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Bill Gates On What Business Can Teach Schools
Hugh Pickens writes "Most workplaces build a system to evaluate worker performance, provide feedback that yields information employees can use to improve, and then hold employees accountable for results. However, Bill and Melinda Gates write that in the field of education, we really don't know very much at all about what makes someone an effective teacher. 'We have all known terrific teachers,' write the Gates. 'But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding.' For the last several years, the Gates Foundation has been working with more than 3,000 teachers on a large research project called Measures of Effective Teaching to get a better sense of what makes teaching work (PDF) so that school districts can start to hire, train and promote based on meaningful standards. 'Once the MET research is completed, we hope that school districts will work with teachers and their unions to create fair and reliable evaluations that reward teachers who are effective and identify and help those who need to improve. When that happens, we believe that districts will be on the cusp of providing every student with an effective teacher, in every class, every year.'"
They're called Parent-Teacher Conferences.
This guy Hugh Pickens, he's Roland Piquepaille back from the grave, right?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Once the MET research is completed, we hope that school districts will work with teachers and their unions to create fair and reliable evaluations that reward teachers who are effective and identify and help those who need to improve.
How many times have people tried this? How many different answers do we need anyway?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's not that we don't know HOW to evaluate teachers, it's that you have to cut through miles of bullshit from teachers unions, state employee unions, and assorted political allies to actually DO IT and USE IT for anything. If you think that unions are about to negotiate away things like teacher seniority, tenure, automatic raises, etc. then you're high. They protect their own, and they have the emotional political/public appeal of the underpaid noble teacher to use if they need to (even though teachers are actually usually very WELL paid).
There are also real world issues that no one wants to talk about that effect teacher performance at the best and worst schools. Poor schools tend to be in shitty neighborhoods where teachers don't want to work, for example. Improving a school in a shitty neighborhood isn't as simple as "We need to get good teachers." You're NOT going to get the good teachers because the good teachers would be fucking crazy to teach at Gangbanger High when they could make more money and put up with less threats of physical violence if they go to the suburbs and teach at Whitey McRichkid High. So you're stuck with the worst teachers, the one's who had no choice but to come there. School stays shitty, vicious cycle continues.
Breaking that cycle requires real money to recruit better teachers, and the shitty schools usually have the LEAST money. If you want to get rid of the bad teachers in a crappy school, what are you going to do, fire everyone? Where are you going to get replacements? Some crappy schools are having to recruit overseas in places like the Philippines just to find teachers as it is.
This is approaching the problem the wrong way. In an ideal world, it would be great to evaluate teachers and pay/promote/fire based on performance. But in the real world, it doesn't work that way.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
PERSONALITY, persistence and patience.
Dear Bill,
Thank you for your comments and concerns but we got this, thanks.
P.S. Please keep sending the money though
Sincerely Yours,
The Teachers Unions
Sad, but this has been the response for a looooong time now and as my good man Bob Dylan says.....the times they are a changin'
Now if anything actually comes of this, maybe capitalism isn't all bad after all. If not, BURN WALL STREET!
One without tenure...
Bill Gates On What Business Can Teach Schools
1) patent
2) lawsuit
3) profit!
Teaching 55,203,000 students, at 132,656 schools. There is no larger group of professionals in the US. So, if you want to improve education in the US, you can pretty much forget about "hiring the best, firing the rest." You need to build a teaching work force that meets your needs.
Job performance evaluations are useless. Most of the time the completion of performance evaluations are tied to Manger bonuses.
It takes two things, and it doesn't matter what the field is: heart and talent.
As a country, we do a decent job training a teacher in what they need to know to teach (both curriculum and method). But you can never instill the right heart--that has to come from within. No amount of money or any other external incentive will ever give someone a passion to teach. The passion, placed in the hands of the person with the right knowledge is what makes a great teacher.
Any policy or incentive will always get the wrong results. We need to foster a love for education rather than bribe people to love their children.
