Garrett (below) is quite right to accuse the “Equity Project” and its Crimson promoters of a sneering elitism and a misapprehension of the nature of teaching. (This also applies, incidentally, to Teach for America, a reprehensible organization which embodies everything I hate about the Ivy League.) But what about his counterargument:

Educational failure has less to do with widespread underqualifcation of teachers and more to do with an increasingly stratified parallel between cultural achievement and academic achievement. Increasingly, school is losing its equalizing function and becoming a reifier of existing class values. When inner-city kids perceive (more or less accurately) the educational establishment as asynchronous with their values, and, more importantly, lacking any real mechanism for personal improvement, they disengage from it.

If you ask me — not that I imagine you would — Garrett is overintellectualizing the problem, and consequently has mixed up his cause and effect. Sure, there might be a widening conceptual gap between cultural success and educational success, but if so it’s likely because schools have over time failed to provide students with a toolkit for cultural success. Either way we have no evidence of this — and honestly, for any of us Harvard students to impute anything to “inner-city kids” is to tread in some pretty presumptuous waters.

Garrett’s dismissal of teacher quality is also wrongheaded. Empirically speaking, there is definitely a relationship between the quality of a teacher and the performance of their students — the question is how you define teacher quality, on which there is a vast and contradictory literature. I’m of the school of thought articulated by this 2007 study (PDF), which found that teacher quality mostly emerges sui generis from individual teachers regardless of their qualifications or background, and that one of the few quasi-reliable indicators of quality is simply experience:

By this reasoning, Garrett’s moderately-paid teachers in bucolic New Hampshire were probably loving and nurturing because they’d been at it for decades (just like mine in bucolic Ontario). And the way to produce more such teachers, then, is to keep them in the profession so they can build those skills — which, in today’s job market and in the troubled areas where schools are most needy, probably has to be done by dramatically improving compensation and job security. What kills education quality is turnover. (This, incidentally, is why Teach for America sucks so hard: people who teach for two years and then leave accomplish exactly nothing.) Ironically, the Equity Project would likely improve teacher quality, if not for the reasons it thinks; I’ll take it over Garrett’s critique, which is intellectually appealing but has no policy value.