Getting to Effectiveness
We have some very good evidence that teachers vary quite a bit in terms of their effectiveness in improving student achievement. We also have good evidence that the current certification process doesn’t do a good job of tracking effectiveness—certified teachers are no more effective than teachers who’ve come through “alternative certification” tracks. It’s also clear that our policies don’t reward more-effective teachers in a manner that’s consistent with the importance of retaining highly-effective teachers to building a highly effective school. Nor do our policies do anything to try to ensure that highly effective teachers can be found in the schools with the highest-need students. On the contrary, they tend to do the reverse. These basic points—and the idea that we ought to change things—have been penetrating mainstream consciousness of late. But it’s often not clear exactly what policy shifts will make it possible to obtain and use data on teacher effectiveness, especially because education policy gets made at a lot of different levels.
Yesterday, CAP released an excellent report from Robin Chait that recaps what we know and goes step-by-step through the issue of how federal policy could help support the idea of shifting from a system based on qualifications to a system based on effectiveness.
One interesting issue is whether Republicans will show any interest in these kind of things as we move toward re-authorization of NCLB/ESEA. The last version of the bill was really the only significant bipartisan initiative of the Bush years—a meeting of minds between George W. Bush on the one hand, and Ted Kennedy and George Miller on the other. And many conservative intellectuals are interested in this stuff, in no small part because teacher’s unions don’t much care for it. But in recent years, conservative politicians have more-or-more retreated to local control bromides and the current crop of GOP congressmen seems more Limbaughized than ever before.
70 Responses to “Getting to Effectiveness”
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January 28th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
“We also have good evidence that the current certification process doesn’t do a good job of tracking effectiveness—certified teachers are no more effective than teachers who’ve come through “alternative certification” tracks.”
Perhaps you could provide the evidence? Since all the evidence I know of says the opposite:
For example:
http://www.ncate.org/documents/research/TFAResearchSummary.pdf
January 28th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Perhaps you are saying that TFA does not count as an “alternative certification” track, but could you please explain then what “alternative certification” tracks are (that don’t include Teach for America) and then produce the evidence that certified teachers are no more effective.
I was and am a certified secondary school teacher, and I can tell you that without the extensive observations and student teaching, I would have been far more lost my first year than I actually was.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Just finished reading Work Hard. Be Nice. by Jay Matthews, a book about the founding of KIPP. Excellent read.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
The content of teaching certification varies tremendously by state and over time. In Texas, it’s undergone two enormous changes in the last 23 years, first in terms of specialization and more recently in terms of classroom experience/management.
NONE of the problems associated with America education, however, will change at all until we change the culture of American parents, who work feverishly to undermine student accountability at every step.
Ineffective teachers are the smart ones: they’ve learned to just pass students on. If they try and do their job, they’ll be vilified (and even assaulted) by parents and abandoned by administrators.
Every single additional dollar pumped into Texas schools over the last twenty years has been siphoned off by a new consultant class that contributes nothing but management-by-metaphor bullshit. It’s not going to teachers, and teachers ARE NOT ALLOWED to do their jobs.
This is the reason why most of what we teach in American universities is taught abroad in secondary schools, “core curriculum” being a euphemism for “remedial.”
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January 29th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
As a supporter of unions, I hate to say that the teacher’s union in New York is going to present an insurmountable roadblock to improving teacher effectiveness. They have created a bureaucracy and power structure that rewards those who support and maintain the bureaucracy, at enormous expense to the taxpayers with little to show for it. The average pay of teachers around here is something like 50% higher than the median income of the region as a whole, with large increases locked in every year off into the future. Benefits are unequaled at any private enterprise in this area. Tenure is near absolute, unless someone commits some heinous crime. I have attended many board of education meetings and there is almost never talk of improving education–it is all about the next round of contract negotiations. Members of the public are allowed almost no opportunity to speak, and never allowed the chance for rebuttal when the board responds. I’ve seen the police called to remove a member of the public who was questioning an academic program. Teachers who go along basically move up through the system endlessly until a few of them get plum jobs in the administration.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Matt,
Please address the massive rates of attrition among the teaching profession (ie 50 percent are gone within 5 years). No analysis of the teaching quality or recruitment really makes sense without taking this fact into account. The attrition issue is especially relevant to positions in struggling schools and/or those who work with at risk kids with learning or emotional disabilities. These are the positions at which high-quality teaching is most desperately needed and where attrition rates are at their highest.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
First we have to define it, then we have to measure it; only *then* can we start enacting policies based on it.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
If it’s any consolation, the teachers’ union in Texas is powerless (thanks to our work-at-will regime), and the results STILL suck.
