Ex Post Teacher Quality
I really highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s article on quarterbacks and teacher quality in the current New Yorker. Unfortunately, I think that when talking about this important paper from Thomas J. Kane, Douglas O. Staiger, and CAP’s own Robert Gordon he gets a bit too entranced by the slightly mysterian notion that it’s impossible to identify effective teachers in advance. That may be true, but what the paper actually says is that our current certification methods don’t in fact do a good job of predicting teacher effectiveness.
One response to this could be to try harder to dream up a better method. But while it would probably be good to do some research into this issue, the Kane/Staiger/Gordon research also indicates that we could do a lot to improve the quality of instruction in our schools without identifying such a method. That’s because ex post evaluations of teacher effectiveness are pretty reliable predictors of future performance. In other words, if we look at the first few years of a teacher’s performance we can get a pretty good sense of how well she or he will fare over the course of her career.
The main policy implication of this is that we should be less strict about who we let into the classroom in the first place (since our current ex ante screening mechanism doesn’t work) and more strict and evidence-based about who we give tenure to (since we have good ex post screening mechanisms that we just don’t make much use of). A secondary implication is that it makes sense, at the margin, to commit resources to things that are more likely to draw applicants into the teaching profession through, e.g., higher salaries than on things like smaller class sizes. Basically, we should increase starting salaries and relax (or scrap) credentialing requirements, then make tenure decisions after a few years based on value-added test measures along with financial incentives to try to get the best performing teachers into the high-poverty schools and classrooms where they’re most needed.
Teacher quality is the internal-to-the-school variable that has the biggest apparent impact on students’ learning, and we actually have decent ways of measuring teacher performance. But we don’t actually do very much to put that information to good use. It’s a tremendous waste.
65 Responses to “Ex Post Teacher Quality”
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December 15th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Some other things we don’t do:
make it easy to pull kids out of classes when it’s obvious that they aren’t well matched to a particular teacher;
match a child’s learning style to a teacher’s style — put the kinetic learner in the active teacher’s class, the mechanical learner in the teacher’s class who likes to blow things up, etc.
teaching to a child’s learning style is so important. Gladwell ought make it the topic of his next book.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I think there needs to be some way to track the kids throughout their 12/13 year progress. The kids really need someone who is looking out for them year-to-year, someone who is an advocate for them, and someone who acts like a mentor for them. I think it would be great if we could think of some system to do that, make it the default option for all kids, then allow parents to opt out or switch counselors if they want to. There are many details to be worked out obviously, but I think a plan like this would provide the most bang for the buck for those needing the most help.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
I dunno, I found the comparison a bit irritating. The problem with QBs is that being a college QB is superficially very similar to being an NFL QB, but is actually very different. It’s not that we have no information on QBs before the draft, it’s that the information isn’t all that applicable to the job they’re going to do. Very little in a prospective teacher’s background is as deceptively similar to teaching as NCAA QB’ing is to NFL QB’ing.
It’s also not clear to me that the kind of teaching advocated in the article is itself unteachable. It’s a craft — seems to me that you can teach people strategies for dealing with a class and with individual students, and that they can practice those strategies, get better at them, and become better teachers.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
One problem with Gladwell’s argument is already noted, the overstatement of how hard it is to decide whom to hire. I’d have to be convinced it’s that much harder than in any other business, and I’m not going to advise my boss to hire other editors with coin flips and see who works out.
But there are other problems as well. It seems to overstate how much we’re besieged by people dying to teach, and we should just let them. That in turn is the right’s way of pretending we pay teachers enough. I mean, are we really going to get four times the teachers we have now just by saying so? Who? Especially when they could be teaching private school and avoiding the inner city?
It overstates the special protection of tenure and the value of eliminating it. That in turn is the right’s way of putting the blame on labor. In most businesses, you have to be pretty bad to get fired outright, unless the job is eliminated. Conversely, we do allow some teacher firings, and some degree of protection from arbitrary decisions by superintendents really does have value when a teacher is out there trying to make his or her case in words to students. For another example, I know the private sector is an answer to everything, but I don’t recall any teacher at my private high school ever having left or been fired.
