Toughness and Caring

By Nancy Hoffman

"Money can't buy me love," the Beatles so famously sang. They were right, but what they didn't say is that you can buy love's first cousin, care. In fact, you can get high-level care extremely cheap, especially if it's care for children, especially if it comes from a teacher.

What do I mean? I observe and work with teachers in some of our most challenging urban middle and high schools. Generally, what they are doing at these schools, sometimes with help from university folks like me, is working to raise academic standards for their students, to prepare them to take statewide tests, to ensure that they have the skills and knowledge to enter college or a job, to teach the responsibilities of citizenship, and to inspire them to love learning for its own sake.

We can evaluate teachers' performance through observing their teaching. Does she know her math? Does he explain clearly? Are her assignments appropriate? Increasingly, we know a lot about how to look at students' daily written work— the products of learning—to assess the results of teaching. And we can question students as we walk about their classrooms to find out whether they understand the purposes of the tasks their teachers have...