For this reason, it’s hard to say that unions are the problem, though I can see where they contribute to institutional inertia.
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January 29th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
One obvious problem is that teachers who know their material and are good at teaching it are not necessarily also good at imposing discipline in the classroom. In Los Angeles, public high school schools typically do not offer after-school detention, unless the teacher wants to hold it herself, whereas private schools normally use their assistant football coaches and the like as disciplinarians.
It would be cheap and easy to hire men with necks thicker than their heads who like intimidating young punks to be assistant deans of discipline. Lots of men like asserting their dominance over other males. You could hire ex-Marine sergeants, for example.
LA public high schools seldom do anything like that for a couple of reasons: one is the insistence on college diplomas. The other is the pervasive fear of lawsuits in public schools over discipline polices that have a “disparate impact” on different ethnicities.
January 29th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
One other thing to keep in mind is that the current teacher training process, with its endless indoctrination in the religion of diversity sensitivity, tends to drive out the brighter math and science teachers because the mindless propagandizing for political correctness becomes intolerable to them.
If you want, say, professional engineers to make a career transition into teaching high school physics or math, you can’t tell them all the lies you can get away with telling poor dumb Education majors. Their self-respect won’t stand for it.
January 29th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Simple idea:
Each school in America gets $10,000 a year for good teacher bonuses.
Teachers who rate best in school (best grades, best improvement by students, parent & student comment etc) get a tax free $5,000 bonus. 2 runner ups get $2,500 each.
Daily thoughts about who gets to live in Bali this summer would definitely liven up old decaying lesson plans.
(and also probably worsen intra-schoole politics)
This is great state capitalism, competitive bonuses for the little people not just financial “service” charlatans.
There are 114,700 primary and secondary schools in the US.
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/007108.html
So at $10k each that’s 1.1 Billion a year – much less than the US Army’s theft/ undocumented illegal give away of 1.4 Billion in 2007.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/86569/
January 29th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Cite, please. As someone who’s actually worked in teacher certification, I can tell you that you’re full of shit.
Education majors? Education majors, by and large, are not in training to be secondary school teachers.
If I wanted to listen to this ignorant crap, I’d turn on my AM radio.
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January 29th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Matt asserts:
“Nor do our policies do anything to try to ensure that highly effective teachers can be found in the schools with the highest-need students. On the contrary, they tend to do the reverse.”
Everybody says stuff like this all the time as if it were self-evidently true, but almost nobody can point to examples of analogous professionals (college professors, coaches, violin tutors) flocking to work with the “highest-need students.” Phil Jackson doesn’t quit coaching Kobe and the Lakers because he feels the Oklahoma City Thunder (or whatever they’re called) are the “highest-need” team in the NBA. The faculty at the Julliard School doesn’t quit and go out and teach middle school music classes. Princeton professors don’t go teach at community colleges. Hank Haney doesn’t give up being Tiger Woods’ swing coach in order to devote himself to improving my golf swing.
No, what we see is that the best teachers, the people who most like to teach (i.e., impart knowledge and skills), try very hard to work with the best students (i.e., those most capable of absorbing knowledge and skills). And we understand that that’s best for society as a whole.
Why does that simple, noncontroversial logic elude Matt when it comes to high school teachers?
January 29th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
As a recent letter in the New Yorker noted, most experienced and good teachers can encounter a group of new or in-training teachers and determine with decent accuracy whom the effective ones will be. But because this is inherently subjective all around, it’s deemed unacceptable as a selection tool and we resort to the Praxis and other written tests that don’t get more effective even as we make them longer and “more rigorous.”
That strikes me as a big issue, but in our regime of guarantees and more guarantees it’s very hard to address. Any takers?