In January 2011, the National Education Policy Center (a think tank funded by the National Education Association (NEA)) published a paper by Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California – Berkeley. In his paper, Mr. Rothstein stated that the MET project’s preliminary finding that teachers with high value-added on state tests also tend to help their students master cognitively challenging tasks is not supported by the data collected in the first year of the project. Are Mr. Rothstein’s criticisms accurate?
I've worked in the private sector. They expect results. - Dr Ray Stanz
The fallacy here is not whether one can or cannot measure teacher performance, or whether or not teachers unions etc will let any change happen.
The real fallacy here is thinking that businesses know anything about evaluating their employees. Businesses do regularly build systems to evaluate their worker's performance, and those systems are almost universally crap and reviled.
Why would one take advice from business on performance evaluation -- their track record isn't exactly inspiring.
"we got this"? You must be one of the teachers that could use some improvement according to Mr. Gates suggestions.
Cheers, Chris
Are hamstrung by poorly planned curriculum and the current application of memorization and regurgitation that is the standardized testing system of today.
1) Gives a shit.
2) Knows their shit.
3) Low tolerance for shit.
Or, more to the point, the elements of a bad teacher:
1) Wants to expend the least amount of effort to collect a paycheck.
2) Has a head full of stupid ideas like: these kids probably aren't doing drugs or bullying each other. The stupid ones will always be stupid and the smart ones will always be smart no matter what I do. Cheerleaders wouldn't lie to me. I don't have to know my subject to teach it well, I can just read the book as I go. Disagreeing with me means the answer is incorrect, even if it is clearly an opinion-seeking question. The correct remedy to low grades is MORE HOMEWORK! Rote memorization of boring facts is a great way to get young minds interested in higher learning. etc.
3) Refuses to adequately punish the trouble-makers or under-performers, to the detriment of the rest of the class.
While we are at it, we should more intelligently align the curricula with age groups, as suggested by Piaget (e.g. young kids should study foreign languages rather than math, because the brain is far more capable of learning language when young, and will be able to pick up basic math very quickly when a bit older).
Oh, and the phrase "zero tolerance policy" usually means "zero thought put into proper enforcement or deciding what constitutes infringement" which means "zero respect for authority learned at an early age."
Ok I'm done.
I think it should be easier to identify a *bad* teacher than a good one.
Different people excel at learning different ways. I can't prove it, but different teachers will be better at teaching certain ways. No doubt an effective teacher would try multiple methods, but time may not be divided equally and the teacher will likely better at some methods than others. Ideally I believe students would be divided by how they learn the fastest, then you could assign them to appropriate classes and teachers.
In the current system, if a teacher uses method A to teach (let's say oral fill-in-the-blank with the class followed by worksheets) and 90% of the class learn 90% of the material but 10% of the class only understands 50% of it. Alternatively the teacher could use method B (let's say read instructions from book, take a practice quiz, then go over answers with Q&A) and 100% of the class understands 75% of it, which method is better? Is it better for everyone to get a C or 90% to get an A while 10% fail...
Back when Mazda joined with Ford to make cars in the US they had a problem. Ford was building all the parts to spec but the transmissions didn't run as nice as the Japanese built ones. Then Ford ripped apart some Japanese engines and found the parts were made to MUCH tighter tolerances than the specs called for. This was because of Deming's Quality program he taught the Japanese. Basically it is never stop improving quality. Even when you are within specs keep getting better because quality will improve and your customers will be happier.
This is what needs to happen in education. It's not setting a standard and making sure teachers meet it. It is setting up a culture of excellence and pursuit of perfection even knowing it is unobtainable.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
While finding a way to quantify what makes someone a good teacher is all well and good, IMHO it's looking at a symptom and not what, at least what I consider, one of true challenges (problems) in education... That being which persons should and should not get a degree in education. It's stunning how many people think teaching is easy and teaching younger kids is easier. There are too many cases of hey I flunked "insert course here" I'm gonna major in education.
For one, student teaching needs to occur much earlier in the program and a down-check from a qualified evaluating teacher should result in your being dropped from the program, similar to having to pass your core classes in most majors with a B or above.
In short, it's rather pointless to evaluate teachers and hold them accountable when there simply is no one to replace them with.
