Do You Need to be a Parent to be a Good Teacher?

That's a simplistic question - clearly - but part of the discussion of this column at Slate by Sara Mosle.

You'll recall that I wrote a thread about an article in the NY Times about the movement of younger teachers in and out of of the classroom, particularly TFA teachers.

So Ms. Mosle, a former TFAer (20 years ago), gives an interesting perspective (bold mine):

The Times article, however, neglects another downside to charters' emphasis on youthful hiring: Many schools launch with few or no adults on staff who know first-hand what it's like to be a parent.

If you aren't a parent, maybe this won't strike you as odd. It wouldn't have struck me that way more than 20 years ago when I joined Teach for America in the program's first year and taught for three years in New York City's public schools. I was single, childless, and clueless about even the most basic aspects of child-rearing. My students' parents seemed like creatures from another planet, remote and distant from the job I thought I was doing. To the extent I understood family dynamics, it was solely from the perspective of the teenager I'd been just a few years before.

Nearly two decades later, I returned to the classroom, this time as a mother, and have become acutely aware of how being a parent has made me a better teacher.

Now when parents approach me with worries or high hopes for the future, I have greater respect for their commingled love and fears. I also have a far stronger sense than I did at 25 that children's lives are not static but instead endlessly fluid. They flow in waves of achievements and setbacks, with their own peculiar weather systems and mysterious currents that can change from week to week and month to year and, in the storms of adolescence, from hour to minute.

I don't believe a teacher has to be a parent to be a great teacher.  But, as one commenter on the story points out, the real issue is not that.  It's the teacher training.  Traditionally trained teachers usually get child development as part of their training.  

She also goes on to profile another ex-TFAer who started a charter school.

Like many of his fellow KIPP trailblazers, Hill, by his own estimate, worked north of 100 hours a week in a profession he regarded as less of a vocation than a crusade. 

At the time, he thought of his school like a Silicon Valley startup, which like all new ventures demanded insane hours. "We were a bunch of 25-year-olds," he recalled in a conversation this spring. "We'd be there every day, including on Saturdays and Sundays. We'd have students at the school until 10 o'clock each night—kids who needed a place to do homework or whatever."

And what happened?

The inevitable followed soon after: Many of Hill's original teachers got a little older, began to marry, and started families, just as they were blossoming into full flower as educators. Hundred-hour workweeks were no longer feasible. The charter was suddenly confronting issues like maternity leave that, incredibly, it had never faced before.

Go figure.  People get older, get married and have their own children. 

Unlike some charter proponents, Hill now recognizes the value of his veteran teachers. 

"Our people who are proven, who are good, are so irreplaceable," he told me. "It was just not an option for us to lose them." Hill says that his attitude isn't always shared or understood by some corporate backers who come "from fast-growth, nonpeople-dependent industries." But in teaching, Hill argues, your people are everything. Which is why he began to offer more flexible hours to top teachers who had become parents.

Ms. Mosle ends this way:

It's a lesson that more reformers would do well to learn.