KIDS THESE DAYS:

While killing time recently in a physician’s office, I read about Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C.

Rhee is generating a lot of noise for her efforts to get rid of bad teachers in the city’s schools.

She believes that teachers are the critical factor in the success of children.

“It drives me nuts when people say that two-thirds of a kid’s academic achievement is based on their environment. That is B.S.,” Rhee said in the Newsweek article. The article goes on to say: “She points to her second-graders in Baltimore whose scores rose from worst to best. ‘Those kids, where they lived didn’t change. Their parents didn’t change. Their diets didn’t change. The violence in the community didn’t change. The only thing that changed for those 70 kids was the adults who were in front of them every single day teaching them.’”

Two days after reading the Newsweek story on Rhee, I read a New Yorker story about a study to determine which teachers are good and which are bad.

The study, led by Bob Pianata, the dean of the University of Virginia’s School of Education, found that some of the standards for being a successful teacher are a “regards for a student perspective; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom.”

In other words, good teachers don’t insist on classroom control every minute of every day, which is the way teachers have been taught to teach for decades.

Allowing kids to learn, rather than teaching them, which is a huge break from traditional teaching philosophy, is consistent with the style that Newport-Mesa schools Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard told me he embraces.

The bottom line here was the same: A good teacher will make a tremendous difference in the educational success of a child.

The effect is so powerful that the New Yorker article stated that: “Teacher effects dwarf school effects: Your child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”

That is a tough one for parents to swallow. And because there is so much more to the school experience than just the teacher in the classroom, the conclusion should not make everyone want to rush out and test all teachers.

Fortunately, my kids have never been in a “bad” school. When compared with the schools in the Newsweek story, in fact, there are no bad schools in Newport-Mesa; that is, there are no schools where teachers are assaulted, where kids walk to and from schools regularly fearing for their safety or where students enter a classroom where only a few of the 20 or so computers work.

We should not, however, put too much emphasis or responsibility on teachers. Despite the focus on teachers in these two magazine articles, there is still the home environment to consider.

Give a teacher a student who has grown up in a learning environment, even for just his first five years, instead of one who has been raised where parents don’t care, and you have given that teacher a head start.

Both stories are correct: Good teachers do make a great difference in the learning success of students. But there is so much more to the equation.

Besides parents and teachers, there is the curriculum.

As I have stated before, California officials are asking teachers to teach far too much in far too little time. I have heard that refrain from teachers up and down the state, and why there is no challenge to the size of the curriculum is a mystery.

Oh, by the way, those magic class-size initiatives that are supposed to give teachers more time with kids to help produce better grades and test scores?

Nonsense, according to the New Yorker.

“Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects,” according to the article. “You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the 85th percentile.

“And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.”

But we’re still paying teachers far too little. As I write this, Los Angeles Angels first baseman Mark Teixeira is considering an offer of $160 million for eight years to play baseball.

STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer. Send story ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com.