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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.'"
The best teacher can not only "teach", they can also "do"
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers. And shutting down infrastructure projects that will last 200 years to start another failed experiment in teaching seems foolhardy at best.
The best teachers I ever had weren't making that much money. The highest paid teachers I've had, A) seldom taught, B) did a horrible job, and C) used a lot of TAs to actually do the work while the prof was out D) selling his book.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
So you think they should be fired on the basis of a mere accusation?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
You know the best way to break a union? Pay the better employees more than the lesser employees.
As long as you're unwilling to admit that the better employees should earn as much as, if not more than, their boss, you will always be under the union's heel, and rightfully so.
How about hiring some charismatic, experienced teachers who will inspire the kids on a daily basis? And they won't need higher salaries - just a nice bureaucracy and politics-free workplace. I'd love to teach and make a real difference in our future, but the environment is just too toxic.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers.
Indeed, the international PISA study found out just that. What might help is adopting teaching concepts from countries who did better than the US (which are 2/3rd of developed/OECD countries). It's not like this kind of problem didn't show up before anywhere else.
And just firing bad teachers is not nearly enough if their replacements are only marginally better. Applying the natural selection principle here is terribly wasteful. I assume one aspect will be a vastly improved teacher education which does the job of selecting good and bad ones, preventing the latter from doing much harm in the field.
Yeah, I had a CS prof who could write great papers, but had no clue about the subject he was teaching. He would have a summary of the next chapter of the book, that he would read to the class, then take questions. We would ask questions, he would write them down, then figure out the answers and then go over the questions/answers at the start of the next class. Repeat for the entire course.
And then we had a math professor, who was super enthusiastic about teaching math, would notice if you missed a class, made classes interesting to be in as well as getting the material across to the class, but didn't pump out the papers.
Guess which prof the university ditched.
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As free, independant thinking geeks, we like to disparage authority. I feel wierd saying it, but in my experience authority is important.
You have to understand what I mean by "authority". It doesn't mean hitting people with rulers, or being stern all the time. It's something more like leadership. You just know it when you see it.
I spent 3 years in a private school that, while it had its failings, seemed to know how to control a classroom. (note, this is a 30 year old memory from when I was a kid, so I could be wrong; but these are the impressions I got)
Teacher walks in. Students get quiet. End of story.
You can't learn when the students are running the classroom, at least not when they're running it out of their id, which is where most kids operate. Yes, I'm aware of alternative schools where kids have free reign and positive outcomes; but there's some selectivity going on there. Trying to apply that en masse would be a mistake, IMHO.
Anyway, at the private school we had a very charismatic teacher who was in a bus accident. We went through at least two replacements until we found one that could command respect and control the classroom. The other two literally got spitballed out of class! In private school, this was not tolerated, and while individual kids would get punished if they got caught, it was also recognized that the teacher couldn't command respect or attention.
Now, all of this is very squishy. That's too bad. Either you've got it or you don't. That's all we know now. Maybe in the future we'll be able to run accurate psychological profiles that will prevent non-authoritative individuals from trying to run K-12 classrooms; but for now, firing is the only thing that works; ie, trial and error.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
who are the best teachers?
the ones with the brightest students? but they have it easy, their students are interested in classes and want to learn.
so then the ones with the most problematic students? not necessarily, a terrible teacher would stand out less amongst low-performing students.
so, the ones with the most improved test scores (aka. no child left behind)? well, sorta. but excellent teachers who don't "teach to the test" will end up with poorer results than automatons that drill all day. do we really want to disincentivise imagination and creativity amongst our teachers?
so maybe test scores plus peer review? what are you a hippy? you can't have the teachers rating themselves.
right. test scores plus administrative review? sounds reasonable. but what about dysfunctional principles? and bias or personal grudges?
well no system is perfect.
not to mention how do you determine if a french teacher is better than an algebra teacher? or a gym teacher is better than a history teacher?
sure, you can come up with a system that takes into account all the variables, but will it be more efficient or less complicated than the methods currently being employed in public schools around the country?
