How Mrs. Grady Transformed Olly Neal
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT
IF you want to understand how great teachers transform lives, listen to the story of Olly Neal.
A recent study showed how a great elementary schoolteacher can raise the lifetime earnings of a single class by $700,000. After I wrote about the study, skeptics of school reform wrote me to say: sure, a great teacher can make a difference in the right setting, but not with troubled, surly kids in a high-poverty environment. If you think that, or if you scoff at the statistics, then listen to Neal.
In the late 1950s, Olly Neal was a poor black kid with an attitude. He was one of 13 brothers and sisters in a house with no electricity, and his father was a farmer with a second-grade education. Neal attended a small school for black children — this was in the segregated South — and was always mouthing off. He remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears.
“I was not a nice kid,” he recalls. “I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry.”
Neal adds: “She would have had good reason to say, ‘this boy is incorrigible.’ ”
(More here.)
NYT
IF you want to understand how great teachers transform lives, listen to the story of Olly Neal.
A recent study showed how a great elementary schoolteacher can raise the lifetime earnings of a single class by $700,000. After I wrote about the study, skeptics of school reform wrote me to say: sure, a great teacher can make a difference in the right setting, but not with troubled, surly kids in a high-poverty environment. If you think that, or if you scoff at the statistics, then listen to Neal.
In the late 1950s, Olly Neal was a poor black kid with an attitude. He was one of 13 brothers and sisters in a house with no electricity, and his father was a farmer with a second-grade education. Neal attended a small school for black children — this was in the segregated South — and was always mouthing off. He remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears.
“I was not a nice kid,” he recalls. “I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry.”
Neal adds: “She would have had good reason to say, ‘this boy is incorrigible.’ ”
(More here.)
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