Are they unteachable?

I am always taken aback when teachers tell me that their students are essentially unteachable, that there’s little they can do to educate children who arrive at school unfed, unprepared and unmotivated.

“I can’t be a social worker, parent, nurse and police officer and still teach,” teachers say. Or, as one teacher told me recently, “If you want a better product, send us better raw material.”

I want to ask, “Then, why bother? If you believe that you can’t make a difference for these children, that their generational poverty, their hapless parents or their gene pool consigns them to the educational scrap heap, why teach at all?”

Such a response would trigger the immediate charge that I was bashing teachers and the complaint that I never faced a roomful of indifferent 13-year-olds with third-grade math skills and empty stomachs.

But many teachers across the state have had those challenging students in their classrooms and succeeded

Fresh evidence of that achievement can be seen in the statewide surge in CRCT scores. Georgia students improved on all 14 of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests with the most sizable gains in math and science where teachers redoubled their efforts after stunning failures in the past. (The CRCT measures whether students grasp the state curriculum and plays a key role in the promotion of students in grades 3, 5 and 8.)

What makes some teachers successful with so-called “unteachable” kids and others not?

One of the best explanations comes from Martin Haberman, a leading authority on preparing teachers for urban, poor schools and developer of the National Teacher Corps. Hundreds of school systems nationwide use the selection criteria devised by Haberman to identify teachers most likely to succeed and stay in urban schools.

Haberman contends that it’s not teacher training that matters most, but an interview process that drills deep into whether teacher candidates believe that students can learn despite lives marred by poverty, violence, gangs, drugs or fractured families. Without a bedrock belief that poor children are not defined nor doomed by their life circumstances, teachers can’t succeed, he says.

When I sat down with him at a conference once, Haberman expressed skepticism toward the teacher recruitment efforts to lure promising young college scholars to struggling schools. Such teachers, he said, are only dabbling in most cases and will eventually capitulate to pressure from their families to get an MBA or go to law school.

“We should thank them for going to law school, ” he said. “We shouldn’t be luring people who don’t want to be there. There are plenty of people who want to be there.”

Besides, it’s not enough, he said, that enthusiastic young teaching applicants profess a great love for children. As any veteran teacher will agree, students aren’t always lovable. That’s why it’s more important to hire teachers who believe that kids are still teachable even when they aren’t lovable, he said.

In Haberman’s research, the most effective teachers tend to be mature adults who come to the classroom later in life and who live or grew up in the local community. They are not shocked by the conditions of the school or the chaos of their students’ homes, so they carry neither pity nor fear with them into the classroom.

What they do bring is a steely determination to reach their students and a refusal to blame their own lack of success on the kids, the parents or the neighborhoods.

Yes, these “star” teachers, as Haberman describes them, encounter all the same problems as their ineffective colleagues, a group that Haberman distinguishes as the quitters and failures. (Half of the teachers in urban schools quit within three years.) But they aren’t immobilized by the problems.

“Star teachers believe that, regardless of the life conditions their students face, they as teachers bear a primary responsibility for sparking their students’ desire to learn,” Haberman said.

“They do not wear down easily nor do they blame the students and their inadequacies,” he said. “Rather, they assume responsibility for doing more. They believe that success is a result of persistence and effort and that students have great potential if given ample motivation and opportunity.”

When teachers argue they can’t overcome a student’s background, they underestimate their power to change lives and they shortchange their profession. If childhood poverty were destiny, we’d have a lot fewer doctors, teachers and lawyers today. Children whose backgrounds would predict only failure achieve every day in Georgia because of smart, inventive and dedicated teachers.

Those achievements don’t come easily. And teachers, no matter how dedicated, can’t engage and reach every child. However, the teachers who change lives never stop trying.

Maureen Downey’s education column appears Monday in the Opinion section. She can be reached at mdowney@ajc.com.