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
The Newsweek article is about getting rid of incompetent teachers. The NYT article is mainly about figuring out specific teaching techniques that are effective. I doubt that either of these will have any positive effect on K-12 education in the U.S. -- in fact, I'm convinced that essentially nothing that our society does as a whole can have any significant effect on average educational outcomes.
Our school system sends kids to schools near where they live. Where you live correlates with your family's income and education. By the time a kid is old enough for school, a number of extremely powerful factors have been at work in determining how well the kid will do in school. One kid grows up in a house full of books; the parents subscribe to newspapers; the adults talk about intellectual things at the dinner table. The other kid grows up in a house with no books or newspapers; the parents spend their free time watching TV.
Let's say the authors of the Newsweek article get their way, and bad teachers are fired. The problem is that (a) the school now has to hire a replacement, and (b) there's a reason why the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around. There is a job market for schoolteachers. The reason the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around was because they had a lousy pool of applicants. Why did they have a lousy pool of applicants? Most likely because this is a school where 90% of the kids qualify for the free lunch program. The best teachers generally don't want to teach in that kind of environment. They know that if they teach in that environment, they're getting the kids who have been growing up with TV and no books. They know they're going to spend more time on discipline than on academics. They know that a lot of the families are financially unstable, so they're always on the move; of the faces in the classroom on the first day of class, maybe 40% will have been replaced with new faces by the last day of the year.
The NYT article talks about improving specific skills that teachers need. But they also admit that that can't make up for lack of subject knowledge, especially in math. As one of the articles notes, teaching and nursing are no longer the only career options for smart, talented women. I'm a college professor, and when I taught classes specifically targeted at preservice K-12 teachers, they were the worst students I'd ever had. In the job market, the vast majority of people applying for K-12 teaching jobs are just not such great students. In the US, 80% of them have bachelor's degrees education, meaning that they basically got a diploma without ever having to learn a deep and specific body of knowledge in any particular subject. Sure, a few people do go to highly selective schools, get stellar grades in a real academic subject, and then move on to a career in K-12 teaching. The problem is that those people are few and far between. When they go on the job market, they have their pick of schools. Most of them are going to end up in affluent, suburban districts.
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We are forgetting a very important part of the formula here: the parents. In many "at risk" districts teachers spend more than half their day making sure the kids aren't hungry, are behaving in class, have their homework completed, and have the supplies that they need like pencils. Why is all this happening? Because the parents are not involved in their kids lives. Either they simply don't give a shit, or they are working more than 40 hours a week just to put food on the table. No matter how good a teacher is, if the kid's home life sucks, or they are more worried about if they are going to be eating, they will never succeed.
Individuals must choose, decide their "essential" nature rather than having it given from some transcendent source.
So, fire them on accusation?
Kids, of course, especially teenagers, are known for their measured approach, their abhorrence of drama. And we all know that parents never turn vengeful over Johnny's bad report or whether the coach is giving him a fair shake.
So I guess it'd be a good idea to hand out the power to destroy any teacher's life with a word.
Simple fact is, it's not actually that hard to fire a teacher. I've watched it operate over the course of decades. True: even for the ones are who just ordinarily bad, who just aren't cutting it, you have to go slow, you have to show that there genuinely is a problem and not a gaggle of histrionic parents, you have to show you tried to help with their weak spots, because teaching doesn't pay much and teachers who've gotten past the prerequisites, who look like they might be able to cut it, to do a genuinely good job, aren't easy to come by.
This isn't the corporate world, where people with friends get up-and-out promotions or just get ignored, given nothing meaningful to do. This isn't the corporate world, where little empire-builders hire huge teams to follow baroque procedures to solve problems better addressed by just one competent employee, if you could find one. This isn't the corporate world, where you can impress ignorant bosses by getting all showy with how hard you work and how much you produce.
These are schools, where slacking off hurts children.
