Secrets of amazing teachers: What both sides of the education reform debate get wrong about autonomy and accountability

Elizabeth Green:

The common view of great teachers is that they are born that way. Like Michelle Pfeiffer’s ex-marine in “Dangerous Minds,” Edward James Olmos’s Jaime Escalante in “Stand and Deliver,” and Robin Williams’s “carpe diem”–intoning whistler in “Dead Poets Society,” legendary teachers transform thugs into scholars, illiterates into geniuses, and slackers into bards through brute charisma. Teaching is their calling—not a matter of craft and training, but alchemical inspiration.

Bad teachers, conversely, are portrayed as deliberately sadistic (as with the Sue Sylvester character on “Glee”), congenitally boring (Ben Stein’s nasal droner in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”), or ludicrously dim-witted (Mr. Garrison from “South Park”). These are the tropes of a common narrative, a story I’ve come to call the “Myth of the Natural-Born Teacher.”

Even in the rare cases where fictional teachers appear to improve—as happens in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” the novel-turned-film, in which a bland schoolteacher named Mr. Chips comes to “sparkle”—the change is an ugly duckling–style unmasking of hidden pizzazz rather than the acquisition of new skill. Others think Mr. Chips has become a “new man,” but in fact, we are told, he has only peeled back a “creeping dry rot of pedagogy” to reveal the “sense of humor” that “he had always had.”