Finally, it seems to overlook the obvious, that to the extent this will help teacher quality, it will be because three in four teachers will fail miserably, with students suffering. This is the most peculiar definition of improved schools I’ve heard. All I can say for it is that at last it’s an admission that the free market’s mythic greatness is going, when it exists at all, to be due to Darwinian forces, not to Lamarckian drives to be perfect.
Matt has this peculiar weakness for libertarians. He could use a healthy reminder of “in the long run we’re all dead.”
December 15th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Your still missing the fundamental problems. First is pay. In relationship to everything a teacher has to do to become a teacher and stay a teacher, their pay is not commiserate to the requirements of them. A new teacher needs to be “highly qualified” in their field of study which means they have to major in that subject in college. Fine for history, gym and such, but tell me what math or science major wants to come out of college and start at a salary of roughly $40,000 and max out at $70,000 thirty years later. People are quick to say teachers need to do this and teachers need to do that, r u kidding? For the amount of money they make I’m surprise we get this good of a selection of teachers. Unbeknown to most people is that teachers have to complete 100 hours of training every five years of teaching. Again yet another requirement not seen any other field on this pay grade level. Its easy to blame the teachers for the current state of education, and some do certainly share in the blame. But by far and large, most teachers are grossly under paid over worked and over stressed. Its not a cake walk job that many assume.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
While I am at it, I will cite a personal pet peeve. Teachers are, understandably, subject to such intensive background checks that even the most minor, seemingly-irrelevant violations come up. Again, I think this is good, clearly we want to know a lot about anything teachers may have done in their past that would compromise their ability to teach and/or to act in a custodial role. That said, this information is then used in ways that is wholly inappropriate, excluding candidates for things like an underage drinking citation. How that is relevant to one’s ability to teach, esp. given the ratio of people who drink underage to the people who get caught, is beyond me… Exclude a whole group of supremely qualified people on a basis that I seriously doubt is in any way correlated with teaching ability.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Really? But what if internal-to-the-school variables are dwarfed in their relative importance? Can you really isolate teachers’ effectiveness from the environment imposed by the administrators? Assertions like this may at first sound good… but that doesn’t make them useful or even insightful.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
I’m hardly an expert on this topic, but I did at least attend public schools. So much of what I read about this topic doesn’t seem to have any relation to the reality of what most public schools are like. I find myself wondering if Matthew Yglesias has even literally stepped inside of a public school in his lifetime.
The comparison between teaching and being an NFL quarterback is so stupid it defies belief. There are thousands of athletes that would love to be an NFL quarterback and there are less than 100 available openings. The only difficulty is figuring out which athletes would be the best quarterbacks. The situation with teachers is quite different. There are a lot of people that want to be teachers, but we need a lot of teachers for all our kids. The truth is being able to figure out who the best teachers are going to be is probably mostly a zero-sum game — the ones that are going to be lousy teachers will probably wind up teaching somewhere.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
One problem is that the educational system has an incentive to deny the basic fact that new teachers are often terrible: no parents will want their kids in classes taught by new teachers.
I think the basic premise of the Gladwell article makes sense: we should reduce the barriers to entry into the profession and use the first couple years of performance as the basis of determining who is retained. But, what do we say to the parents of the first grader who gets a terrible rookie teacher? Ideally, we need a system that eases these new teachers in in a way that reduces the potential damage to the students. Maybe all new teachers should have reduced class sizes, which would be beneficial because (1) less students would be stuck with a bad rookie teacher and (2) the rookie teacher would probably be able to perform better with less students. After the first year, the teacher would either be (1) fired, (2) promoted to a full-size classroom, or (3) given a slightly bigger class and reviewed again the following year.
I think it’s also worth considering the idea of exceptional teachers having larger classes. So, if a school has 120 third-graders, instead of simply having four classes with 30 students, how about a system where one exceptional teacher has 40 students, two OK teachers have 30 students each and one rookie teacher has 20?
