SALT LAKE TRIBUNE November 27, 2007

HEADLINE: Born teachers: NCLB fails to reward innate talent

We’ve all known them - teachers who enlarged not only our cache of knowledge but also our reservoir of self-worth, who obviously cared about us as people, not only as their job. These teachers encouraged curiosity, fed it with facts and enticed it with questions that wheedled answers from the most uninterested youngsters among us.

These are the born teachers; they have personality traits that can’t be taught in college classrooms, and schools should do all they can to hold onto them.

So it’s not surprising that a majority of parents queried in a new study co-written by a Brigham Young University economist said that, when possible, they would choose such teachers. The parents were reflecting their children’s preferences.

The researchers’ questions required parents to indicate whether they would give “student satisfaction” or “high achievement” top priority, but it seems to us the two are not mutually exclusive.

Often students say they like teachers who are tough but fair, who expect them to work hard but praise them when they do and who respect them and expect them to do as well as they can.

Unfortunately, the federal No Child Left Behind law defining “highly qualified teachers” doesn’t recognize the value of these unquantifiable qualities possessed by many of the best teachers. It specifies only that a teacher have the correct academic degrees and college courses on their resumes. It does not allow a principal to take teaching ability into account, and that is especially unreasonable at small schools in rural Utah, where teachers often have several subjects on their plates at once.

The survey is more evidence that the one-size-fits-all federal law misses the point. It tries to do from Washington, D.C., what can best be done on the local level, where an individual teacher’s abilities can best be judged.

NCLB is not without benefits. It has forced schools to pay attention to the achievement of low-income, minority, disadvantaged and disabled students, separately from their white, middle-class counterparts.

But, when it comes to evaluating teachers, more than just degrees and college courses should be considered. Sometimes, innate character traits mean just as much, to students and to parents.