January 29th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Probably because your analogies are non-analogous, and can safely remain noncontroversial by virtue of being stupid. “Need” seems to be the concept you’ve missed. It has little to do with performance and everything to do with the conditions that hinder performance.
Matt was talking about the incentive structures already in place, which encourage new teachers to work with at-risk students. Since you don’t understand this, you are in no position to comment on it. An actual analogy to this arrangement can be found in medical school, where students are offered scholarships in exchange for working in poor, under-served communities.
Mr. Sailer is a perfect example of how we can’t have ignorant people designing education.
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January 29th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
$5000 bonus for any teacher that allows a camera to be installed in their classroom.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
It is very subjective, Rich, and we should be wary of the process because it is subject both to abuse and to teachers simply selecting people like themselves.
On the other hand, objective tests are becoming a kind of scam industry (think Barbara Bush after Katrina), where it is only important that the test makers make the sale. Objective test scores are up over the last generation, but college instructors will tell you that the analytical and communications skills of incoming freshmen are down, possibly because they’ve spent too much time drilling for objective tests. The skill set I used to teach cannot be assessed by objective tests without dumbing down the curriculum and standardizing the content to the point that cheating would be much easier.
Finally, any kind of screening process for the teaching profession or for college admissions is unlikely to increase the role of skilled professionals making subjective judgments if only because professionals cost money and it would be a difficult sale to make to the public. Academia, like the private sector, has learned to shift funds to management and stiff the people who know what they’re doing because they’re the ones doing the work.
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January 29th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Grand Moff- Thanks for your comments. Here are two scenarios, for illustration purposes only (in other words, I don’t vouch for their empirical worth, but they may well be reasonable):
1) We assess prospective/new teachers subjectively, with a higher degree of accuracy.
2) We assess prospective/new teachers “nominally objectively” (through written exams or routinized interviews or mock teaching), with a lower degree of accuracy.
The first route is unfair to some prospective teachers, while the second route is unfair to some actual students. If there’s any empirical value here (in other words, if subjective observation is a better predictor of teacher effectiveness), then I’d say the tie should go to the students and we should accept unfairness to prospective teachers. What do you think?
January 29th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Sailer makes some interesting points. Let’s get Matt’s education policy wonk girlfriend to address them.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Why the focus on teachers? I would submit because they are an easy target for those who don’t want to admit that this is, like many other issues, a political problem.
There are many factors in how educated an American kid gets.
Some random factors:
IQ is normally distributed among children – how is this addressed?
There is ongoing dispute about curriculum – can’t this be settled?
In any field – medicine,law,etc., roughly 20% of the practioners are incompetent – why aren’t they culled?
What about the unspoken fact that parents want OTHER kids to get a poorer education than their own?
What about the millions of kids that can’t absorb much education – they statistically exist, where are they and what do we do about them?
A holistic approach is needed, politics prevents it.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
So, what we see, decade after decade, are many of the best school teachers pulling strings to get themselves transferred to the schools with the best students. Many of these good teachers, when they were young and idealistic, started at schools with bad students with the intention of rectifying the injustices of society. But, after some number of years, they decide to hell with it and go where the students can learn more from them.
Now, what can be done about this?
The most obvious is that teachers with bad students need more back up from administrations in terms of discipline. Many good teachers aren’t good disciplinarians — think about how your best college professors would have done at controlling typical inner city high school classrooms. The best disciplinarians tend to be men with IQs around 95 — possessing a fair amount of cunning and psychological acuity but very little intellectual ambition — and a strong need to assert dominance. The good teachers need to be able to outsource their discipline problems to good disciplinarians.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
This talk of “teacher effectiveness” as if it were a meaningful concept does not make sense to me. Is there such a thing as a reliable measure of teacher effectiveness that isn’t automatically gamed by either school administrators or the teachers themselves? Sure there are good teachers and there are bad. But is there really any way at all to measure this?
