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.'"

Comments

Fire teachers? Good luck

[Vinegar Joe]

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

Re:Fire teachers? Good luck

[John Hasler]

So you think they should be fired on the basis of a mere accusation?

Re:Fire teachers? Good luck

[jthill]

So, fire them on accusation?

Kids, of course, especially teenagers, are known for their measured approach, their abhorrence of drama. And we all know that parents never turn vengeful over Johnny's bad report or whether the coach is giving him a fair shake.

So I guess it'd be a good idea to hand out the power to destroy any teacher's life with a word.

Simple fact is, it's not actually that hard to fire a teacher. I've watched it operate over the course of decades. True: even for the ones are who just ordinarily bad, who just aren't cutting it, you have to go slow, you have to show that there genuinely is a problem and not a gaggle of histrionic parents, you have to show you tried to help with their weak spots, because teaching doesn't pay much and teachers who've gotten past the prerequisites, who look like they might be able to cut it, to do a genuinely good job, aren't easy to come by.

This isn't the corporate world, where people with friends get up-and-out promotions or just get ignored, given nothing meaningful to do. This isn't the corporate world, where little empire-builders hire huge teams to follow baroque procedures to solve problems better addressed by just one competent employee, if you could find one. This isn't the corporate world, where you can impress ignorant bosses by getting all showy with how hard you work and how much you produce.

These are schools, where slacking off hurts children.

Teaching shares this with programming: it's somewhere between a professional craft and an art, and anyone who genuinely knows anything about the product can see stellar work for what it is. Most people can identify a happy child with a lively, perceptive mind. It's strange, though: you'd be astonished how many people seem to be threatened by such children. You'd be astonished how many parents never give a shit about their children and then blame the teachers when their children don't care about themselves. You'd be astonished how many parents transfer fears and frustrations in their personal lives into their children's classrooms and start getting hysterical because of a chance remark.

And no, I've never been a teacher, never worked in a school, never been married or lovers or even friends with anyone who got fired or even needed help. But I have known someone well who was president of a teacher's union for decades, and I've been around for lots of bad or worse teachers getting fired.

Lazy principals who think growing good teachers is somebody else's job ... now, they're hard to get rid of.

Oops. Sorry, was that unfair?

Re:Better teachers and more funding !

[icebike]

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.

Re:Teachers Unions

[0xdeadbeef]

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.

Good Teachers

[Lije Baley]

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.

Re:Good Teachers

[mctk]

And they won't need higher salaries - just a nice bureaucracy and politics-free workplace.

Personally, I've never understood the resistance to paying teachers more. Our entire push in the last decade has to make schools more business-like. Normally, the measure of a good business is whether it stays in business. With schools, however, that metric doesn't work. No Child Left Untested is an attempt to fix this. If we have a metric for schools, then we can "bankrupt" those that aren't performing. We are trying to fit our schools into our free-market philosophy. However, for some reason, we ignore an elementary free-market observation; if you don't have enough qualified candidates for positions, then you need to improve working conditions and/or offer more money. Simple, and yet rather than recognize this, people complain about "administration" and call teachers whiners.

Since we can't outsource education, we've decided to put the squeeze on artificially. Give schools less money, while at the same time, expect more. The schools I worked at could use *more* "administration". Our principal was overworked. Our secretary was deciding which classes students should be placed in, because our *part-time* counselor was only on campus half the day. Rooms only got cleaned every third day. Roofs leaked. Heating failed. Our school had no librarian. There was no music program. There was no dance program. There was one visual arts teacher. After-school programs died as their funding was cut. What an inspiring place for a student to be. Really expresses the concern society has for their education.

And you've got curriculums that are created are created by textbook makers and suits far removed from the realities of students. You can't teach something to someone who doesn't care. But "inspiration" is secondary. Spend a week studying imaginary numbers that culminates in students who actually understand what they're looking at when they see the Mandelbrot Set, and, officially, you've wasted a week, cause that isn't on the tests. Spend a week working through some of the details and mathematics of how, exactly, your voice is transmitted from your cell phone to mine (something students are always *very* interested in), and, officially, you've now wasted two weeks. And the tests will show that you're behind. You must be a bad teacher.

I often think that our society's vision for teachers is to remove all individuality, all wiggle-room, all deviations from the norm. In our attempts to make sure that curriculum is presented exactly equally to all students in all schools, we will soon remove teachers all together and replace them with DVD's.

Re:Better teachers and more funding !

[thms]

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.

Re:Teachers Unions

[sweatyboatman]

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's not mainly about salaries

[TheLink]

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"...

overwhelming social and economic forces

[bcrowell]

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.

Prental Involment?

[YesDinosaursDidExist]

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.

Re:Prental Involment?

[fishexe]

In many "at risk" districts teachers spend more than half their day making sure the kids aren't hungry, are behaving in class, have their homework completed, and have the supplies that they need like pencils.

I can't speak to a wider trend, but I can verify this in the case of at least one public school. My wife teaches 9th graders and regularly brings food for her students just to make sure they have eaten, because there isn't any at home. She also gives them books that she's finished reading, because otherwise they wouldn't have any at home. Turns out when somebody actually takes the time to figure out what they're interested in, and then provides those books, these kids really like to read.

Good examples are there...

[BrokenHalo]

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?

Re:Good examples are there...

[ultranova]

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.

No it doesn't. Education, however, does. Finland was Russia's (and before that Sweden's) economically abused agrarian colony until the first World War, got pummeled heavily by Stalin in second, and had to pay huge tribute for the crime of not surrendering. That tribute had to be paid largely in industrial products. This prompted industrialization and made educated people very valuable, since a nation of a few million people kinda has to care about effectiveness of labour.

As a practical example, consider the cost of university level education in Finland and America. According to usastudyguide.com the cost of tuition in the United States is between $5,000 to $25,000, and this doesn't include room and board or additional fees. In Finland, in Tampere University, it's 44,50 euros ($60) per year. On top of that, the state pays part of your living expenses plus around 200 euros per month of social security, and usually a single meal per day on top of that in University's cafe.

In other words, in the United States higher education is a luxury that costs you $100,000+ to get, while in Finland it's considered so valuable to society that it actually pays you to get it. Everything else follows from that difference in attitudes.

Cue a thousand libertarians missing the point and ranting about socialism in their responses.

Re:How do you develop good teachers?

[spaceman375]

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.

New Approach

[McBeer]

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.

Re:Better teachers and more funding !

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Why teachers matter.

[jshurst1]

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.

Re:just pay them more

[Nimey]

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.

Re:Better teachers and more funding !

[Billly Gates]

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.