Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
How about exploring this for a bit: perhaps the student has bigger things to worry about. Like say whether or not they are going to get shot on their way to class, or if that crack dealer is going to pummel them because one of their friends owes him. You know, just sayin' that its a whole problem. Drugs in schools are a huge problem and prohibition has only made it worse, education is what is needed, ironically, of wider issues than just the "teachers" in isolation.
Shh.
The classroom is a complicated and unconstrained environment. It is unconstrained since there are so many outside forces at work a teacher does not have control over. How do you select and train good teachers, even if you could identify them? Do you fire an bad teacher after the first year or give them time to develop?
Do you test people? How do you know they just aren't good at taking tests?
Another thing I heard (I can't find the reference) is that fewer students in the classroom make a difference. Are we willing to pay for better education or is this just another lame half-hearted attempt?
And let's not talk about charter schools. There is evidence they are no better than public schools. If we fix either charter or public schools we may be able to fix the other.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/on-education/2009/06/17/charter-schools-might-not-be-better.html
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Yes, if we figure out the magic equation that produces competent teachers, and we'll be able to apply it all the dim drones willing to work for a teacher's wages.
Let's do the same for programmers! And doctors! And stock traders! Think of the money we'll save!
I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of people who want to teach, but want to work a regular job as well. I'm not sure how it would work logistically, but it would be nice if they were able to sign up as a "consultant-teacher" to teach one class in their area of expertise with no long term commitment.
All teachers need is a high enough salary to live a decent lifestyle (I know it's relative, but I'm sure you can figure out what I mean). Most good teachers have no illusions about becoming millionaires through teaching. They're not stupid after all. Being super rich is not their goal in life.
Good teachers enjoy teaching. Most don't like dealing with loads of admin crap, or politicking.
So you spend some of the money and resources not on high salaries, but on getting most of that crap out of the way.
Where high salaries can come in handy for teachers are: subsidized/free education for their own children[1], and housing loans/allowances (and in the USA, medical/health stuff).
I suggest that it may be cheaper to provide them that than to directly provide them higher salaries.
For example: instead of paying all teachers high enough salaries so that all their children can go to university, do masters, PhD etc, you just commit to paying for any of their children that want to (and meet the grade/entry requirements), and take a gamble that not all their children will want to do so, and not all would want to go to the most expensive universities[2] (and meet the entry requirements). And so I bet you end up paying less overall.
[1] It would be sad and ironic if teachers cannot afford to provide good education for their own children. And I'm sure most good teachers place significant value on education.
[2] and only the approved ones, otherwise people will be setting up "online super expensive university courses"...
Oh teachers are special.
They should never be fired for gross incompetence, assessed in any way o even rated publicly.
Especially if you ask teachers unions.
You get some lovely catch 22's with the teachers union here too.
Here the unions position is literally "there are no bad teachers".
One shining example stands out for me... a teacher who was consistently drunk throughout my time in highschool.
Completely out of it the whole time.
Now of course the teachers union maintains that it doesn't oppose firing teachers who are drunk on the job... BUT.
The catch 22 is that the only evidence of a teacher being drunk on the job which is acceptable to the union is a blood test.
The teachers union will not allow teachers to be required to undergo such test under any circumstances.
Hence the only way the drunken teacher can be fired is if she either admits it openly or hands them a blood sample for no reason.
The cry of "but the union doesn't defend drunken teachers!!!!" which you hear from teacher is a load of shit.
They do defend drunken teacher, they just pretend those teachers aren't regularly drunk on the job .
Standardized test? What the heck is that?! Here in BC, Canada, the teachers are completely against standardized testing of students. They don't believe in it because, (horrors of horrors) people will use the data to choose better schools and better teachers for their children. Oh, they say it's for the kids sake - that failing a test will crush all spirit out of the kids. But really they just don't want us to know how shitty most of the teachers really are.
L.A. Weekly:
In the past decade, [school district] officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
[Note that, in one of nation's largest school districts, that's less than one ATTEMPTED firing per year]
We also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining.