And secondly, even if teacher effectiveness were an actual concept, it would still be meaningless in terms of solving real problems in real schools. There are hundreds of thousands of school classrooms around the country. You will never find “highly effective” teachers to fill every one. Often, a school district is lucky to get any warm body at all. This focus on heroic, magical individuals (think Michell Pfifer in whatever that stupid movie was where she played a heroic, magical teacher) is misplaced. We cannot expect all teachers to be heroes. We need systems that will work even with mediocre teachers, which, by definition, the majority of teachers will be. (This concept holds true in all industries, by the way.)
And a final point. The essentially problem with teaching is that, as the saying goes, hell is other people’s children. Those of you who have never stood in front of a classroom can not possibly relate. I have held many different jobs in my life. Teaching was, without a doubt, the most taxing, difficult, dangerous, and unrewarding (yes, I said it!) of these. Teaching is a terrible job. This is not likely to change. Thus, it will always be difficult to attract and keep “effective” teachers.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
The next implication of the fact that the best teachers tend to bail out on the worst students after a number of years of beating their heads against the wall is that the best teachers — the most brilliant and innovative and creative, the ones who can come up with new breakthrough lesson plans — probably shouldn’t be encouraged to teach the worst students. That’s the surest route to driving them out of teaching altogether.
Instead, for lousy students, we should concentrate on putting together lesson plans (scripts, in reality) that have been shown by research to work fairly well, and hire diligent, conscientious, but not particularly creative teachers to teach the script.
For example, forty years ago, teachers had students chant the times tables for weeks on end until they memorized the damn things. That’s the kind of repetitious task that drives the most brilliant and creative teachers crazy, and that kind of rote learning isn’t terribly necessary for the brightest students. But, it’s exactly what is needed for a large proportion of students.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Steve Salier said:
The best disciplinarians tend to be men with IQs around 95
In my experience, the best disciplinarians in school are always women.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Rob Mac says:
“In my experience, the best disciplinarians in school are always women.”
So that’s why all the drill instructors at Parris Island are women!
Look, the big troublemakers in public schools are pubescent males with two digit IQs. The best disciplinarians are adult men who used to be pubescent male troublemakers with two digit IQs. They’re on the same wavelength.
The troublemakers aren’t natural-born anarchists objecting to all hierarchy. They’re objecting to not being on top of the hierarchy. The people who can best put them in their place are not the sensitive types who have taken lots of Ed School classes to understand the deep roots of adolescent angst. No, they’re guys who like to exert dominance.
The side benefit of this is that hiring a bunch of thick necked guys without college diplomas as assistant deans of discipline would give the young punks good role models. They know they aren’t going to graduate from college, but instead of turning to crime, they can now see an appealing future for themselves if they force themselves to graduate from high school — getting paid to swagger around campus putting young punks in their place.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I think that ‘unfairness’ will always be alleged, and not always in good faith, by failed applicants. I have also observed that departments run best when run largely by themselves, since outsiders do not understand their personnel, resources, and local student body. Administrators, at the middle level, have adopted leadership roles when in practice their function is clerical. The last word should come from the department, on hiring, curriculum, etc.
Pretty hard for a politician to look tough advocating that, though.
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January 29th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Uneducated, hired thugs = good role models?
Is Sailor a parody troll?
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January 29th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Teachers are easy targets for grandstanding politicians because teachers are public employees, because America’s anti-intellectual culture inculcates a distrust of the educated, because teaching is a low-paying profession (thugs who play a child’s game with a ball are respected, for some reason), and because the present generation’s consumer ethic has obscured the simple fact that the most important work is to be done by the student.
The teacher is like a coach, which should be obvious because coaches keep talking about how they are teachers. If scholarship athletes brought the same “it’s your job” attitude to college football, no one would watch. We treat students like customers because the upside-down marxism of market fundamentalism has to dumb every exchange down to the same simple relationships. Employee. Customer. Simple. Stupid.
As a child in a family of teachers, I was always taught that the grade was my responsibility, and shitty teachers were no excuse. There were good teachers and bad teachers (and a lot of overwhelmed teachers), but the job was mine, not theirs. This simple ethic (also known as a “work ethic”), is utterly absent from political debates on education, which is the surest sign that they are a waste of time, waged by fools and con men.
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January 29th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Grand Moff Texan scoffs:
“Uneducated, hired thugs = good role models?”
