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Expert Opinion

Paul Ruiz on High-Quality Teachers and Equity

For Paul Ruiz, No Child Left Behind has redefined what it means to be a good school. He says simply, “To be good, you have to be good for all groups of students.” Ruiz is a principal partner of the Education Trust, a Washington, DC-based advocacy and research organization that’s dedicated to promoting high academic achievement for all students, from kindergarten through college. A former school principal and central office administrator, Ruiz has spent more than three decades in the education field, working to close the achievement gap for Latino and African American students.

It’s a subject he is passionate about, and he shared that passion at an April, 2005 conference in Portland, Oregon, sponsored by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory’s Northwest Eisenhower Regional Consortium for Mathematics and Science. During a break, Ruiz spoke to Northwest Education Assistant Editor Bracken Reed about the need for high quality teachers for all students. According to Ruiz, “what teachers do or don’t do in their classroom matters hugely. In fact, a good teacher can ameliorate the effects of poverty by about 40 percent [according to studies by the Education Trust].”

The follow is an excerpt from their conversation:

In your opinion, what is the number one priority for improving America’s school system?

Teacher expertise, teacher knowledge, teacher roundedness [are what’s needed] so no matter what immigrant kid walks through that door, that teacher can teach literacy 10 different ways. That teacher can teach numeracy 15 different ways—at the appropriate grade level, of course. That teacher can organize her classroom to engage students and contextualize learning. The research is replete with that theme, over and over again.

Of course, teachers need the resources. They need to have access to these learning communities and these wonderful strategies, because they can’t reinvent everything. But the more prepared the teacher is the more likely they are to conceptualize, to problem solve, to critical-think through some of the issues that confront her or him everyday in a classroom. And, the more likely that they can contribute to the improvement of the grade up and the grade down, because they know content well.

It’s like my father—he was a carpenter. Did it matter that he was a very good carpenter? Damn right, it mattered! When he got a construction job and it was a complex job, if he didn’t know what he knew he couldn’t finish the job. And there are many carpenters who are mediocre carpenters and get blown out of jobs because they can’t figure out the problem. Teachers are the same way. Teachers who are very good can work themselves through the complexities and vagaries of the work. Teachers who are marginally prepared get burnt out, get frightened out of the profession. And their kids don’t learn as much.

Is that necessarily a bad thing? Or is there possibly a natural weeding out process involved?

I think in some cases it’s a good thing. But in most cases, those folks could learn and could become better.

So how do we get them there?

I make the point that if I had $5 million in Title I coming into my district, I would stop buying programs. I would invest highly in teachers, in various ways.

Say you only had a million dollars or less and you had to really prioritize, what would you recommend?

That’s a fair question, and a lot of districts face that kind of funding situation. One, I’m going to assume that I’ve done some data gathering, and I know which classrooms are my performers and which ones are not. And when I say “performers” I mean the teachers who are giving me bumps in achievement. And I know how much and how little. Having said that then—since I don’t have too much money—I would make sure that I hired a numeracy and literacy coach, right way. And the focus of the coaches’ work would be with the adults, not with the kids. So that would eat up about $100,000 right off the bat, or more. Then I would use another amount of money, a sizeable amount, to make sure that those teachers have a chance to get out. And I know people say, “Well, I don’t want a sub in my room.” Well, dang it, you have to go learn. And we need to make sure that you get a good sub. And the district then can create opportunities for the sub pool, so that the substitutes are not people who can barely fog a mirror, but that they’re people who have trained and we’ve invested in and they’re reliable subs, they’re not just anybody.

Can some of that be done in the summer, so they don’t have to have substitutes?

It can be done in the summer, it can be done during the regular school year, because not all the subs are engaged everyday of the school week. We could bring them in, pay them for six hours to be learning content, to be learning pedagogy, to be learning literacy, to be learning more and more of what we want them to teach. So for subs, you don’t have to wait for summer; you can do it as you go. In fact, I would require my sub pool to come in once a week for this kind of training, whether it’s three hours or five hours—it depends on how well I construct the content. But I would require them, and pay them, as being part of the sub pool, they’re going to play with the district game plan. They’re going to show up to these professional meetings, to these opportunities to learn more—about the curriculum, about the standards, about the assessments, about the resources available to the district and the school.

So, coaches for the folks who are teaching, and supports for the sub pool to make sure that the substitutes don’t make things worse while the others are learning. Allow the faculty to visit each other within the school building, to visit each other within the system, and surely to go visit places within the state that are doing good work. In other words, break down the isolation. You should also connect with universities so that you can get the best and brightest professors of mathematics, professors of science, to come and spend time in the school demonstrating and teaching content.

But the point is [you need] generous ways of investing in folks. I would reserve some of the one million to buy some “packaged” material. And the point is this: if I thought that the teachers knew what to do, they would be doing it. And in some cases, in some schools, in some grades, some teachers need the package. But I wouldn’t just give it to them. I would have them learn the package so well that they could redesign it and make it better. Too often we buy packages and just give it to folks, and they don’t understand what’s in the package, and within two or three weeks the package makes its way to the shelf. What we want are people who are capable of inventing those kinds of tools. That’s what we want. We don’t want just folks who can use the tool, we want folks who can invent a similar tool—improve it, make it better. And, I would go buy good assessments—[but] I would spend the bulk of that $1 million on my people, every year. Not just one year or once a year.

I would also use some of the money to reduce class loads if I could, especially in critical grades. In elementary schools I would reduce class sizes not only in first and second but maybe in fifth grade—before I sent them off to middle school. I would make sure that I had an opportunity to reduce the class sizes of 25, 26 kids to maybe 18, and maybe as low as 12 for some kids in some subjects.

And then I would use the other chunk of money for a very smart data person—a person who would dedicate his or her life just to observing, collecting, putting together the data that’s coming out of classrooms, out of our assessment programs.

And then I would connect with a group to come in and create a 10-week, eight-week assessment program, so we can monitor—weekly or during report card time—the growth being made by youngsters, and the growth not being made by youngsters. And then use the data to plow back and make decisions about how to bump assignments. Disaggregating ... the works.

Regrettably, however, right now that same one million dollars [is going] to hire more people, and the bulk of the system missed an opportunity to learn, again.