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Effective Teaching for All Students: A Civil Rights Perspective
Hal Smith
The National Urban League believes that any working definition of “excellence” in educational performance must state clear- ly that more is expected as an outcome for youth than minimum competency – or a deep exposure to mediocre teaching and content. “Excellence” requires mastery and proficiency – which fully prepares students for the world of college, work, and life. Our vision of equity and excel- lence at scale is that distributions of performance by different groups of stu- dents will no longer neatly follow identi- fiers such as race, language, socio- economic status, or gender. Furthermore, those distributions would evidence levels of performance high enough that U.S. stu- dents could participate on an even footing with the students of other nations.
Our education reform approach is built upon the premise that while any one individual reform or innovation approach holds substantial potential for some stu- dents, true promise lies in the untapped potential of using these reforms in informed and deliberate combination to address complex questions. Singular ap- proaches, even those as potentially valuable as those that aim to evaluate narrowly defined individual teacher effectiveness, limit what is possible. Seemingly intractable and complex problems such as those found in urban schools and communities require multifaceted and thoughtful solutions. There will be no single “silver bullet” approach to education reform and innovation or the improvement of out- comes for urban youth. Our principles hold that a portfolio, or suite, of tools, strategies, and approaches are required to deliver better outcomes for both histor- ically underserved and underperforming students and the schools in which they are educated.
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Hal Smith is vice president of education and youth development at the National Urban League. This perspective originally appeared in Voices in Urban Education 31 (Fall 2011) with the title “Perspectives: Civil Rights Considerations” as part of the article “Effective Teaching as a Civil Right: How Building Instructional Capacity Can Help Close the Achievement Gap” by Linda Darling-Hammond. VUE 31 was developed in partnership with the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, University of California Berkeley School of Law. Reprinted with permission from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.