This is a good illustration of the cluelessness of Education Industry types like Grand Moff about the nature of so many of their students, especially the ones who cause the most trouble and are most likely to drop out.
I’ve detailed the kind of person who makes an excellent disciplinarian of pubescent males — male, a high school diploma but not necessarily a college diploma, not stupid but not intellectual, and experienced in hierarchical organizations with strong discipline traditions, such as a Marine sergeant or assistant football coach.
That gets turned in GMT’s brain into “Uneducated, hired thugs”!
This is a clasic manifestation of what John Gardner calls the “Yale or jail” syndrome: the constant propagandizing of public school students that they all have to graduate from college or they’ll be complete failures in life. Lots of students realize that no way, no how are they ever going to graduate from college, so they might as well get started dealing drugs now.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I wonder if anyone has analyzed whether different kinds of teacher education produce better teachers. Do teachers who receive training at well-regarded schools of education turn out better than those that come out of the average State Normal School?
And I think that for teaching in the lower grades, actually studying and understanding childhood development is crucial; to the extent certification assures that this subject is studied (if not sometimes internalized) it’s a good thing.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
“This is a clasic manifestation of what John Gardner calls the “Yale or jail” syndrome: the constant propagandizing of public school students that they all have to graduate from college or they’ll be complete failures in life. Lots of students realize that no way, no how are they ever going to graduate from college, so they might as well get started dealing drugs now.”
Um that’s the fattest non-sequitur I’ve ever seen to the reasonable objection that school employees shouldn’t be thugs.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
David in NY asks:
“Do teachers who receive training at well-regarded schools of education turn out better than those that come out of the average State Normal School?”
Going back to the 1965 federal Coleman Report, it’s been apparent that higher IQ teachers tend to be more effective, just as higher IQ correlates with greater effectiveness at most occupations. So, students who get into more prestigious Ed Schools based on their test scores are likely to be more effective teachers.
On the other hand, Ed majors and Ed grad students tend to be at the bottom of their campuses in terms of SAT scores. Clearly, academic Education education tends to drive away intelligent people, perhaps because the content includes so much mind-melting politically correct fluff.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Is there such a thing as a reliable measure of teacher effectiveness that isn’t automatically gamed by either school administrators or the teachers themselves?
A really good question. The other variable, of course, is that home conditions largely trump school conditions as the dictator of how well students learn, and the most effective teacher can’t do much with many (not all) kids from culturally deprived homes. Indeed, classes full of such kids create intense pressures to “game” any system that insists that all kids must be above average, or there’s punishment for school/teacher.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
David in NY objects “that school employees shouldn’t be thugs.”
Here we go again with another example of the cluelessness of the educated about the students whose educations they pretend to be concerned about.
Are Marine Corp sergeants thugs? Are assistant football coaches thugs?
No, they are men who play valuable roles in our society disciplining young males.
There are lots of public school students who are much more likely to go to prison than to make it all the way to being a sergeant in the Marines. Sergeants should be held up as role models, not denounced as “thugs.”
January 29th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
“mind-melting politically correct fluff”
Thanks, Steve. Good points. I come from a family of teachers, and know that some of the education stuff is “mind-melting … fluff” just because it’s not very rigorous and would be pretty dull even if it were. But why do you poison your argument with the “politically correct” accusation, which is hardly the worst problem? Also, seems to me that the bad lower grade teachers I’ve run into in various capacities just never incorporated lots of the teachings about childhood development, were at sea about how to deal kids who were developing at different rates or in different ways than the average, and could have used better teacher training in these areas (or been better students of it).
January 29th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Please try to keep track of your own content. You described them as:
You furthermore accuse me of some psycho-babble “Yale or Jail” syndrome, when it is in fact you yourself who wrote:
So you’re the one writing them off, not me.
Some of the smartest kids get into gangs, and succeed in leadership roles. I know teachers who have risked life and limb to get them into productive roles, and succeeded. But Steve Sailer wants to write them off and hire a thug force to perpetuate the problem, which has everything to do with Sailer’s insecurities and nothing to do with the reality teachers deal with every day, something Sailer only hears about on AM radio.
