The Sound of Silence from readers (with no corresponding dip in subscribers) leads me gratefully to believe that no one is going to mind too much if I give up on Martin Haberman for the moment. I will say (again) that his 1995 book “Star Teachers of Children in Poverty” is moving, creditable, and worth focused attention, but to approach his later work with caution. Hanna, a stalwart commenter and excellent teacher, sent a reflection on the matter I’ll quote at length here. It’s a thoughtful resolution to this troubling interaction with an educational theorist.

“When I read “Stars” I did wonder a good deal about what he based his conclusions on… I’m not sure this bothers me all that much though. It’s got something to do with that searching-for-keys-under-the-lamppost analogy – you know the one? If Haberman had stuck with the hard data, spending lots of time on analyzing and reporting on the frequency of particular responses, the conclusions he could have drawn might well have been so limited as to be relatively unhelpful. At times the value of a conclusion is less in its being certain than in its capacity to encourage different thinking and acting.

When I read “Star Teachers” I was working in an extremely dysfunctional school under an unstable principal with a criminal record, and I felt confused, angry and guilty. The “Star Teachers” book was the first one that felt as if it was remotely relevant to the landscape I was lost in. The surprise of this sense of familiarity, rather than any strength of his use of data, was what made me pay attention. The lessons of my education classes, in contrast, seemed to pertain to a different world. I remember feeling troubled and, I think, hurt by the lines about racist teachers in “Teacher Burnout,” by the implication that I might not simply be unsuccessful, but immoral as well.

Can Haberman be right on many or most counts? I do know that his “Pre-Screener” doesn’t work quite as he insists. This online test is linked from the front page of the Haberman Foundation and is supposed to identify psychological traits necessary for effective teaching. I first took it toward the end of that year in the ghetto school, and scored “high” on only 2/10 items predicting success as a teacher of children in poverty. That was one reason why I left for a private, Catholic school – I figured my Haberman test result was evidence enough that I was trying too hard at something I just couldn’t do. This spring, two years later, I took the screener again and now scored “high” on 8/10 items… Haberman keeps insisting that the “ideology” of star teachers is relatively stable, that the proper mindset can not be taught, and that it is very strongly correlated with success with children in poverty. It must be more complicated than that. While I think he captures something really central about the psychology of successful urban teaching, I feel that there’s something unfortunate or misleading about using the term “ideology” to describe it…

So Haberman does not have the last word on what it takes to be an effective teacher of children in poverty. But then, who has?… In the complex world of education there are going to be multiple, competing, and partially contradictory perspectives that all have value in some way. “