The problem is finding good teacher to improve education is good in a perfect world but it isn't.
You got suburban schools with most of the parents working at a good middle class job. The students will on the whole do better then the students who live in the slums.
Also you have the overall culture of the school. Where some schools cultures are setup as an education facility where they demand the students to learn things. Then there are other schools who operate more like a day care that just make sure the kids are safe for when they are there, and they use teaching as a way to try to pacify them.
School have a hard time separating the slackers from the people who want to do good but are having problems.
There are parents who put unneeded political pressure on the school to make sure if F+ turns to a D or his C turns into an B+.
There are parents who do nothing and let their child slide.
Discussion about politics, religion is forbidden.
Standardized test make sure every child thinks that everything must have a right answer.
You take a good teacher and put them in a bad environment they will not perform, or they may get fired very quickly.
You take a bad teacher and put them in a good environment the students will learn in spite of them.
I spent my childhood in spite of most of my teachers. I got the message every year from one teacher "There is no way you will be able to make it threw the next level of school" I didn't get this message during Grad school though. Granted I wasn't an A+ student a Solid B+ was my standard. But it let me go by and by no means was I ever in any threat of failing out. The problem is I have a learning disability in writing it is a minor one so it never was considered a disability, however it makes getting my point across difficult.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Because, just like in every big company in the world, in teaching it's all down to an individual heroically battling the odds to make a success.
Reward that hero, beat those who stand in the way, throw them to the dogs or the dole queue.
What is most important is that those that do what they are told, and tell you how good things are, are rewarded. And you will retire (in 18mths with $40m in the bank) sure in the knowledge that all will be well forever, or at least until the next fucking lunatic with a year of business school shows up to mess with everything.
And now they have jumped over the cage bars and into schools. Great.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
When that happens, we believe that districts will be on the cusp of
finding a way to fire all the older more expensive teachers and replace them with fresh college grads at the bottom of the salary scale.
Any number can be gamed, and this once certainly will.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You think BG is a tough negotiator? You wouldn't want to be bought out by him? The unions make him look like a wimp.
If they haven't already corrupted this study, when the results come out they'll make damn sure the contracts still have tenure and that it costs 10X to fire a teacher as it does to hire one.
If Apple had to follow the hiring and tenure policies of the public school system, your iPad would probably have 10 apps that crashed every 5 minutes.
You can only understand to full extent what a teacher has done when the kids they have taught grow up.
Large quantitative HLM studies show that (the variance in) academic success at school is determined more by home life (social capital - upbringing basically, positive self concept) than by any other factor - the school, the teaching or genetics (although they are contributing factors). If governments - or indeed the Bill Gates Foundation - want to raise student results, then the best place to spend the money is to address poverty, domestic violence and healthcare.
I taught for 3 years. Unfortunately the low pay and long hours and lack of facilities sucked, so I left. I find IT is much better by all relevant metrics.
School districts in California are so broke they are literally moving the kids into the least badly neglected buildings and letting the other half rot to the ground, while paying the teachers less than before to try to reach 40 students in one room all day.
You spend less on schools now than in the last half a century: less per child per year than you would sending them to 2 months of university classes.
You get what you pay for.
Changa hates change.
Performance reviews in companies are a sham to justify the HR VP's salary. If Bill Gates knew how to motivate productive then I would expect Microsoft's tens of thousands of employees to give OSX and Ubuntu a little stiffer competition. Most of Microsofts productive inovations come from acquiring startups. Startups do know how to motivate, by employing small teams of people who large stakes in the actual success of their project and using natural selection to weed out those who can't or won't succeed.
One of the basic problems with teacher evaluation projects like this is that it assumes that the effect of a good teacher --- a qualitative value --- can be measured in the same way as we measure employee performance --- an essentially quantitative value. When you are a "good" employee, this means that you are productive, that you do what you are told a majority of the time; at the most simplistic, that you produce X + n widgets, with n being a value above the mean. This has nothing to do with teaching, where education is not the product: educated students are the product. A key ingredient of good teaching is getting students to understand that they have the ability to question, observe, theorize and think --- and to make them feel good about doing it. There is no standardized test that will show whether a teacher is providing feel-good-a-tivity to her students a priori, and until we begin to assess teachers with a different approach than we do with employees producing Taylerite widgets in the business world, we will continue to degrade both the quality of the education we can provide, and the value we attach to it as a society.