And pay could be variable. If the barrier to entry is reduced, then new teachers would likely be willing to accept reduced salaries for their first year or two. Exceptional teachers who are able to get positive results out of oversized classrooms would receive higher salaries.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Your still missing the fundamental problems. First is pay.
How so? I said we ought to pay teachers higher salaries to make the job more attractive, and then pay even higher salaries to the most attractive teachers. Do you think lower salaries would help?
December 15th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
But what if internal-to-the-school variables are dwarfed in their relative importance?
Then we should also do stuff to improve children’s health care and reduce the child poverty rate. But the fact that reducing the poverty rate is important is no reason not to implement the most effective teacher quality policies we can find.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
It’s not that we have no information on QBs before the draft, it’s that the information isn’t all that applicable to the job they’re going to do.
Actually, Football Outsiders (www.footballoutsiders.com) has found that among college QB’s drafted in the first and second rounds, NFL performance correlates fairly closely with two stats — college completion percentage and number of starts. Limiting the sample to first and second rounders eliminates guys from small schools or in goofy offensive systems that have great stats but lack NFL-caliber physical tools. Identifying players with the required size and arm strength to play in the NFL is relatively easy — but physical ability is a necessary condition for NFL success, not a sufficient one. Looking at completion percentage and number of starts allows teams to identify those college players with the accuracy, decision making ability and durability needed to succeed in the NFL.
I have no idea whether one could figure out ways to identify good teachers in advance, but I don’t see any particular reason why it couldn’t be done. The fact that it hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it can’t. But is there any evidence that potentially talented teachers are being excluded under the current system, as opposed to choosing not to enter the market because the job is not attractive due to low compensation or other reasons? Why not be more selective about giving tenure and more aggressive in identiying and eliminating the worst teachers without lowering standards up front?
December 15th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
One problem with your proposal and an observation; the problem is knowing who will teach best in the toughest schools. The fact that someone does very well teaching priviledged kids in a private school for example doesn’t necessarily mean they will fare well in a tough public school. So, how do we determine what qualities allow someone to succeed in tough schools and identify people with those qualities?
The observation is this; I teach college and I can tell you that no one teaches college teachers to teach. I’ve known and been taught by some who are highly intelligent, know a lot and are passionate about their subjects but can’t communicate to save their lives and don’t seem to public speaking in the first place.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Gladwell’s article is interesting, but just like folks above, I wonder if Gladwell has ever stepped into a classroom:
We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.
I know this is one of those Gladwellian counterintuitive moments, but really — lowering standards? If we’re lowering pay… maybe. (Yeah, that’ll happen.) In addition, call me elitist, but it seems to me that the “degree and a pulse” standard is already in effect.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
One problem is that the educational system has an incentive to deny the basic fact that new teachers are often terrible: no parents will want their kids in classes taught by new teachers.
When California went to a limit of 20 kids per class for K-3, one of the unintended consequences was that there was a need for many new inexperienced teachers. There was one public elementary school in a wealthy Los Angeles area that proposed a unique compromise: have the newbie teacher team-teach with an experienced wonderful teacher. Put 40 kids in that one team-taught classroom. All 40 kids would get the benefit of the great experienced teacher while also getting the benefit of having the 20 to 1 teacher to student ratio. The newbie teacher would get the benefit of seeing a good, experienced teacher in action. Win-win.
Naturally, since it was such a good idea, the CA dept of education said no, if the school wanted the funds to go to 20 to one, they had to have the teachers in separate classrooms. But no reason why the concept couldn’t actually be used.
December 15th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Seems to me:
1. the quarterback to teacher comparison is not helpful. Selecting candidates for any profession is determined by:
1. the variability in the applicant pool (large variability means that weak selection tools are still effective);
2. the critical difference factor. How hard is it to be effective in the profession? Professional football is competitive, which means that, no matter how good all quarterbacks are, better quarterbacks will succeed and worse will fail. Finding good teachers is not a zero-sum game. And it’s hard to determine how difficult it is to be a good teacher.