So, first Sailer doesn’t know what he’s talking about, then he forgets what he wrote, then he blames his own assumptions on me.
Like I said: ignorant people cannot design education.
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January 29th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Ok Steve, I take it all back. They should be thugs with, as you put it above, IQ’s of 2. That’ll fix everything.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
“Sergeants” have earned the right, by serving their country, to go to college and earn a degree.
I have worked with veterans for years and taught them at the college level. You’re the one who thinks they’re not good enough.
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January 29th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
You can see from this discussion a major reason why public school teachers don’t get the support they need in disciplining students, which in turn leads good teachers to flee to wealthy, well-behaved suburban schools, private schools, or quit teaching altogether and go work in some nice, quiet office.
If we want to get more smart women and more smart nerdy guys into public school teaching, we need to provide them with help from professional disciplinarians with the alpha male personalities that young troublemakers defer to. Unfortunately, schools can’t afford to hire many high IQ alpha males since their money-making opportunities are so vast. So, that leaves alphas with middling IQs, many of whom won’t have college degrees, but are solid people.
But, these high school grads with 95 IQs and good work ethics get denigrated here as “thugs.”
January 29th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
By you, at great length, in several posts. Too bad you can’t erase them now. There they are for anyone to see.
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January 29th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
You can see from this discussion a major reason why public school teachers don’t get the support they need in disciplining students, which in turn leads good teachers to flee to wealthy, well-behaved suburban schools, private schools, or quit teaching altogether and go work in some nice, quiet office.
Right. If only we unleashed the goon squad on the inner city schools, all the teachers from the tony suburbs would flock to ghetto schools. You can’t possibley be stupid enough to believe the crap you write.
January 29th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
“Thugs,” “goon squad,” etcetera …
I think we can see one big reason right here why undisciplined public schools lose once-idealistic teachers.
I sent one kid to a private school, one to an LAUSD public school. The private school had detention after school for kids who got caught doing something bad, presided over by an assistant football coach in spring, by the guy who coached the shotputters on the track team in the fall.
The LAUSD school didn’t have any organized detention system. Teachers could stay after and have detention for their own troublemakers if they wanted it. That was it. Students could be suspended or transferred, but statistics on disciplinary actions were kept by ethnicity and published online, so the Administration was very concerned about kicking out too many black or Hispanic troublemakers relative to Korean or Armenian ones.
January 29th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Too bad this thread got derailed into a discussion of whether thick necked guys can enforce discipline. It was interesting until then.
At the risk of keeping the tedium going, I’ll reiterate–the best disciplinarians I’ve seen in school are always women. To be more specific, they are usually black women. The thing is, your thick necked guy can shout all day, but he can’t lay a hand on a kid and the kids know this. They did not enlist in the Marine Corps. Certain women have a special skill for enforcing behavior with nothing more than a look and a clearing of the throat.
However, the general concept that discipline and teaching should be wholly separated is an interesting one.
January 29th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Yes, I could imagine that black women, on average, would do a better job of disciplining than white women, or many white men. (By the way, the black female enlistment rate in the U.S. Army is much higher than the enlistment rate for women of other races.)
Of course, the trick in disciplining is not laying hands on anybody, it’s making clear that you have a stronger will and will use an endless variety of punishments to enforce your will.
“However, the general concept that discipline and teaching should be wholly separated is an interesting one.”
Right. The point is that schools shouldn’t be Hobbesian environments where each teacher must be his or her own police force, just as you shouldn’t have to carry a gun to protect yourself from criminals. You don’t attract and retain the more gentle, creative, intellectual people to be teachers that way. Schools should ordered civilizations where the gentler souls can delegate much of the task of punishing troublemakers to the tougher types who like doing that kind of thing.
January 29th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Steve Sailer writes:
Instead, for lousy students, we should concentrate on putting together lesson plans (scripts, in reality) that have been shown by research to work fairly well, and hire diligent, conscientious, but not particularly creative teachers to teach the script.