As you say, Finland accepts only the best, trains them well and lets them do their thing. It does work.
But the US spends more per child on education than Finland does. We're actually ranked #4 in the world, way ahead of Finland. So saying "more money" without serious reform for quality of education just means throwing more money down a hole where it won't necessarily make anything better.
Breaking that cycle requires real money to recruit better teachers, and the shitty schools usually have the LEAST money.
I agree with the rest of your post, but you miss the point entirely here. The problem isn't that poor schools aren't being funded. In fact, per-student costs in poorer districts is actually multiple times what it is in more affluent areas (if you want a citation, watch the documentary Cartel and count the luxary cars found in school admin parking lots in the "poor" school districts of NJ). The problem is that a tiny fraction of that function actually makes it into the classroom. Most of it goes to pensions and unions.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Measurement is great. However business schools have become obsessed with measurement as they try to emulate science. Wouldn't it be great if you could just have a metric for everything? After all, it makes decisions pretty easy at that point. You just compare numbers.
However, in anything complex, large scale measurement is difficult... if not impossible. Just like your engineering/it job. How do you measure performance? Lines of code is easy... but stupid. Bug fixed/week... well that doesn't account for the person who writes high quality code that doesn't need so many bug fixes... In the end, like teachers... you just 'know' them. Colleagues can recognize them.
At the end of the day you'll spend more time, money, resources trying to have metrics than actually producing things of value.
And don't forget that bad metrics are worse than no metrics.
If you have two groups of software developers.
One doesn't use metrics at all.
Another uses lines of code.
The one with no metrics will produce better results than the one that with bad metrics.
In education, if we have bad metrics, it could produce worse results. teachers might do all kinds of things to get their numbers to look good that would be detrimental to the students.
The way we have solved it as a society has been via the market place of ideas. Everyone is free to try out their ideas. Everyone is free to start a business. They try and entice people to try their goods/service... good companies tend to gain more market share and better ideas thrive.
[insert disclaimer about crony capitalism, monopolies, legal .... all the things that stand in the way of the free market place of ideas... ]
It's far from perfect. let's face it, the best product is often beat by the one that is better marketed, or from a more 'reputable' company. However, no one needs to prove it is perfect. Only that is better than the alternative. The alternative being that you can predetermine success by reports/metrics.
I don't know what the best school policies are. I don't know what makes the best teacher. I don't know how applicable those are to every community and student. I don't know how policies today can change with conditions tomorrow. It's a million variable equation.
I have more trust in the market place of ideas than on bureaucracy to predetermine the winner.
My solution to education is simply to open it up. At its most basic level, let schools do their own thing. Empower local schools do manage their own resources and policies better. Yes, you will get some bad school of course as they would be poorly run. That's a trade off you make for diversity of ideas... some will be bad. You can set a basic set of limits of course, but push more decisions locally.
Going a bit further than that, you could introduce free entry so anyone can setup a school (maybe mandate it be non-profit)... and people just choose the school they want.
I'd have gotten a better attitude from some teachers if they were replaced by robots.
Teachers should be cooperating with each other, not competing with each other. This is why business practices should not be applied to schools. Schools are already suffering from this kind of thinking, and the teaching ranks are being filled with sociopaths who could care less about students.
Proverbs 21:19
As someone who is recently started up college again. I have to say one of the biggest factors that separate the good teachers and the blatantly horrible teachers are those that overuse powerpoint. I'm once again being reminded of one the horrible truths of college is the number of 'teachers' whose teaching methods are reading off powerpoint slides being projected in front of the entire class. I can't help but think "I'm paying this person how much to read text for me?" I recall all my favorite teachers from high school to college and I remember the one thing that separated them from the others was how they interacted with the class.
If you interact with your class like a human being, you will see results.