3. The sensitivity of the assessment tools.
Another topic. Teacher assessment. I’m amazed how poorly student and parent feedback are used in k-12 education. I’m a parent, and I’ve had a very difficult time trying to deliver constructive feedback to my daughter’s teachers. Any criticism is taken as an attempt to get the teacher fired.
Longitudinal student assessment. Seems to me that one of worst features of “no child left behind” is cross-sectional assessment of the performance of a group of students. I think Jimboslice (#2) is correct. Longitudinal assessment of students will be a great advance, to both students and teachers. Vis-a-vis teachers, it would permit an estimate of how much a group of students progressed (or an individual student progressed) during the course of a school year.
Finally, regarding davido’s comment (#13): isn’t it remarkable how different the teaching model in the k-12 system is compared to the university system? No one in colleges or universities is taught how to teach. There is no barrier to teaching, other than non-teaching, academic performance. This makes for some astounding teachers and some truly terrible ones.
December 15th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Matt, I think two points are relevant here.
One- The “very important paper” you cite is a perfect example of why one should be careful when reading anything produced by a think tank… even if you generally agree with its overall ideology. The review of the research literature presented in that paper does not even come close to giving an accurate picture of the research literature on the topic. This would not pass muster at a third tier academic journal.
Two- Since you visited Finland, I’m sure you already know that the reform policies Finland put in place in the 90’s was centered around teacher training, and the university-based system they’ve developed mirrors teacher training on this side of the pond. [learning theory, methods, social theory & practicum] The difference in outcome is a result of greater degree of symmetry between actually existing public schooling and teacher training and [quite frankly] the Finns just do a better job.
December 15th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Class size is a bad counter-example there, Matt. While I doubt it is as well correlated as salary, too large of classes absolutely will discourage people from staying (and perhaps even from entering), it changes the whole dynamic and not in a good way.
December 15th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
As a public high school teacher in Florida, I have to say that a lot of what is being proposed sounds great, but….. Where is the money coming from to hire these teachers? My own district has decided to ‘encourage’ veteran teachers, good vets too, to retire so they can either hire a new teacher cheaper or, more likely, simply not replace them. There has been discussion of saving money by letting the vets go and having some folks teach out of field, in order to shrink the work force. We have been told that we are getting no more copy paper this year, and to expect to pick up an extra period next year. Our budget for the district, we have been told, will be zero next year; no money. A neighboring county just laid off 10 teachers. Until we figure out money, it’s all pie in the sky
December 15th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
You all should review the current NY Times Magazine “Ideas” issue for the idea contained in the description of Washington DC’s proposed new contract with teachers. It has not been accepted and I do not know why other than what is in that piece. But I think it is well linked with this discussion and issue, and is an attempt to get a program going that both pays teachers well and offers a means to evaluate the best.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
I’d posit that principal’s vision, leadership expertise, and educational philosophy have stronger influences on the educational process. These affect the whole school, not just a small group of students. The same tools to measure teacher performance also measures building level performance and socio-econ effects can be factored in with data analysis/modeling.
Also a school building, or dept level constraint would be support for teachers – how does the district or the building help teachers do their job. Behavior, learning support, parent and community education, research, etc.
Another factor not often looked at thoroughly is textbook and support materials being selected. All too often, teachers are asked to develop support materials or not given time to study new materials to find the most effective ways to present the information.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
We aren’t even at the state of political agreement that this is anything like a true statement yet, much less able to think about using it. The official teacher union line is still that you can’t identify good and bad teachers by looking at testing. Until they admit that, or we start igoring them, reform isn’t going anywhere.
December 15th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
I’ve seen new teachers with absolutely no experience or training and they are awful, one would say destructively so. Those that are trained at the colleges are much better, learn faster, and are much, much better in the end. I see no reason to open the door up to more unqualified teachers to pick the best of the lot. The real issue is that for most, there is no ongoing training for teachers, once they have their first job. I’ve had my principal in my class once every three years for a re-eval, but beyond that there is no feedback on what I am doing, how effective it is, really nothing. Studies also show that after six years, there is no natural improvement with experience so the teacher who has been teaching for 20 years is the same on experience as one who has taught six. Ongoing teacher improvement is the only way to ensure we get top quality teachers in every classroom. Other countries do it, so should we.
