But given the importance of teacher quality, it's harder to defend procedures that systematically encourage the best teachers to head for classrooms with the fewest difficulties, leaving new and inexperienced teachers to deal with the learning needs of students with the most severe problems. Meanwhile, schools in poor neighborhoods have to pay as much for a novice teacher just out of college as schools in more upscale neighborhoods pay for a teacher with a doctorate and 20 years of experience. Poverty-area schools inevitably wind up with the weakest teaching staffs. This approach to budgeting contributes to the turbulence in many low-income schools. Poverty-neighborhood schools are staffed by a shifting cast of new and poorly prepared teachers.
Faculties change too rapidly to pursue any sort of sustained improvement strategy.
Small wonder that every year, one-third of new teachers leave the profession. Those who stay learn to shut themselves off in their classrooms and ignore the rest of the school. Some districts claim to allocate disproportionate amounts of money to poverty-neighborhood schools. However, as Marguerite Roza has shown with Seattle, funding formulas that give extra weight to needy students are often a shell game. Senior teachers still cluster in the nicer neighborhoods.