- AJ
Maybe people feel teaching is a more rewarding job than janit-ing, so they're willing to take less pay for it? Maybe it's harder to find a skilled janitor than a skilled teacher? Maybe its easier to evaluate the skill or quality of a janitor, so it seems harder to find a decent one than it is to find a body sit in a box of kids?
Another interesting point is that the man, who worked as a janitor in a public school, sent his own kid to a private school (as many public school teachers also do. Something about "not eating dog food" I'm lead to understand.)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Private schools are not the answer. I went to public and private schools. The only reason private schools perform better imo was because the students in private schools were handpicked, low risk students who came from supporting homes.
Take your average Public school class and dump them into a private school and you can kiss your academic achievements goodbye. The quality of teaching was pretty comparable in both schools.
Teachers can not be fairly judged by the success of their students. We know as an absolute fact that the wealth of the student's home is by far the major factor in the students success. Sadly that happens to equate with race in many areas of our nation. In the end it boils down to schools with poor testing results being filled with students drenched in deep poverty and lack of opportunities in their early years. The schools can do very little to repair these children. Kids who do not see their parents reading books in their very early years will never tend to read themselves. By first grade the permanent damage is done.
The second way to test a teacher is also not good. If you test an English teacher on his English knowledge he may test poorly but he just might be intensely skilled in the narrow knowledge needed to teach his eight grade English class and he might be the type of teacher that gets through to the students.
Compounding this problem are situations in which a school draws a small number of very poor students but has a large majority of students from affluent homes. I know a teacher right now who gives a female fifth grade student lots of attention and good grades because she knows the girl can become really violent. The girl is in the fifth grade! Before you think that is nonsense consider that these young kids are known to shoot teachers. Gifted students will not receive the attention that the troubled child gets. Yet 90% of that school comes from affluent families.
Maybe they didn't know the candidate was lousy when they hired them. They hired someone that seemed okay, they turned out to be lousy, and now they can't get rid of them. In my school district, there is no shortage of candidates for teaching jobs. If it was possible to ease out bad teachers one way or another, there would be more opportunities to find potentially good ones.
In group behavior: 'because they're evil/morons/sheep/crazy' is not 'insightful' it's 'oversimplified'
Former Teach For America high school computer science and math teacher here. (I also taught at a school funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's High Tech High initiative noted in the summary.)
First, some positive comments. It's great to see studies like those mentioned in the Newsweek article attracting eyeballs in academia and the popular press. The conclusions may seem to border on the tautological for most of us (great teachers are great at teaching!), but such ideas are largely verboten in the public school system. If you haven't already RTFA, I'd suggest The Atlantic's treatment of the same material.
Anecdotally, I can fully corroborate Teach For America's data. Both in my school as well as those of my TFA colleagues, teachers that continually pushed themselves to excel and improve in their craft were able to consistently produce jaw-dropping results in their students' test scores. It really is amazing. As an example, I co-taught a summer school pre-calculus class with another TFAer in Watts a few years ago. We somehow managed to march through three years worth of material in those two months; our students went from being on average two grade levels behind to slightly above grade level. I attribute this success to Teach For America's philosophy of teacher excellence (which is similar to 'kaizen' in many regards).
The summary asks "What makes a good teacher?" This is the wrong question. There is no one thing that will make a teacher great (vibrant personality, deep subject knowledge, an M.S. Ed., etc.). Rather, it is an attitude that is willing to try anything (and, conversely, promptly reject the ineffective) to make students succeed. To use a math analogy, it is the second derivative that matters, not the current value or even the slope.
Disclaimer: this post does not necessarily reflect the views of my former employers.
You touch on the BIGGEST lie in education. Teachers are not under paid. In most places in the country, the average teachers salary yearly is just slightly below the average salary in the area, and the average hourly pay of teachers is above the average of the general public. Teaching pays an average amount. Not a lot, and definitely not a little. When the numbers are laid if front of people they start running to arguments about how much schooling the teacher has, or how much overtime the teachers work (which is another lie in teaching). My wife spent many years working in lending. She reviewed a lot of public school teachers W-2s from many different states, what she found was that teachers do just fine in the salary department.
