Improving Education Through Better Teachers

theodp writes "The teaching profession gets schooled in cover stories from the big pubs this weekend, as Newsweek makes the case for Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers, and the NY Times offers the more hopeful Building a Better Teacher. For the past half-century, professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language — but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements. But what they ignored was the elephant in the room — if the teacher sucks, the students suck. Or, as the Times more eloquently puts it: 'William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge.' But what makes a good teacher? When Bill Gates announced his foundation was investing $335 million in a project to improve teaching quality, he added a rueful caveat. 'Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn't have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,' Gates said. 'I'm personally very curious.'"

Comments

Re:Good examples are there...

[ultranova]

Of the many education systems worldwide, the finest is widely reputed (by many comparative reviews) to be that of Finland. Not necessarily because teachers there are so incredibly well paid, but because their profession commands RESPECT.

No it doesn't. Education, however, does. Finland was Russia's (and before that Sweden's) economically abused agrarian colony until the first World War, got pummeled heavily by Stalin in second, and had to pay huge tribute for the crime of not surrendering. That tribute had to be paid largely in industrial products. This prompted industrialization and made educated people very valuable, since a nation of a few million people kinda has to care about effectiveness of labour.

As a practical example, consider the cost of university level education in Finland and America. According to usastudyguide.com the cost of tuition in the United States is between $5,000 to $25,000, and this doesn't include room and board or additional fees. In Finland, in Tampere University, it's 44,50 euros ($60) per year. On top of that, the state pays part of your living expenses plus around 200 euros per month of social security, and usually a single meal per day on top of that in University's cafe.

In other words, in the United States higher education is a luxury that costs you $100,000+ to get, while in Finland it's considered so valuable to society that it actually pays you to get it. Everything else follows from that difference in attitudes.

Cue a thousand libertarians missing the point and ranting about socialism in their responses.