December 15th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
I was thinking about this last night. You (says the article) can get the same boost by hiring a teacher in the 85th percentile of performance as you could by halving class size, i.e., doubling the number of your average teachers.
So, you can structure your school to depend on finding teachers who are better than 4/5 of the teachers out there, or you can structure it to use twice as many average teachers. If it’s set up for super-teachers, of course there will be years when you screw up and don’t actually hire super-teachers. OTOH, if it’s set up for normal teachers, well, that’s the kind you always have.
Remember, all of this talk about super-teachers always ends with the vague assurance that we’ll somehow spend lots more money in the poorest schools, so cost is not an object in this thought experiment.
Given the choice between investing in schools designed to be run by normal administrators and normal teachers, or investing in schools that get the same results only when super-administrators use their super skills to choose super teachers….well, call me a Jacksonian Democrat, but I’m going to put my faith in the average guy.
December 15th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
It’s not to hard to see where the antipathy to smaller classes is coming from. Smaller classes means more teachers, and teachers are presumed, in the rarified altitudes of people who would never actually send their child to a public school, to be the enemy.
If you’ve been reading Matt for long, you will have noticed that he thinks the big problem with American education is that teacher’s unions are blocking change. He may be a little vague about what change they’re blocking, or why they shouldn’t do that, but he never fails to blame teacher’s unions for the problems.
December 15th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
And remember, all these suggestions, if implemented, pretty much become meaningless the minute the teacher enters the room only to see kids who have no prior knowledge of anything, and must be remediated before they can be taught anything. Remember the “low-information voter”? They raise low-information kids.
Parents are the mentors a commenter mentioned earlier. Without them, we get what we have, and so many of you want teachers to raise the kids, as well as teach them. Well, I would like to raise my own son, and I would like others to raise theirs!
December 15th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
you know…it seems kind of stupid that it needs pointing out, but Gladwell is simply saying something that has always been true. That certain skillsets cannot be evaluated because the relevant ability underlying said skillset is not transparent to analysis. This is because it’s always in some kind of quantum state gestalt. The evidence is always about what happened in the interrelationships between mind and moments. That result is always tangled with the circumstances, when you really need evidence about the mind. The quarterback thing, believe it or not, is highly applicable metaphor. This pretty much means that in many occupations like commissioned officers, NFL quarterbacks, teachers, and any other occupations where one has to track large numbers of human agencies, the only real way to find out whether someone is any good is to work them out either in very controlled circumstances or just throw ‘em out the airplane.
Pretty much everyone who wants to know already knows this, including Gladwell with that Blink book of his…The problem with the good method is what people have said before–that it is profoundly wasteful. You kill alot of soldiers before you get to Jackson or Grant or Ridgeway. Your team sucks while you try out inexperienced quarterbacks. It costs a hundred thousand dollars and a couple of years to find a good employee. Bad teachers, especially in math, ruin many students ability and confidence in their natural skills. Everybody is *highly* motivated to introduce some miracle technique or test that will skip all of that laborous and wasteful mess. The fact that there *isn’t* a test means that the process is driven to push the costs onto others and deny the need. No Child Left Behind, a hot scout, a self-promoting general. That’s why the teachers unions are recalcitrant on topics like merit pay and “flexibility”. The only way to do it right is to spend a great deal of money and tolerate a high degree of failure–things that *no* municipality is willing to tolerate. All else is bullshit.
December 15th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
buckyblue (#24) raises a good question: why isn’t there more ongoing training for teachers? The Gladwell article makes it seem like smart educators could watch videotape of a teacher and easily point out examples of what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. How about rotating a camera around the school so that each teacher gets taped for a whole week once a year and then have an assistant principal (or some veteran teachers) in charge of reviewing a small portion of the tape?