Teaching shares this with programming: it's somewhere between a professional craft and an art, and anyone who genuinely knows anything about the product can see stellar work for what it is. Most people can identify a happy child with a lively, perceptive mind. It's strange, though: you'd be astonished how many people seem to be threatened by such children. You'd be astonished how many parents never give a shit about their children and then blame the teachers when their children don't care about themselves. You'd be astonished how many parents transfer fears and frustrations in their personal lives into their children's classrooms and start getting hysterical because of a chance remark.
And no, I've never been a teacher, never worked in a school, never been married or lovers or even friends with anyone who got fired or even needed help. But I have known someone well who was president of a teacher's union for decades, and I've been around for lots of bad or worse teachers getting fired.
Lazy principals who think growing good teachers is somebody else's job ... now, they're hard to get rid of.
Oops. Sorry, was that unfair?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers.
This is pretty nearly right. 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.
That means allowing them the space to exercise their experience and common sense rather than regulating their activities into a series of so-called "outcomes" that have to be ticked off so that petty-minded little bureaucrats can get a good night's sleep. It also means not leaving teachers exposed to be pilloried by media and politicians for their own ends.
We need to try treating teachers as valued members of society, for the fact that they are entrusted with the education of future generations, rather than treating them as political footballs. Of course, that also means that teachers need to be paid well enough that they don't feel exploited. After all, who among us really wants to give 100% when we are feeling aggrieved with our employer?
not everyone can be a fantastic teacher (in the same way that not everyone can be a concert pianist) no matter how well they are trained. and there aren't enough people with the temperament, focus, love, patience and understanding that make up a fantastic teacher to teach every child on every subject.
unless you're very wealthy (and probably even then) your children are going to have teachers that are not inspirational. and perhaps they're not even particularly well informed. or perhaps your child's teacher is truly inspirational, but it turns out that he or she is not inspirational in a way that works for your child. your child will spend day after day, hour after hour sitting through interminable lectures and stupid pointless presentations. they will get useless comments on their school work and they'll bring home ridiculous assignments. And just in case you think it's just in your imagination, your neighbor's lod will be assigned to a more capable teacher in the same subject.
well clearly, due to this terrible misfortune, your child will end up working at a gas station for the rest of his life.
it seems to me that many parents look on education as some sort of passive process (your kid goes to school for 12 years and comes out Enhanced With Knowledge® ). so when they see their child struggling in school they naturally think the school is broken. they want better teachers and better facilities to put the knowledge into their child! Well, it couldn't hurt. But real learning happens only when the student is actively involved in the process. Yes, excellent teachers know how to make subjects come alive for their students, but students need to be able to inspire themselves.
If it takes an army of miraculous teachers to get a person to graduate high school, that person is going to have serious issues when they confront a world full of people who aren't exerting every particle of effort into making them successful.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I've had 70+ teachers over the years. Maybe 4 of them were "bad". On the other hand, I've had to be in class with hundreds of lazy, disruptive, and/or stupid students who waste the entire class' time. If we got rid of the dead weight students, we could improve as a whole.
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Very unfortunate, but true. The best teacher that I had was almost fired because the school refused to give him tenure. His problem (besides a "bad habit" of telling the truth), he didn't publish often enough.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
With a country as large and heterogeneous as the US, it might be productive to look at inter-state comparisons as well. Pew has some interesting data in the area(PDF alert).
The other thing that you want to be alert to, though, is the confounding effects of non-teacher-related variables. It isn't exactly news, or rocket science, that some demographic variables work strongly in favour of educational success, and others work strongly against it. In a wealthy district with educated and engaged parents who would be furious with junior if he doesn't do his work and make the grade, and are happy to hire tutors, and test prep outfits, and whatnot, a teacher could probably do just about anything and have their students get good results on any of the major standardized tests(though they would face the risk of being lynched by parents if they slacked off too much). More demographically hostile areas are notorious for chewing up and spitting out the most idealistic and comitted teachers with not much in the way of results to show for it.
