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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.'"
It's almost impossible to fire a teacher. Read up some of the "rubber rooms" operated in Los Angeles and New York.
"About 160 teachers and other staff sit idly in buildings scattered around the sprawling district, waiting for allegations of misconduct to be resolved.
The housed are accused, among other things, of sexual contact with students, harassment, theft or drug possession. Nearly all are being paid. All told, they collect about $10 million in salaries per year -- even as the district is contemplating widespread layoffs of teachers because of a financial shortfall."
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/06/local/me-teachers6
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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.
i was kind of disgusted by a recent story i read in the new york daily news
it was a story of a public school janitor who bilked his school's petty cash fund for janitorial services to the tune of $30K
to, among other frivolties, send his kid to private school (irony meter off the charts)
but that's not the real story in this story. the real story here is that this janitor made $86K a year?!
some sort of 40 year tenure you say? no, he was there for only 5 years
how does it make sense that a janitor is making $86K a year considering the average new york city school teacher's salary?
i don't understand how this makes sense to anyone in the new york city school system
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/03/04/2010-03-04_custodians_rap_cleaned_city_out_of_30g.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
of State Government there is no chance for improvement in the trenches. The whole system, from soup to nuts, needs to be dredged out and rebuilt and there is zero chance that will ever happen, specially in California with it's all-powerful teacher's union.
Schwarzenegger wasn't the first to try, and he won't be the last to fail.
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.
In my personal experience, students are the best judge of teachers, once they reach the JR High/Middle school and are exposed to more than one teacher at a time. Grade school kids usually have nothing to compare with "She who must be obeyed".
Looking back, students can identify the best teachers they ever had, those that got them interested in subjects, who got points across, who came prepared, and who usually had a closet full of source material accumulated over the years.
In a move that would surely bring the swat team today, we were handed a Civil war rifle to examine (inert), often instructed by "The general" in full period uniform (regardless of the period being discussed), and howled in laughter as a canoe paddle and coon skin cap was produced from under the desk and he paddled his desk chair across the room.
This kind of imaginative teaching is now gone. Instead we have dumbed down books and teachers instructed to follow it to the letter.
I suspect everyone can think back on their education and immediately identify a particular teacher that made an impression. Both good and bad. And more often than not that teacher will not have been the one teaching their favorite subject.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
1 teachers should go down for treason if they can't teach but keep trying to
2 every administrator should be required to put in say 2 "credit hours" of teaching every year
(unless it can be proven they are geniuses at admin but can't teach)
3 the first 3 years of teaching should be done by folks that are a combo of MR Rogers and Judge Dred
4 most of the first 3 years should be focused on A that you can learn B respect for others C how to teach yourself
(who cares that a 5 year old only knows 1 language if said kid is able to respect the other kids long enough to learn the other languages)
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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.
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!
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.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
That is what I said, the best teacher had to be able to do both.
we spend the money on Education and higher salaries so we can attract better people to teaching
This sounds great on the surface; after all, one gets what one pays for, right? Sorry, here's a collection of links to browse that will VERY quickly dispell that notion:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_pri_sch_stu-spending-per-primary-school-student
http://www.epodunk.com/top10/per_pupil/
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
http://www.heritage.org/research/Education/bg2179.cfm
Now, IF the hiring and firing of teachers worked like going to work at a private company then the spend more get better results method would not only work, it would have worked already. Unfortunately, teaching is a political hot potato. It's nearly impossible to fire underperforming teachers. Just look at the hubbub in Rhoad Island a few weeks ago. At the worst performing school in the state, the superintendent directed the teachers to work 20 minutes per day more. They refused and threw a stink and the teachers' union is litigating the hell out of the district when the superintendent said they'd be laid off at the end of the year. Here in Denver, where the city schools are wretched, a whopping total of 0.4 percent of teachers were not only bad enough but also behaved badly enough to get fired last year. How many people in private sector jobs god laid off in a TYPICAL year, nevermind the crappy economic conditions like last year? 0.4% indicates just how hard it is to get rid of bad ones. And you can't have any performance based pay at all - the union threatens to have a fit every time that's seriously suggested.
The only way to force the teachers to get better at the public schools is to open up more competition. This means vouchers for private schooling, Everywhere this gets tried seriously, the public schools are forced to improve or go out of business. The public teachers' union HATES vouchers though, so it's really hard to get such systems implemented.
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.
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!
..Class size? As a science teacher, I fully agree with all the comments about the difficulty of firing teachers, and the effect of teachers of pupils performance, BUT in terms of my own teaching - if the school cannot afford enough teachers and class sizes are made larger - not even the best teacher in the world can make that much of a difference. On the other hand, fewer students with even a bad teacher will do better. Also, the government (UK in this case) should stop changing the sylabus or current faddy pedagogy and let teachers teach the same thing for more than 3 years. Just when you start achieving results with whatever they have decided is the 'next best thing'(TM) they change it.
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"...
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.
Find free books.
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.
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.
So your point is skills can't be learned?