Of course, we should be asking how good of teachers they are if they cannot handle the simple math it requires to see that they make decent money.
There was a recent New Yorker article that seemed to cut through all this. (Unfortunately, you can't read the whole thing without a subscription: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/01/100201fa_fact_rotella)
Anyway, the point was that the Teach for America program has this huge shitload of data for almost 20 years relating to teacher effectiveness, and they can and have used it to make sure they're hiring better teachers. The trick is you don't have to identify anything about effective techniques, etc- all you have to do is follow the extremely strong correlations from assessing your candidates,
As an aside, the Teach for America people specifically said it was less relevant the quality of the educational background of the teacher than that they had faced some academic hardship and overcome it in the past. Screw you for badmouthing people that want to teach. And you should read both this New Yorker article and the featured one. They pretty clearly back up the notion that teacher effectiveness is more relevant than this "anti-ghetto" stuff you're spouting without data.
Of course there is plenty of evidence that you get good employees if you pay them more money. Look around and quit listening to think tank FUD. There is absolutely no way of substantiating the article's panic laden assertions. None. Look at yourself in the mirror for goodness sake.
Every high performing private school hires teachers with doctorates. Universities hire people with doctorates. They get paid a lot and because they have tons of knowledge in their subject area they make pretty good teachers. There is plenty of research that says people who know what they are talking about are good teachers. The news is as usual catching and throwing some crap from yet another attempt to distract people from doing what is right.
OMG the educators have been doing it wrong for the last fifty years! ROFL Peolpe who believe that believe their plumber has been putting their pipes in backwards and their electrician has miswired their houses. They have a profound distrust of institutions that may or may not be well-founded. The result of such thinking is what brought about the rise of home schooling. But you gotta understand the majority of home schooling moms are evangelicals whose husbands have big gun collections and think the IRS is out to get them. They may be right, but they aren't you or me.
Now I'm sure that at this point all the slashdot self-educated whingers will come out of the woodwork, but seriously folks, just think about it. The articles are pretty much crap.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
You seem to misunderstand who the customer is. This is a common mistake in education.
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.
I can't speak to a wider trend, but I can verify this in the case of at least one public school. My wife teaches 9th graders and regularly brings food for her students just to make sure they have eaten, because there isn't any at home. She also gives them books that she's finished reading, because otherwise they wouldn't have any at home. Turns out when somebody actually takes the time to figure out what they're interested in, and then provides those books, these kids really like to read.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
My students are current researching this issue for a paper. My wife is also studying in the field of education. So I think I have a few things to say. First, my dad retired as a teacher, and he was barely breaking $30k when he did. That was about ten years ago. Teachers in East Tennessee, good ones, well, some are making $35k, with an MA or MS. That's too little. Then again, I have a doctorate, with publications, and I'm making $32, teaching 116 students this semester. If I quit, I could be replaced right away with some other sucker. So maybe it's the same for K-12. Next thought. The education K-12 teachers get is a joke. Worse than a joke, complete crap. I've been in the education building, listened to the courses and the professors. I don't say this lightly: these are not the people you want teaching teachers. Fire them all. Burn the building. Salt the earth. Start over. No one should teach anything above 3rd grade without a BA/BS in that field. With an education minor. No one should be allowed to teach anything, nothing, with an education degree. No one should be allowed to teach teachers who has not taught in a classroom for 5-10 years. Period. Exclamation point. Another idea: how about some respect? In America, that means, in part money, but how about we laugh at any smug jerk who says "those who can do..."? How about we teach our kids to obey and respect teachers? (Of course, this will require clearing the unrespectable deadwood first.) Also, how about being able to actually fail kids, at least at the high school level? We should also teach how to govern one's emotions, require physical education, complete nutrition, and discipline. Finally, we should decouple school funding from the individual districts. Yep. If you're rich and you want your kids to have a special school, you'd better be able to ante up at the private school. Otherwise, one big pot per state, with a fat chunk of federal money. And no money for tons of computers and AV. One class on word processing and a few other things. Beyond that, chalk or white boards. Save the money. Read books; talk. The return on the vast expense for the computers and other rapidly-obsolete tech just isn't worth it right now.
