The previous post is a link to an essay by The Rev’d Dr. David Stokes. Herewith, a story that involves him.

When we met, David was the Rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Providence, Rhode Island, an Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement parish around which Brown University arranges itself. The God who rescued Israel from bondage in Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead, the Anglican divines, Karl Barth, Jane Austen, Walker Percy, Jaroslav Pelikan, Brevard Childs — I would go to Saturday morning mass at Smokey Steve’s and afterward over coffee David and I cosseted ourselves in all of the above. With encouragement from him and from George Hunt, the Bishop of Rhode Island, I resigned my Christian & Missionary Alliance pastorate to seek holy orders in the Episcopal Church.

It was the spring of 1993. I was at the Diocesan House in Providence waiting for my initial interview with the commission on ministry. David was already in the room with the commission. I was sitting in another room waiting for the signal to join them.

Kierkegaard was right. It’s dreadful to sit quietly in a room alone with nothing to do. I am neurotic about keeping a book on me to fortify myself against that circumstance. So when I opened my satchel and discovered that my book wasn’t there, anxious I scanned the room for something to read. It was lined with bookshelves empty but for two derelict loose leaf binders. Pushing them aside revealed a book: The 1992 Journal of the Diocese of Rhode Island.

A diocesan journal publishes everything a diocese formally considers in its annual convention. Nobody would ever confuse one with Barchester Towers or the novels of Susan Howatch. Still, it had a front and back cover, a binding, and sentences. Anodyne. I decided to let the book fall open and read whatever presented itself. It fell open at the section that records affirmations. The first words to shine upon my retinae were these, “We affirm the election of the Rev. William W. Wiedrich as Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese of Chicago.”

I wasn’t raised in the Church. I started going to church, Grace Baptist in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, as a sophomore in high school. The first Episcopal priest I knew was William Wiedrich. His son Tom was a friend and classmate at Sault High. We played varsity basketball together. Tom was a natural, beautiful jump shooter. Father Wiedrich came to our practices in his clericals. He’d shoot around with us. He rooted for us at games. He preached at my high school baccalaureate. I remember that at the baccalaureate each of us was given a round laminated button on which TUIT was typed. So many people told him they didn’t go to church because they didn’t get around to it, he said. He didn’t want us to ever have that as an excuse.

But back to the diocesan journal. The odds that I would be caught without a book are very small. The odds that the one book in that room would be the Diocesan Journal can’t be much better. Add that to the odds that the book would fall open to that page and that the first words to shine on my eyes would be about the first Episcopal priest I knew and tally it up with the odds that this would happen as I’m waiting to meet the committee that decides if I’ll make any progress toward being priested — it seemed to me then as it seems to me now that the odds against what happened have to be astronomical.

You don’t have to invoke the supernatural to account for any of it. Each of those things could have been just a coincidence, as could all of them added up together. A reasonable person could shrug it off as a fluke. Maybe it was. But it is also possible that it wasn’t a fluke, that it was providence, that the Most High was treating me to a drink on the house, letting me peek around the corner into the frontier between the seen and the unseen. I don’t know what you make of it, but I am the world’s leading authority on what I made of it. God was whispering from the wings. What I heard him saying was this. You have been expected. You are on schedule. You are taking the correct turn at the right time.

David Stokes and I talked about it. A woman at the Diocesan House gave me the telephone number of the Diocese of Chicago. When I got back to my study, it didn’t take me a minute to get around to it. I spoke with Bishop Wiedrich.

As so many things do, all of this relates to football. The Chicago Bears’ linebacker Brian Urlacher suffered a completely dislocated wrist in Lambeau Field the first Sunday of the NFL season. The Green Bay Packers beat the Bears that night, 21 – 15. When Urlacher got back to Chicago, he went directly to the team’s hand and wrist surgeon for an operation, an all night affair early that Monday morning. How do I know? The surgeon, Tom Wiedrich, told me.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. 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. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. 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 eighty-fifth 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.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.

The New Yorker