If you blankly read off a presentation that you didn't even write, you will put your class to sleep.
I'm being tortured every week by sitting through 2.5 hours of staring at this screen and thinking "I'll just read the textbook at home". So I can't help but appreciate the irony of Bill Gates wanting to contribute to education. When it was his company that I think helped contribute to the laziness it now practices.
Theft?
Forget Bill Gates, in the words of Steve Jobs:
"what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you go, 'I can't win.' "
Highest average pay in the country, yet very low in the education rankings. It mainly goes by seniority, so if you taught for only three years you were entry-level.
Many of those teachers protesting in Wisconsin were making well over $80,000 per year, and Wisconsin is only in the middle for teacher pay. The average California pay is over $60,000.
It's a wonderful effort Bill's trying to do.
But until we remove tenure, nothing will work.
It doesn't belong in grade school or high school.
It was meant for professors that are doing research
on potentially controversial work.
So, in a way the, the way (currently) to find a good
teacher is one that hasn't made tenure yet.
They will try, but this will fail and here is why:
Keep in mind I have a 5th grade boy in Oakland Ca Public School.
A principal can no longer expel a student, that decision has to be made by a committee and let me tell you that is one of the hardest things to get done.
You could have Jaime Escalante and if you have a classroom full of kids that have no respect for teachers and authority it is a lose lose for the teachers. I have seen damn fine teachers at my sons school. Imaginative, innovative, young men and women simply just leave because they were not being allowed to teach outside the box since it was not in line with the Federal / State / Local "guidelines" ( read that as mandates ) even though they could show that their methods were working in relation to test scores and the like.
The other problem is parents. Parents tend to come in a few flavors:
Education starts at home not at the local school house. The school is there to build on what kids should start learning at home. My son is evaluated twice a year once at the local and once at the state level and my wife and I see exactly where is he is on math, english and science and then we act accordingly. Are we a couple of standard deviations from the mean as far as parental involvement in our child's education? Yeah probably but we are nothing particularly special. We just want our kid to have the best start we and the public school system can give him. We have parent teacher conferences more often then the scheduled ones. Our son's teacher knows, because we have said it explicitly to her, that if our kid gets out of line she is free to nail his little ass for it. If his work in class falls off then we want to know it well before the grading period so we can kick his little butt a bit and start clamping down on privileges AND start spending more time with flashcards, more reading time with him etc. then we already do.
Teachers who are left to try and educate children completely on their own with parents that just don't get involved will fail, that is a given. Why, well because when they have 30+ kids in a classroom and they have to deal with kids that are disruptive and they cannot eject them and a hundred different factors that they have had control over taken from them because there are 348 committees all trying to tell them ho
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
So what, exactly, are Bill's credentials to talk about education? I know people who studied the subject (yes, you study it - teachers aren't some random dofuses who go around talking crap, there's actually quite a lot that goes into teaching.
When I remember Bill's ghostwritten books, and his public speeches, my impression is that he really doesn't know all that much, and if he weren't filthy rich, few people would listen to him. Somehow, we equate success in one field with knowledge in all fields, and that's nonsense.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That's because the variables also include the people being "managed" and the corporate culture.
How often have people here completed a project DESPITE the manager's attempts to "manage" said project and people?
Pretty much that. But can the successful manager take over the spot of the unsuccessful manager and achieve the same results?
I think Scott Adams said it best about management and statistics. Statistically, SOME average (or even bad) managers will "succeed" just by happening to be in the right place at the right time.
Take a hundred pennies. Toss them into the air. The ones that come up "heads" have "won".
Discard the others. Repeat.
Some will come up heads again! Discard the others. Repeat.
Wow! Some pennies are super achievers. They've come up heads THREE TIMES! Discard the others. Repeat.
Now you have the elite pennies. You know that these pennies will "win" no matter what the circumstances. Discard the others. Repeat.
The pennies that come up heads this time are the ultra-super-elite pennies. Whatever these pennies do, you should emulate. These pennies really know the situation and are capable of adapting to changing circumstances.
