but I wouldn’t want to draw any conclusions.  It does strike me as odd, though, that the teachers that write and star in all the inspirational movies, books, and articles about their amazing success are no longer actually teaching.) 

Real teaching often looks a lot more like this (especially at 1:50):

Or this (especially at 2:00):

It's not that I don't think teachers can be inspirational; it's not that I don't think teachers can make great gains with some students; and it's not that I don't think teaching isn't incredibly important.  I remember my mom showing me Stand and Deliver a number of times and telling me that one day, that would be me.  I was just as inspired as anyone else.  And in the sense that this narrative motivates well-intentioned people to change the world, it has its merit, but it is still largely delusional to think that a single teacher can make up for all of the things that so many students lack in their lives.


I’d argue that the narrative being spun (by the media, organizations like TFA and KIPP, and Hollywood) certainly serves a purpose, but it’s not improving education.  I’d also argue that it's destructive. If we, as a country, allow ourselves to buy into this delusion, we will continue to make ill-informed decisions about ways to improve quality education for all children.   That, however, will be the topic of my next post, as this one is too long already.