I’m sure most teachers would be happy to receive both positive and negative feedback if it was constructive and specific, as opposed to just getting blamed for low test scores.
December 15th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Sure, those are fine suggestions. But you specifically posit that it’s a tremendous waste to not use what we supposedly know about teachers’ impact. Again, where’s the insight in this line of argument for reform? Of course some teachers are better than others. Is this degree of variability across vastly different levels of experience unique to teaching as a profession? I doubt it from my experience… and if not, why think that a meaningful large-scale policy can be designed to eliminate such variability among teachers if it exists among engineers in industry?
For the sake of discussion, even if I grant that teacher quality is a huge problem and that teaching efficacy can be measured, suggested policies to address these issues are oblivious to practical realities. Schools are living, breathing entities that thrive on a spirit of cooperation and collegiality. How would merit pay affect the school environment? Teachers I know think it’d be a disaster in any of the proposed forms.
A basic hindrance to meaningful reform is a general lack of respect for teachers among students, parents, and society at large. Pay scale is a part of this, but not all of it. This mindset is reflected in the commonplace restrictions placed on basic teaching supplies (e.g., photocopies); such daily restrictions would be seen as absurd in an office of a more respected profession. Moreover, reformers who consistently seek to impugn teachers exacerbate the problem. Sure, there are bad teachers and always will be… as we should expect in a large country. Teacher policies should be viewed as incremental adjustments and not touted as magic bullets. Large-scale reform demands a larger perspective and that apparently frustrates the ‘data driven’ analysts.
December 15th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
wk makes the point; the reformers don’t care what happens to those living, breathing entities. Indeed, Republicans tend to fell no pity for anyone or anything, especially, it seems, teachers.
The larger perspective wk mentions I believe is society. We need to reduce poverty, and return respect to teachers. At least give us as much fucking copy paper as we need!
December 15th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Just commenting here makes one a bad speller! (that should be feel, not fell)
December 15th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I like shah8’s (#28)’s comments.
December 15th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
My vote is to bring new teachers in for elective courses, and let them learn to teach there. Less pressure, no end of grade testing. Even in my public schools we had environmental science, psychology, and other such courses. With EOG testing, good teachers are those that know how to prepare their students for these tests. No junior teacher can possible have any sense of what is going to be tested. They need time and space to learn the way the ’system’ works. My other vote is to start them in private ed. I did this and loved it. I never switched actually to public teaching even though i went to public schools from elementary through university. For me, my years spent teaching at a private, well funded, well run middle school were like a dream compared to my own experiences. Average cost per pupil at 14k with 9k in tuition, so it was not terribly expensive.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:10 am
1) Why is an approach that relies on the bottom 85% of teachers being replaced by people who are as good as the top 15% considered more feasible than, say, eliminating poverty? Or, less drastically, reducing class size?
2) I thought education reformers were strong advocates of national standards, standardized tests, etc. While dreamy-eyed idealists think education is about making a child creative and curious and poetic, hardened realists understood that our struggling students really just need to get down the basic arithmetic and reading skills that are measured well by testing. So it surprises me that the secret to getting these reforms in place is being able to discover the SuperTeachers out there who have Peyton Manning-level talent. What happened to Teaching Without Heroism?
In short, Matt’s ideas on education reform strike me as somewhat incoherent, although I suspect it would seem a lot more sensible if I simply wanted to get rid of the teacher’s union.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:27 am
wk: “Schools are living, breathing entities that thrive on a spirit of cooperation and collegiality. How would merit pay affect the school environment? Teachers I know think it’d be a disaster in any of the proposed forms.”
there is no profession in the universe where everyone is paid the same, including teaching. Teachers get tenure and seniority. Unfortunately, that is also an incredibly shitty way of doing it–imagine if top engineers were paid the same as the worst ones (that worked at the company the longest). What kind of world would that be? That’s the situation we have in education.
it’s sure convenient to say, hey, let’s not blame the teachers, let’s blame the whole society. The teachers are doing the best they can! It’s too hard/unrealistic to improve teacher quality! And it is really hard. But it’s still orders of magnitude harder/unrealistic to eliminate inner city poverty or some shit like that. Either we start somewhere, or let’s forget the whole thing.