These topics always bring out the antisocial twits that bag on educational institutions with so many tired, old worn out and factually wrong diatribes. There are a lot of them on Slashdot.
Bottom line: Anyone who uses school or teacher and "accountable" in the same sentence needs to shut the fuck up.
Schools don't need any more "Accountability" than they already have. What schools are able to do is codified in law and regulation and you cannot blame schools for flowing law and regulation. They are VERY accountable in that regard, because we as Americans have decided that we need to tell schools what to do via political process.
You can guess how well that working out.
What our education system actually needs are real tools to protect, educate, train and ENLIGHTEN our children. We need a better testing system. We need better teaching techniques. We need better trained teachers. We need the profession of educator to be among the best respected and legitimately revered career one can pursue.
In the above our political system has utterly failed in all in the above. We've turned our education system in to a parody of what it should be. For politics.
Teachers unions are quite fierce because there are no end of career positions that use teachers as scapegoat for their fear-of-the-moment. Despite what you might think, our teachers are remarkably badly compensated for what they do. You do know that entry level teaching jobs in most states generally pay so little that their families qualify for foodstamps and free lunches, right?
We need to put legitimate scientific research in to the area of education so we can actually prepare our kids for the future.
We need to commit to devoting massive amounts of our national resources for providing:
Safe and up to date physical Infrastructure.
The salaries of properly compensated teachers.
The development of educational programs that meet the needs of disadvantaged children.
More importantly, the development of educational programs that meet the needs of advanced learners and those with the drive to excel.
To develop programs to prepare students for a well educated and rational adult life.
Normally I'd leave it at this. It's not nice to point fingers but we've got a really serious problem. I'm going to come out and say it. I'm laying the blame right here, and its anyone who votes for anyone that votes republican. Not pulling punches today. Never in recent history has there been more a dangerous threat to our future than the pure insanity that is that political party.
Quite literally people that openly strive to make our children dumb to secure their own political futures.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We need more reviews, and more experimentation. I've had an idea that's been tickling in the back of my mind; call it an aggressive experiment in education.
Take some number, N. Let's say 10 for each state in the nation. Put aside $1,000,000 for each N. Hopefully it won't be necessary to adjust for inflation, but put that idea aside for now.
Choose N social security numbers (or another unique ID), entirely at random, from the people born in the past year. Put them in a safe without looking at them. Announce the intent and details of this program (see below) to schools that could possibly be affected, if you like. If you don't, there's no reason you couldn't do the following now with people born in the past.
In 25 years (A complete public education plus, if they're lucky enough, a college education, and either some work towards a higher degree or some time in business), pull the numbers out of the safe, find those N people, and offer them the following deal:
Right now, before anything else happens, you make a documentary about their life--about all the people that influenced them and about their entire education, from pre-school to current day. When all that documentation and research is done, give them the $1 Million. Tell them to start a business, project, whatever with it--but don't force them. Instead, watch the money. See if they spend it on business, on hookers, on charity, on family. Reconvene and finish the documentary in a few years, or after the initial seed money runs out.
There are three fundamental, interesting things you can learn with this sort of experiment:
* The state of the school system given a truly random sampling of students (even if it is very small)
* The effect of the school system on the student's life, along with other environmental factors, and how it shaped their future (as indicated by how they spend the money)
* If you announced the program, how that affected the way teachers viewed that particular year of students. For example, I can imagine that some teachers might refuse to give up on problem students, or work them harder, simply because they might be the lucky ones. Also, I can imagine school administrators forcing that sort of attitude, or punishing problem children more, or... who knows.
Cons: Well, it does cost $1M per child, plus the cost to do the documentary. It's also not well-controlled. But I think it would be fascinating. I want to see it happen, just to see the data, just to see someone's history right at this moment, and then watch them move on into the future with renewed purpose and a grand opportunity.
They listed everything but "attract" and keep effective teachers. Because one thing we need is to concentrate on attracting individuals that will be great teachers and then keeping those individuals.
The current state of teaching is that they aren't respected enough. This might be because there aren't enough great teachers or it could be a cultural issue that we need to fix.
