This month's Atlantic has a provocative article posing the question, "What Makes a Great Teacher?" The author looks at work that the Teach for America project has done since 2002 to answer this question.
The findings suggest that students' socioeconomic status may not matter as much as is sometimes believed:
For decades, education researchers blamed kids and their home life for their failure to learn. Now, given the data coming out of classrooms like Mr. Taylor's, those arguments are harder to take. Poverty matters enormously. But teachers all over the country are moving poor kids forward anyway, even as the class next door stagnates. "At the end of the day," says Timothy Daly at the New Teacher Project, "it's the mind-set that teachers need--a kind of relentless approach to the problem."