If we really need superstars to teach, then we're screwed. According to the BLS there are something like 3.5 million teachers in the US right now (kindergarten to high school). There are 660,000 physicians and surgeons. 1.3 million computer "engineers" and programmers. So it seems like if your strategy is to magically select exceptionally smart people, then we won't have good teachers.
I don't divide the world into "dim drones" and "brights". It doesn't have to be a "magic equation". The fact is there may be skills and techniques that make for better teachers, and those might be learnt to a certain degree. If that's true, we'll still have better and worse teachers, we'll still have to get rid of bad teachers, but we'll be in a better situation. More money would help, but it needs to be spent intelligently.
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?
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
The problem with US education is NOT one of funding; governments have been throwing more and money at education over the past decades and it hasn't made any difference in outcomes:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1980_2020&view=1&expand=&units=b&fy=fy11&chart=20-total&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&title=&state=US&color=c&local=20-total
Of course, it's usually the people who stand to benefit from having even more thrown at this problem, who cry out about how the problem is "we need more money". Which makes me wonder if you're part of the system.
What these projects are really are massive gifts from those of us who can't make use of the lines to those who happen to live nearby and want to travel along the rail corridor.
i currently live 1 block from a BART station in walnut creek, CA. BART is a multi-track, multi-line high speed train network which runs into san francisco and the rest of the bay area... if the train station wasn't here, i wouldn't have moved here. so your assumption that the only people to benefit are those that "happen to live nearby" doesn't take into account that everyone has the option of benefiting by moving closer to a train station.
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.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
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.
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.
It's well-known, and also my experience, that administrators don't really care about the quality of the teaching in classrooms. To them it's just a product, and as long as the "sale" is being made, job done. Consider the same dynamics in a helpdesk, phone support situation; what is more profitable?
Consider my sig. First, I had a college teaching job where the union was non-functional and reviews were given by a dean. Result: I had to beg and plead for an assistant dean to come into my room once, ever, for the supposed required review; he stayed for 5 minutes and scribbled something utterly nonsensical about the CS lesson, "Dan's great", that's it. Now, I teach at a school where the union is strongly involved, and every semester I get a rotating series of fellow professors sitting in my classroom for a whole hour, writing a 6-page report, and having a discussion with me about my classroom management, in a very detailed and sometimes picky manner.
American Educator magazine, Fall 2008, had an issue about the effects of teacher governance and peer review. One interesting finding: When the union and teachers are involved in reviews, they are FAR MORE likely to fire teachers than administrators or principals. Teachers care about the profession, and the students, and their reputation; just like doctors or lawyers or engineers. But administrators have other priorities.
Read the article here ("Taking the Lead", p. 37): http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall2008/index.htm
Look, in the last two decades there's been a concerted Chicago-school-type program to wrest control away from teachers and corporatize schools, reducing teachers to low-paid, unskilled at-will labor. Full-time teachers have been replaced by part-time contingent faculty to save costs (example: community college instructors in 1997 were 54% tenured full-time, now just 43%). The majority of funding increases go to grow administration jobs, not in-classroom teaching (growing 41% between 1997 and 2007). Source, AFT State of Higher Education Worforce: http://www.aftface.org/storage/face/documents/ameracad_report_97-07for_web.pdf
In a software company, the PHB's tend to want to take decision-making away from the engineers, and the result is an inefficiently run company (but in the short-run, profitable for the bosses). The exact same thing is happening right now with the PHB's of the school system trying to squeeze out teacher peer review and shared governance, for the same reasons, with all available data showing the exact same end-results. The more they squeeze, the more students will slip through their fingers. But like a lot of American social issues, the evidence can't get through the wild-eyed tea-party propaganda.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.
I agree with your general sentiment. I will note that one of those groups who uses teachers as a "political football" in CA is none other than the teacher's union.
(Yes, I mean that as an insult to them, and to every other union that places their own political power above the well being of their victims-- I mean "members".)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I suggest the works of John Taylor Gatto.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
A former teacher who won awards as Teacher-of-the-Year for both New York City and New York State, Gatto has looked into the history of education in the United States and came to the conclusion that the Education system is working exactly as it was designed.
However, the U.S. education system was designed to prepare students to be cogs in the industrial machine, and that requires workers who have some basic skills but no independence or spirit of inquiry. In short, it requires workers who are half-educated - no more, no less - and so countless reforms never work because the system is already working exactly as intended.
These little piddling changes will make no difference. Allow the money to follow the students, that might make a difference. The government monopoly on schools will just continue on its old course.
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.
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?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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)
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.
Having attended grad school to secure a teaching certificate, I can tell you that the education culture will resist any attempt to cull poor performers from the pack. The emphasis is on never criticizing and being exceptionally inclusive. When peer review was done, all reviews were A+ while performance varied considerably. The instructors and students "accommodated" the poor performers because I was told "They need jobs too and it's our job to help them.".
