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Reading the opinions of some think tank dwellers can get pretty discouraging.  Many focus almost all their energies on teacher compensation or hiring models and seldom worry overmuch about how to build teachers' capacity for success.

Luckily, two items yesterday buoyed my spirits.

The first is a current Phi Delta Kappan article by Elena Silva, who attributes the success of Tennessee's Benwood Initiative to strong support for teachers. (See our profile of Chattenooga's "Benwood Schools," which boast impressive, long-term gains in student learning.)

Yes, pay incentives and some new teachers helped. But Silva argues that the district got the biggest bang for its buck from teachers who received "support and recognition from the whole community, resources and tools to improve as professionals, and school leaders who could help them help their students."

According to Silva, supporting teachers already working in low-performing schools pays off:

A new analysis of 'value-added' teacher effectiveness data indicates that over a period of six years, existing teachers in the eight Benwood elementary schools improved steadily. Before the Benwood initiative kicked off, they were far less effective than their peers elsewhere in the Hamilton County district. By 2006, a group of mostly the same teachers had surpassed the district average.

The second item that improved my mood was a blog posting by the Core Knowledge Foundation's Robert Pondiscio, who echoes Silva's analysis. He emphatically quotes the Fordham Foundation's Mike Petrilli: "Shouldn't we be thinking about how to make average teachers more effective, too, and augmenting them via technology and other stratagems, rather than putting all our eggs in the 'superstar teacher' basket?"

Pondiscio concludes with an important point:

If value-added [assessment] is used merely to hound mediocre teachers out of the business, we will have gained nothing. If it is used to determine what makes good teachers effective, and help those mediocre teachers move toward proficiency, then we have a shot.

Perhaps we should not spend all our time looking to outsiders for salvation. We would do better to cultivate the talents of the millions of people who work in public schools every day.