I’m not prepared to give up on our kids just yet.
p.s. people would respect teachers more if they clearly weren’t so many incompetent ones clogging up a broken education system, and if these incompetents weren’t protected from accountability by co-worker collusion. Teacher unions are by design supposed to maximize the interests of the teachers versus the administration/government. That’s what unions do. But what the union doesn’t do is look out for the interests of the students. Can someone explain to me ANY good reason why middle school teachers should have “tenure”? Is there some compelling academic freedom which we must protect for 6th grade math teachers?
December 16th, 2008 at 2:34 am
Barbar: we don’t need super teachers. But the current crop ise so crappy that an infusion of new blood could do a lot. Look at Teach for America. it’s silly to suggest we can’t identify, recruit, train, minimally DECENT teachers. that doesn’t necessarily even involve firing people; just putting in place some feedback and training programs for existing teachers makes a big difference. see buckyblue’s comment above.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:57 am
Interesting strawman argument, raft… but you’re clearly distorting what I said.
I acknowledge that reforming teacher policies might be helpful… but that doesn’t mean it’s THE solution as the current strain of reformers like to imply. It’s not hard to cherrypick a few statistical studies and claim you have the answer. I could play that game too. Yes, merit pay sounds good in principle—but the devil is in the details.
I didn’t say we have to immediately reform all of society or give up. For serious reform, start by putting money where our collective mouths: fund education at an appropriate level. If we don’t value it enough to pay for it (e.g., basic supplies and facilities), why should we expect a high level of performance? Would expect top-notch results from an engineering company whose offices lacked sufficient paper and/or working bathrooms? But money doesn’t solve everything, so there will also be a need to sift out the dead wood in the teaching AND administrative ranks (and school boards).
Plenty of room for lots of reform ideas… but simply bashing teachers and their unions is a gross ideological simplification that doesn’t really add to the discussion.
December 16th, 2008 at 5:01 am
who is claiming that reforming teacher policies is “THE solution”? talk about a strawman argument. We need to push on all fronts.
i was specifically responding to your argument that merit pay would destroy the “spirit of cooperation and collegiality” in public schools. That’s the worst objection i’ve heard yet! please.
December 16th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Well, Raft, I can explain why elementary school teachers should be protected against red baiting and witch hunting.
My mother was an elementary school teacher. In about 1958 she learned she could get a free subscription to China Reconstructs, a magazine published by the Chinese government at the time. However, to be allowed to receive this, she had to sign a document for the US government that said she wanted to receive Communist propaganda.
At the time, our local high school was under attack by rightwing nutcases who insisted the school was run by Communists. You can still read some of what they had to say today because this was Bellevue High School, the school Obama’s mother attended. The major piece of “evidence” was that one or two teachers belonged to the ACLU.
Believe it or not, there are still people out there who would try to mess with teachers at any grade level about this kind of silliness. Just last year in my district we had to vote out three school board members who were going into the classrooms and messing with the teachers. Freedom isn’t something you inherit, it’s something you earn.
December 16th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Barbar, I don’t think we live on the same planet. My children, and the children they went to school with, were, for the most part, happy to learn. They want to learn. School usually got in the way of learning. They waited until the end of the day, to get out of school, for their fun learning to begin.
Yes, there does need to be skill building, ‘repeat this till you know it,’ stuff that’s boring. But so much of school is based on that, and so little is designed to teach critical thinking that our students are coming out, all to often, dumbed down. We don’t teach logic by teaching how to add. We teach it via proof theory. One’s boring, the other ought to be exciting. We don’t teach writing in penmanship and spelling class, we teach it when we examine other’s writing and when we apply the principals of logic to our own ideas and responses to the world. And it should be exciting.