And I'll bring up the other elephant in the room: it's because education is, in the USA at least, a very female culture. You can see the effect of this in the entire process, much to the detriment of the students: management by consensus, emphasis on behaving "well" and being quiet, institutional enforcement of the status quo, heavy reliance on social rules, reliance on strategies like "think of the children" when engaging in discussion and so on. Sadly, this aspect has been discussed for years and since the education/female culture is threatened by it, it is never fully addressed and typically dismissed as not relevant. The female culture of caring and nurturing is wonderful for day care, but not for educating. And what is it our schools appear to have become? Institutions of babysitting where the emphasis is on "getting along", "respecting diversity", improving "self esteem" and walking quietly in a straight line down the hall. The nod to learning is achieving a good score on a standardized test, which the teachers in Norfolk, VA have been manipulating (cheating) to artificially inflate score to keep their budgets and jobs. There's nothing wrong with female culture, it's simply misapplied in education.
Given that Bill Gates is not an educator, he is not aware that the characteristics of a good teacher have long been known (but he could "Bing" that, I suppose), it's how to communicate and teach those that is still undecided (RTFA). It's just that those characteristics seems to be at odds with the moribund education culture.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Thats not true.
My wife is a teacher and you can be fired for being seen in a bar, having a facebook page, or just wearing a bikini in public. There is zero tolerance as teachers need to be holier than thou and the union can not save you. Also, teachers do not become immune from being fired until about 3 to 4 years and even then you can still be fired for gross negligence such as coming to work drunk. Infact, this happened with a new teacher. He just got hired and partied all night the night before class to celebrate his new job and passed out in the bushes by lunch. He was fired on the spot before the first day finished.
Even a picture of you smoking in public outside the school can get you canned. They are that strict. Firing teachers is quite popular in this political climate. This is true even in minority districts where 65% of students do not speak English as a native language. hmm why do not the students there test at grade level in English?
Must be the teachers fault right? Fire them!
Teachers are fired left and right every 1 to 2 years and rehired so they do not get the union benefits of job security. My wife is always let go and rehired every year. It has a devastating psychological effect as the kids and I freak out every summer about living out in the street only to be rehired. I tell you one thing. If this happens again she will not be a teacher anymore. This crap has got to stop and teachers are anything but un-fireable. Infact, I would even say teachers have less job security than most professions. You do not just go in and teach. Your lesson plans and your schedule have to be very very detailed in a particular format that takes a few college level courses to do it right. Think of it as writing an APA paper? This is for every day and the principals love to ring you in by the neck if its not 100% perfect or not to their liking. Its not fun nor easy anymore.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
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.
A big part of the problem is that teachers aren't taught well. I worked in a private school without a teaching certificate for 10 years. Later I went back to school and got a B.Ed. Two years of sand piling.
My headmaster would NOT hire someone who only had a teaching degree. Claimed that a border collie could do a better job, and the kids would like her better. He preferred young people with a 'hard' degree -- one that required either brains or scholarship -- figuring he could teach them how to teach in a year.
Rather than create a darwinian survival of the fittest, I think it would better to create a positive feed back loop.
Try this: Most school districts have some form of peer selected teaching execellence awards. Take the N runner ups. Secund them away from the school, arm them with clipboards, and let them loose in the Education college at the local university.
Let them rewrite the entire curriculum. Chuck the sandpiling courses.
Move the education system away from the universities and into the Community colleges, and the Institutes of technology. Run it more like the trade program rather than college.
Here's how the teacher training system would work.
1. You pick up a 3 or 4 year degree in some subject. For high school teachers it's related to their specialty. For elementary teachers it's some combination of childhood psychology, and general level courses in everything.
2. You go to 'Normal School' (What teacher's schools used to be called.) This is your typical trade school program. 12 weeks of training, followed by a minimum of 24 weeks of work experience in the field. You get paid for work, just not as much as a journeyman does.
3. You get out, and join the fray.
4. After N years experience you can apply to become a teacher at the Normal school. N should be short initially 5 years or so, to maximize feedback.
***
The second aspect that needs to change is the expectations of parents and kids. Teachers are expected to put up with behaviours from both that are off the wall:
* My sister-in-law had a grade 2 student that was acting out. She kept her after class to talk to her at the start of lunch hour. Possibly kept her for 5 minutes. The girls mom stormed in, said that Libby had no right to keep her kid late at all without written notice. Grabbed her kid, as didn't bring her back that day. Mom complained to the principal, and Libby was required to apologise to the mom.
* I worked for a while in a school where almost none of the kids wanted to be there. Most kids, when push comes to shove recognize that they need an education. They may not like it, but they tolerate it. Add to the social group, and school isn't as boring as just being at home. In this school I had one bright young blade come up and inform me that he wasn't coming back. "Why not?" "I want to go to a school where there are otehr kids in my class who want to learn"
* Merging the seriously learning disabled into regular classes is a mistake. A teacher teaching 24 students has about 2 minutes per kid in the course of a class. Typically 1/3 of the kids get it from being shown once. They learn from your talk at the beginning. Another third will learn from a few seconds of 1 on 1 showing an example or two. The final third need several examples and coaching. This gets really difficult if you have a kid who is noisy or otherwise disruptive. It gets difficult if they have such special needs that the regular curriculum doesn't work. If they are quiet, try hard, and don't need a separate curriculum, then merge them in.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.