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.'"
yes but the trick is to raise the bottom to a higher level
While you're at it, have you a plan to raise the sea floor of the Mariana Trench?
For an example lets say that a school has a range of scores from 94% to say 50% (or some A work and some F work)
Now a Partnership of IBM and several big medical Companies decides to run a test of their new Computer Brain Interface (which allows the "data" parts of education to simply be downloaded).
The problem is that the dumb kids lack the mental function necessary to comprehend what they have just downloaded. Knowledge, left unapplied, is worthless. In many cases it is actually worse than worthless.
Now yes there will be 50% of the students in the bottom 50 percentile but that bottom 50% NOW PASSES THE STANDARDIZED TESTS
They're not measuring whether the kids pass standardized tests.
They're measuring by straight percentile.
They're also using the old, broken metric of evaluating the teacher by the successes of his students. And let's face it, whenever you get into this, confounding variables enter the mix and they are NEVER negligible. Given the sample sizes, you usually can't even control for them properly.
Do I believe there are bad teachers? Hell yes. Do I believe every "bad teacher" story? No. A "bad teacher" story often turns out to be a "bad student" story - and one bad student can disrupt and hold back an entire class, even moreso in the "class shall move at the pace of the slowest fucking idiot" mentality of schools since the mid-70s.
Charles Murray, referenced in the Slashdot post above (rather out of context up there too, jesus christ!), has also said the following:
"Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough."
Also:
"On the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95."
The confounding variable is, and always will be, the random chucking-around of problem children into classrooms that was prevalent even 3 decades before "No Child Left Behind."
We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster. - Carl Sagan
The "standardized tests" we need today, are a far cry from what was required even 20 years ago. Unfortunately, society is comprised primarily of "twelve o'clock flashers" (those idiots who, in the 80s, would have an analog clock on the wall and a VCR, microwave oven, and stove all flashing 12:00 because they could never figure out how to set the clock.