The ideal research programme, for someone who wants to improve education, would really seem to have at least two parts. The first would be trying to determine what makes a good teacher good. Compare teachers in highly similar environments to one another. Observe their rates of success, student improvement, etc. Compare their behaviors and methods, try and establish correlations. Test the behaviors and methods that correlate with good results to see if they are in fact causative. That's a nontrivial piece of social science work, and there are probably a lot of unionized fossils who won't like it; but it seems conceptually simple enough.
The much hairier project is working out what demographic and cultural factors work for and against education and then trying to do something about that. Unfortunately, that is likely to be a lot more difficult. Firing teachers deemed bad will be child's play compared to, say, eradicating pockets of entrenched poverty and violence and cultural dysfunction.
Truth is there's plenty of blame to go around and teachers certainly deserve their fair share.
I think all the teacher hating is BS, FIRE THE STUDENTS, seriously. I'm sure many University professors would like to fire their students (if you're a prof mod me up!) :)
Seriously teachers can only do so much if students won't meet them half way and do the work, no amount of excellent teacher's can turn slackers who don't want to do the work into stellar students.
And yet other countries with public schools don't have our problems. The difference? Education and the teaching profession is respected in those countries.
Of course, we do have a system exactly like what you want in our universities. And there people complain about poor teachers who are generally paid well, because their metric for success is not educating students, but giving the school prestige to attract students in the first place. There students succeed in spite of poor teaching because the filtering has already occurred - the best schools have students who are already highly competent, self-motivated learners.
You showcase your ignorance. Any teacher is going to put a lot of hours in at home, making tests, grading papers, creating new lessons, doing committee work. I know because my wife teaches high school English and I have an aunt and a couple friends who teach. They also don't get the whole summer off - there are committee meetings to go to, inservice days to attend, and they come in about a week before the students do to get their rooms prepped and learn about what new madness the administration and legislature have decided on.
They work much more than 8 hours a day, for a comparative pittance. Sure, they're paid more than J. Random Schmuck at McDonald's, but it's a job that requires a college degree and a certification. Still, my wife makes about $40k/yr on her eleventh year of teaching, which is only slightly more than I make fixing computers for not quite half as long, and I never take my work home with me.
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If you can do, why on earth would you settle for a teachers salary?
And I notice that so far, the simplest rememdy, pay more, goes unexplored.
You pay peanuts, you get monkey's.
I have worked with a lot of ex-teachers, who now do things like IT-training, they make several times what they would make in front of a class-room filled with kids, so why would they do it?
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Here in British Columbia, the good teachers (who actually manage to get full time work, frak you union/management collusion) generally have to work about a 60-70 hour week, plus be available for phone calls. The work load can get insane, because a good teacher is working HARD during those hours... I've put in long hours at various jobs, but there's usually way more 'down-time' or light load work in a week than a teacher gets.
This is all for a lower middle class income until your seniority gets big. Time off in the summer amounts to about 3-4 weeks or less since there's always professional development and prep.
The general public just has no idea.
On top of that, a good teacher deals with intense frustrations over curriculum, bureaucracy, feckless parents, and lack of support for special needs... most spend an inordinate time with 'classroom management', meaning discipline.
The thing is, good teachers will work for enough to live on, because they will do the work anyway, that's what makes them a good teacher. What they really want is the ability to properly teach without burning out; i.e. adequate prep time, smaller class sizes, more support staff targeted at the 10% of the class that takes 90% of the attention, and fewer overall hours. Burnout turns good teachers into indifferent, bitter staff working for that pension.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Roughly, you got the following groups involved:
And all the time, teachers see those who take their teaching talent to private industry make several times their pay, with none of the hazards of getting some parent upset or a student who desides to file charges because daddy touched them.
No, if you want to fix education, you got to make a drastic cleaning action.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
while in Finland it's considered so valuable to society that it actually pays you to get it.
I'm guessing they severely limit the number of philosophy & english (Finnish?) majors, and don't have 'victim group x studies' majors at all.
In the United States there are a significant number of majors that add no value whatsoever to society, and more often than not produce a strain of 'educated' people who have nothing but grievances against productive people.
I'd say the following applies to a good third to half of the useless twits America gives bachelor's degrees:
-Theodore Dalrymple
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