We’ve done that. Here in Texas we call that every child left behind. It doesn’t work. For the reasons why, I refer you to Grand Moff Texan
January 29th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Check out Texas’s NAEP scores compared to California’s.
http://nces.ed.gov/NATIONSREPORTCARD/
California is generally between 44th and 49th in the country on all the federal NAEP tests. Obviously, demographic makeup is the biggest determinant of NAEP scores for a state — that’s why the top NAEP states are all up near the Canadian border, but Texas has generally beaten California pretty badly on the federal gold standard tests in this decade. Maybe it’s all just crooked manipulation of the NAEP in Texas, but certainly laissez-faire California, where rookie teachers are told to make up their own lesson plans from day one, doesn’t show much evidence that the opposite works on a large scale with modern public school students.
January 29th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Grand Moff Texan –
You obviously are an example of exactly the kind of person Steve is talking about when he refers to “clueless education types.” How is Steve writing them off in that paragraph? He is suggesting essentially that these kids won’t be able to graduate from college, but that many of them (the alpha males, and to some extent females) have a productive alternative in using their personality traits to become enforcers of order. That is not “writing them off” unless you assume that a college diploma is the sine qua non of success in life.
The current idea is that everyone must either graduate from college or be a failure. Steve is suggesting that there are other options out there, and that trying to forcce everyone into the college-track mold is a recipe for failure and for writing off anyone who is not cut out for this particular path in life.
“Sergeants” have earned the right, by serving their country, to go to college and earn a degree.
That doesn’t mean that all segeants have degrees or need them.
So? None of that implies thuggishness, in the sense of bullying people. The point is that many of these people, with slightly-below-average IQs, have a desire to impose order on other people, and do not have much of a chance at getting a job with high cognitive requirements. Their talents can be put to good use by getting them to impose societal order on people, under self-restraint, as opposed to trying to impose their own will on people.
And not having a college degree does not make one un-educated, unless you mean to say that high school is worthless.
[Such men are denigrated as thus] By [Steve Sailer], at great length, in several posts. Too bad you can’t erase them now. There they are for anyone to see.
Only, Grand Moff, if you are so stupid as to see any attempt at using intimidation to maintain order for the good of society as “thuggish.”
January 29th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
dave: Ok Steve, I take it all back. They should be thugs with, as you put it above, IQ’s of 2. That’ll fix everything.
2-digit IQs. For the benefit of people such as yourself, Dave, let me explain what that means. It means that the IQ consists of a number in the tens place and a number in the ones place, that it is between 10 and 99. Steve’s comments also indicated that he is looking at the high 2-digit range; he specifically mentioned 95, but probably anything between 90 and 99 will do. An IQ of 2 is a one-digit IQ, and would not qualify under the criterion that Steve lays out.
January 29th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
As we’ve seen from the quality of some of these comments, much of what passes for “teacher training” today consists of inculcation of what Newspeak calls “crimestop.” As Orwell explained in 1984:
“… the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
January 29th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
It makes me sick to say this, but Sailer has actually made some good points in this thread. His #13 was insightful, and the first two paragraphs of his #9 interesting until he veered off into his classic racism. I would suggest that this once we actually read his posts; there might actually be some reasonable thought in there.
Cranky
To cheer myself up I will point out that in his #25 Sailer finally admitted that IQ is not an inherited fixed quantity but can change over time with experience and education (”The best disciplinarians are adult men who used to be pubescent male troublemakers with two digit IQs.”)
January 29th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Yes there are effective and ineffective teachers (high-school edition):
-does the teacher manage the classroom so as to make the lesson the only thing happening in the classroom at that time?
-does the teacher use appropriate, varied means to demonstrate concepts and build skills?
-does the teacher both require students to work at learning and clearly demonstrate that learning has happened?
-does the teacher do all this while having a charismatic and empathic relationship with the students?
Though far from perfect, I like to believe the answer in my case is ever-evolving towards the yes, yes, yes, and yes…
and I fail 40 % of my students. Which is to say, most students come to me without a work ethic. Roughly 10% are simply not up to the intellectual challenge (can’t read the textbook, can’t process information, etc…)
It’s just brutal to get a 30% homework completion rate. It’s a travesty. The taxpayers should be demanding workcamps for nonperforming students or force the parents to take them to work with them.
