Last summer I wrote a post entitled " The Cult of the Magical Teacher: Our National Delusion ." Although this may come as a shock, I wasn't the first to recognize this alarmingly debilitating myth. It's been on people's minds for decades. It's only been exacerbated (along with its harmful effects) in the age of Teach for America and the deprofessionalization of the wonderful thing that is the art and science of teaching.





If you're unfamiliar with the myth, it goes a little something like this: there is an achievement gap in the country because our schools suck; teachers are the most important things in schools - so if the schools suck, the teachers must suck; but since we know that teachers are the only thing that matter in a child's education, it's teachers alone who can save our kids, if only they're willing to actually work hard (which, in most magical teacher narratives, involves something like working two or three jobs and getting a divorce), our schools would be good and our society would reach "end of history" status.





Rachel Levy recently posted on the questionable claims made by professionals (with mostly no background in education) about the capacity of excellent teaching to remedy some of society's most disturbing ills. But, as far as I can tell, research's voice on the magical teaching phenomenon is relatively new. It certainly doesn't go back as far as people have been telling magical teacher stories. It's only emerged as people have begun to call for increased federal and state accountability for public schools. Now that we're playing a massive national money game with kids' futures, we want to know how much teachers matter, how to assess their ability, and how to train them for excellence. Unfortunately, because much of this research is in its prenatal stage, we have a lot of non-educator research specialists talking out of their asses about moronic conclusions they can draw from the data. Give it a few decades and subtract the politics, and I'd wager everything I own that the research will do very little aside from provide more and more evidence that well-spent money, smaller class sizes, and better trained, more respected, and more experienced teachers are what work in schools.





strive to provide a quality education for all students (rather than just pretending), you can bet we'll see more and more money heaped on the arguments made by people like Until we get to a place where we actuallyto provide a quality education for all students (rather than just pretending), you can bet we'll see more and more money heaped on the arguments made by people like Michael Petrilli and Eric Hanushek as an investment against spending what would be required were our actions to actually live up to our words.





However, while researchers have their place in influencing the more facts-based minds among us, I'd argue that the far more culturally pervasive (and therefore destructive) force driving the American public's opinion about teaching in the wrong direction is the collection of magical teacher narratives that make their way onto the movie screen and into the book stores on a yearly basis, most of which are inspired/written by people who spent only a few years in the classroom. (On the plus side, they're easy to make fun of - see here , and here .)





A friend and former colleague of mine recently completed his master's thesis on this topic. He's an English teacher who is also a student of creative writing, which makes for an interesting perspective. I requested that he allow me to share part of his thesis on my blog, and being the incredible guy that he is, he agreed. The rest of this post is from his thesis. I hope you find it as interesting and informative as I did.



The following is an excerpt from Derek Smith's master's thesis, "The Myth of the Magical Teacher." Smith has been teaching Language Arts for eight years in Washington state and is in the process of completing his master's in non-fiction creative writing through Seattle Pacific University.





Consequences of the Magical Teacher Myth in Popular Teacher Narratives: Stretching Reality to Meet the Myth





Authors writing in the shadow of a pervasive myth grapple with it in various ways. Those striving to meet the narrative demands of the myth may end up altering the realities of their teaching in significant, unethical ways. One episode of the radio show This American Life on NPR (“Faustian Bargains”), for example, features LouAnne Johnson discussing with host Ira Glass the ways her book is different from the Dangerous Minds movie and television show inspired by her book. On screen, her character does things she would never do, she says, like host a fundraiser at a strip club. In the book, she never has her life threatened by a student. In fact, she taught an Honors program for students who have some but not all of the academic and behavioral struggles depicted on the small and big screens. She says that when she got her royalty check from the television show, she returned it.