you can't just 'get rid of them'... you have to change the environment so they rarely exist.
i agree with an earlier comment where someone said the first 3 years of a individuals education needs to be more militant; children need to be taught that to learn is their job--for the first 18 years of their lives, and that they need to be as responsible as children as they're expected to be as adults... that means being respectful of other students responsibility to learn as well and being productive students themselves.
school is usually a far too relaxed social environment... being a class clown is often encouraged by other students. being a clown at lunch break or before or after school is fine, but when a class is actively being taught it should be known by the students as a criminal offense, and some consequence should be put into place to discourage it.
yes, i realize learning needs to be fun at times too, but from the teachers side of the equation fun learning time should be scheduled to more realistically resemble the work place lifestyle the children should be prepared for. i've seen very few teenagers make the adaption to the working adult world easily. usually the change between their school life and the working life and personal responsibilities are so dramatic that they easily become dunks, or drug users, or they merely spend years depressed because they don't know what to do about not being able to cope with the change.
learning can't always be fun anymore then you can always eat cake... i mean you can get away with it for a while, but eventually any system in place that doesn't adhere to reality will fail. maybe parents should pay a tax that get's returned to them based on their child's educational productivity, but get's paid through the student so they can feel they're getting paid for their work. "today you earned 10 dollars doing quality work at school, the book you just purchased with your parents cost $9.99. you earned the privilege of enjoying that book!"
a lot of people would say this is already the parents job, and that they can already do this, some probably do, but then i would argue that later in life it wont be a parent paying their child for their work, and it wont be their parent that scolds them lovingly if they don't succeed at producing quality work. it'll be some stranger who could care very little about the ability of the worker to feed themselves and just fires them for being a slacker.
i don't necessarily agree with the harshness that can occur within the working world nowadays, but it's there... and as long as it is our children should be well prepared for it.
People keep saying that, but I would say citation needed. Other countries with public schools do have our problems, to varying degrees. Germany was shocked and dismayed and cried bullshit a lot when the PISA study came out, because they scored similar to the US, and had always been very cocky about how much better their schools were. But much like here, the people talking about it were often looking at the best students, in Gymnasiums. The number of people dropping out of lowest tier schools or simply ending up with a diploma that was useless was depressing. Hauptschulen were becoming more and more dangerous and useless places, and teachers were quitting. I don't know if it's gotten better since, I moved back stateside. But at the time I was quite happy that I had gone to high school in Iowa, I thought our schools were better. Granted western iowa isn't dallas or new york, and the schools were much better than most in the US probably. But this general line that everyone else has it right and we are the only ones that suck at public XYZ is patently false.
It's either false dichotomies, or the terrorists win, you decide.
Report explains declining school performance in Sweden Let me summarize the article for you. Sweden's standard of education (still very high, much higher than the US) has been in decline. The reasons are as follows. 1) Schools only to a limited degree compensate for socioeconomic differences. (as you have stated) 2)The most important resource factor is teacher competence. 3)The level of segregation in the school system has increased. Widespread housing segregation and the right to choose which school to attend have resulted in more homogenous student bodies, which affects learning negatively (All the poor kids in one school, and all the rich kids in another is bad for everyone). 4) Less direction on learning outcomes and methods has led to less teacher-led instruction and this negatively affects children's performance. I don't know how you improve on these things (apart from point 2 and 4), but it seems to me that this is a great list to work from.
You touch on the BIGGEST lie in education. Teachers are not under paid.
You are right. That teachers are not under paid is the largest lie people tell about the education system.
Teaching pays an average amount.
Teaching requires a minimum of a bachelors. And yes, when you average teaching with all jobs, including McDonalds fry cooks, they end up average. But when you compare them to industries where a degree plus added specific training and internships are required, they are way behind. Add in those with strong unions (since so many whine endlessly about those) and they are even further behind. But yes, you are right, when you average office workers and minimum wage jobs together, you get teacher-salary level. And you think that's ok, and that's the real tragedy.
Learn to love Alaska