Yes there are ineffective teachers. No, that’s not the low-hanging fruit here.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:14 am
Stevie,
Each time you get called out for being a moron, stop quoting Orwell as if he ‘defends’ you.
He would hate a piece of shit like you.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:48 am
Yes, I could imagine that black women, on average, would do a better job of disciplining than white women, or many white men.
At my school, in an entirely white rural area, the most feared teachers tended to be the four foot tall Sicilians ladies, followed by the phys. ed. teachers, who were basically of the type Steve is talking about, plus a teaching degree. We did have a thick neck assistant principal whose job was basically walking around busting kids. He looked like the missing link and had an almost complete lack of intellect but was a basically good guy. It was a rough, hillbilly school with lots of fighting and general goonery…he kept busy.
January 30th, 2009 at 5:02 am
And yet, he’s the same stupid racist cunt he was back in the 90s when he got his hardon over Margaret Thatcher.
January 30th, 2009 at 6:57 am
> At my school, in an entirely white rural area,
> the most feared teachers tended to be the four
> foot tall Sicilians ladies, followed by the phys. ed.
> teachers, who were basically of the type Steve is
> talking about, plus a teaching degree. We did have a
> thick neck assistant principal whose job was basically
> walking around busting kids. He looked like the
> missing link and had an almost complete lack of
> intellect but was a basically good guy. It was a rough,
> hillbilly school with lots of fighting and general
> goonery…he kept busy.
Well, keep in mind that things change. You description also fits my inner-city high school fairly well. But a few years after I left the bad guys moved from being “American Graffiti” style punks to being gangbangers, and converted from carrying brass knuckles, switchblades, and the occasional .32 to carrying lead-filled baseball bats, meat cleavers, and Uzis. The “withering stare from 4′ grandma figure” method doesn’t work real well when the student replies “My boys will cut your liver out on the way to your car tonight” and has the means to carry out that threat.
Cranky
January 30th, 2009 at 7:01 am
To get back to the topic of Matt’s post, I am starting to fear that Obama’s education policy is going to be made by a bunch of young, inexperienced CAP’ers such at Matt who have never stepped into a classroom as an adult nor once worked to bring a child from a disadvantaged background up to grade level. Some of things MY says are interesting, some are misguided, some are absolutely ridiculous – but he doesn’t seem to have _any_ real-world experience to understand that.
Cranky
January 30th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
#56: Why? The current Secretary of Education is not Matt, but Arne Duncan, former CEO of the Chicago public school system. I think he has experience with children from disadvantaged backgrounds – or at least with running a school system that has them, since according to Wikipedia he has never been a teacher. But it would be silly to assume (without some pretty strong evidence) that teachers have no input into the DoE’s decisionmaking.
Also, #13 is completely off base: if we wanted to produce a couple hundred really good students and the hell with everyone else, matching up the best students with the best teachers the way the NFL does would make sense. But in the actual goals of educational policy, raising the _floor_ is at least as important as raising the roof – while our ability to produce Nobel prizewinners, etc. is not without value, it’s the lack of basic skills among average and below-average graduates that is the real crisis of contemporary education. The NFL doesn’t have to deal with that problem because its goals don’t include improving the game of people who don’t make the cut.
For similar reasons, it’s also a bad idea to give the most funding to schools whose students come from the wealthiest families. If you’re really concerned with the performance of the bottom students, then you have to send your resources where the problem is, not just sling platitudes at it.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
If you want to send the most intellectual teachers, the ones who really like thinking about iambic pentameter and the quadratic formula, to the schools with the lowest performing students, then, please, give those teachers a lot of back-up on discipline. Hire guys with thick necks who don’t like thinking about the Austro-Hungarian empire, but do like thinking about how they’re going to intimidate that little disruptive punk into understanding who’s boss the next time that nice Miss Smith sends him to the assistant dean for discipline’s office.
January 30th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
To cheer myself up I will point out that in his #25 Sailer finally admitted that IQ is not an inherited fixed quantity but can change over time with experience and education (”The best disciplinarians are adult men who used to be pubescent male troublemakers with two digit IQs.”)
I don’t think that Steve was implying that their IQs increased at all, just that they learned to use their abilities in a productive way.
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