Of course, the other side of this equation is that we need great students and we need to work on that side of the equation also. You get great students with involved parents.
I am a teacher at quite an unusual educational institution that pays teachers 5 times the average salary. That lets it be really, really picky about who should be teaching here, and a lot of people apply who could otherwise have very successful carreers elsewhere.
Trust me, with the type of talent you can attract with good wages, our students get amazing results.
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Any effort like this is doomed to failure if there's no agreement on what "good" means. Does it mean all the teacher's students pass the standardized tests? Or maybe all the teacher's students stay out of jail all year? Perhaps all the teacher's students earn (your favorite percentage here) more than other teacher's students over the next 50 years? We can't even agree what the schools are supposed to impart on the poor souls that pass through them, so how are we to determine what a good teacher is?
That aside, I think everyone will agree that they could tell you which of their teachers were "good" in the context of their coming-of-age passage through the school system, and which were "bad" in some way (or all ways). However, if we wrote down why we thought a particular teach was "good" or "bad" (or perhaps more precisely "!good"), I suspect that we'd see a very wide range of criteria. This will end up as "what the Gates Foundation thinks good teachers are" more than anything, and will be only a source of more battles between the various stakeholders in teaching our kids (district management, teachers, unions, parents, politicians, etc).
The bottom line is that we need to decide just exactly what it is we want the schools to be doing for our society. If what we want is to produce fodder for the corporate engine, that needs one type of teacher. If we want to produce fully-functioning citizens of a free society who are able to think for themselves and sort out the difference between facts and bullshit, that requires quite a different skill-set in the teachers. Answer this question first, and the rest can follow. Ignore this question, and we'll never agree on what a "good" teacher really is.
The recent accomplishments of the Steve Jobs Foundation and the Richard M. Stallman Foundation listed below:
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Yes, in most cases, memorizing and rote is the wrong way to go about things... AT A HIGHER LEVEL.
At the elementary school level, in math, for example, rote learning is, IMO, the only way to teach the basics. Kids *need* to know the multiplication tables by heart. When my daughters were learning them, we'd drill... until they could answer anything in the 1-12 table without thinking. To do any sort of advanced math -- and by advanced, I mean basic arithmetic with more than 1 digit, or anything above basic arithmetic -- you NEED to "just know" the answer to the single digit multiplication tables.
On the other hand, the hard sciences, or the social sciences, even at the entry level, are much less amenable to rote, even though that's how they teach many things.
And at the secondary level, schools tend to use shitty textbooks. See Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think, for a (possibly dated, but I doubt it) view of how textbook approval works.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
A good teacher depends on context. Who is the teacher trying to teach? My school had a fantastic physics teacher, who was always given top set physics and only top set physics to teach. For the top set kids, he was a fantastic teacher - he knew his stuff, was enthusiastic, and had the kids motivated and interested. When he started at the school, he was also given a lower set to teach. There, he was hopeless. He couldn't quite grasp how to teach science to kids who couldn't reliably add numbers, and didn't have the authority necessary to do the crowd control.
Another teacher (this one taught math) was fantastic at teaching the bottom sets. The bottom set kids made significant improvements in his classes - he had the right personality, was well liked and got results. His grasp of math beyond elementary calculus was a little shaky, though. He never taught one of the top sets, because his math just wasn't up to it.
So which is the better teacher? That depends on which kid you are.
First fix MSFT's problems with identifying good engineers over diversity and politics. Oh well, it seems Google was waiting me...
MS has a big shitty training system, maybe billy can start by making that suck less.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
'We have all known terrific teachers,' write the Gates. 'But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding.'
What makes them outstanding is the same thing that makes any working person outstanding when faced with a miserable job. They find a way to not be miserable and enjoy what they are doing so that they can do it well.
Why was that so hard?
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
Just like composites can be stronger than single component materials, a good mix of teachers can be better than one archetype. Some of the best teachers I ever had would have failed miserably against any kind of universal standard.
One teacher might be extraordinarily inspirational but lousy at grading papers on time. Another might be fantastic at giving prompt feedback and individual attention, but lack charisma and engagement in group sessions. If all teachers in a school were one way or another, the overall experience would suffer. However as part of a good mix, the educational experience could be much richer.