Yes, each child should learn the basics of sentence construction, spelling, math. But some won’t. Some, like our dear host (and me,) won’t get the spelling. Yet I never had an editor turn me down because of my spelling. The weight of my work, my ability to research and interview, was worth more then the liability of my spelling; a copyeditor could fix that.
The point is that currently, too many children are left behind because of a single liability, they aren’t pulled ahead because of their gifts. And the aggregate of those individual liabilities in a classroom dumb the entire class down.
I’ve got children in the top 5% in math/science; dismal failures in school because they’re also in the bottom 30% in writing. At about age 20, when their cerebral cortexes developed (this happened to me, to my siblings, and I bet it happened to Matt,) the writing wasn’t such a big deal any longer, and they began to produce, all those lessons in writing took hold.
But the stains of the failures linger. So I’m advocating for child-based education. Teach to the child. Each one is different, has different abilities, strengths, gifts, weaknesses. We don’t all need to be good at the same things. And thank God for that.
But we should each be taught to bring out our abilities, to help find the places where we’ll best find success and happiness. That might be Mr. Gladwell’s point; the best just happen to find environments that do that for them.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
zic: I don’t think you understood my comment.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
“The problem with the good method is what people have said before–that it is profoundly wasteful. You kill alot of soldiers before you get to Jackson or Grant or Ridgeway. Your team sucks while you try out inexperienced quarterbacks. It costs a hundred thousand dollars and a couple of years to find a good employee. Bad teachers, especially in math, ruin many students ability and confidence in their natural skills. Everybody is *highly* motivated to introduce some miracle technique or test that will skip all of that laborous and wasteful mess. The fact that there *isn’t* a test means that the process is driven to push the costs onto others and deny the need.”
The problem with this analysis is that teachers want to resist the next step. Maybe we can’t sort the good and bad teachers IN ADVANCE, but we can certainly sort them after they have been on the job for a few years. But the unions deny that even that is possible. That we can’t tell who the good teachers and bad teachers are EVER, or that we can’t make any policy based on differentiating between good and bad teachers at any point in their career. And that is ridiculous.
December 16th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
I don’t think anyone should be allowed to discuss this issue until they have spent one semester – just one – trying to teach in a classroom. Oh hell, try it for one week or even one day. I know, I tried it for two years in a ghetto school and in a country school. It’s is a humbling, mind boggling experience.
So if any of you are really really serious about understanding the plight of the classroom teacher, put all your theories on hold and walk a few days in the shoes of a classroom teacher. Talk to me about what needs to be done only after you’ve done that. I’ll listen.
December 16th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
I think oh makes a salient point. I can’t claim to have such experience directly, but I do rely on being raised in a household with some 60+ years of experience in the classroom. Take that for what you will.
As I said above, the devil is in the details with instituting the commonly cited reform ideas… and this is how I interpret oh’s comment (please correct me if I’m wrong).
—
Raft, my mistake if you didn’t mean to imply that reforming teacher policies is “THE solution.” But when you make statements like
it sure sounds like you place the bulk of the responsibility with teachers… or at least see teachers as the primary impediment to any solution. Fair enough—I do understand that perspective. My main point is that rushing to blame teachers is itself an impediment to meaningful reform. A prevalence of poor teachers can in part be attributed to the fleeing of good young teachers who come to the conclusion that they’re not afforded a basic level of professional respect. There’s a chicken-or-the-egg argument here.
On merit pay… I think it’s pretty common in any profession for salary within a corporate entity to be highly correlated with seniority. I doubt this condition is particularly unique to teaching. I’ve known plenty of marginally competent engineers who got promoted ‘out of the way’ to management. Moreover, tenure-like arrangements are common in any civil service job… teachers and their unions are not unique in this sense either. I don’t categorically defend unions, but neither do I categorically decry them. Incentivizing teachers with merit pay may be a useful tool if done correctly… but be careful what and how you incentivize. Schools are not perfect analogs of businesses even if you are offended by my ‘living, breathing’ characterization. As said upthread, the ‘right’ way tends to be expensive and difficult.
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