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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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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
Peer review. Not from the other teachers who work at the same school, but from teachers all over the state or country:
What I envision is that all teachers should log some 4 or 5 hours per month watching a video feed of a few randomly chosen teachers, and then give those teachers (and their bosses) feedback. This will lead to both nurturing the good teachers and quicker identification of those who should not be in charge of kids. Even those who are watching may learn something from seeing another's approach. Good all around.
The feedback should not be anonymous to avoid the occaisional personal connection that may arise. A bad review from your husband's ex should be challengable.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
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.
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.
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.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
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.
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/
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.