While I agree that we should look to see what actually works, it sounds like Gates' approach might lead to a teacher monoculture.
At least some people do know what makes a teacher effective (or claim to). While it's distressingly unknown in the wider education community, the research I'd heard of essentially boiled down to this: About 50% of overall student achievement could be attributed to "classroom management"; that is, the teacher's ability to keep the students engaged, involved, paying attention, and doing what the teacher wants them to be doing at any given moment. And there are a number of specific skills (some might call them "tricks"), which can be taught, that can help teachers get better at doing that.
The teacher does need to know *enough* about the subject to not be leading the students astray, confusing them, be able to answer questions, etc. But beyond that (and perhaps more than that), it's classroom management that really matters.
It's perfectly acceptable English even if somewhat informal.
I realize that it's common for trolls around here to gripe about that sort of thing, but language variety is real and failing to teach students about it is almost as egregious as not teaching them any grammar at all.
The current administration of schools is a bigger problem, we have them all chasing test scores.
Tell Mr. Gates to find a cure for rampant greed, the top %1 have taken enough already.
They can have my command prompt when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
How to speak without saying a single thing
How not to share and take everything for yourself
How to increase margins to infinity in a finite world
How to backstab and claw to the next rung of the ladder
How to lobby for laws to make your illegal activities magically no longer illegal
I'm just spitballing here... everything I learned in kindergarten is a lie.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
...is that every kid who fails a test should have the grade thrown out and immediately get an A, along with some extra credit for effort on the next assignment.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I am VERY VERY surprised the Gates foundation has been duped into doing this type of meaningless research.
This tells me that they have NO IDEA what teaching is about and it's position in our society.
Teaching is an art. You can quantify certain actions but you'll never quantify the individual complex INTERACTIONS between a teacher and a group of students or even an individual student. Just read the comments on this board regarding "teaching" techniques. Some are harsh, some are liberal. They only address certain methods. That's not teaching.
Teaching is the method of opening a mind, planting the seeds of knowledge and then watching that knowledge grow by observing the student's behavior.
There's no formula or this. You can't create a .NET class to mimic this. You certainly cannot patent it. It doesn't fit in a jar or graph well.
Teaching is like painting, sculpting or gardening. Any robot can throw paint on a canvas, chip away at granite or throw seeds on the ground. It's the Teacher's skills as a classroom artisan that helps create good painters, gardeners, programmers, etc.
I'm very sorry to read that one of my cultural hero's is actually so mislead.
That's why the dictatorship of a corporate environment suited Steve Jobs but would never serve him in the classroom.
As such, I would image this is why Steve self selected himself out of teaching and into business ownership. He obviously doesn't have the chops to be a good teacher.
And NO, bashing somebody's over the head with YOUR ideas (regardless of how good you may think they are) is NOT teaching.
Not to mention when you quantify something using a system (no matter how complex) people will evolve hacks for that system -- perhaps you've heard of hacking of metrics? aka "juking the stats" so any programmed system for management of humans is going to fail. All one can do is have good management staff; which is something business people haven't been figuring out in the "real world...." Plus education is NOT like anything else, when will people STOP likening it to everything else.
ALSO, just because you've been to the dentist doesn't mean you are a dentist or are fit to critique them. A professional educated and experienced educator has to put up with all kinds of crap questioning them; in a field that will NEVER be well understood until we figure out the human brain.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I suggest the Gates Foundation watch "Waiting for Superman"-- then spend some money on pilot projects.
The Government Union complex has failed the people, in spectacular fashion, while maintaining and rewarding mediocrity. Competition breeds excellence, and competition is what the functions of education and government need.
..is what makes an amazing teacher. If you're passionate about something (i.e. helping others excel), you will be amazing at it. It's not unique to teaching.
Gates doesn't know about teachers any more than he knows about health care. He knows about screwing people out of vast amounts of money. Thats it. The US has always allowed people who aren't trained as teachers to be teachers. I have a cousin who moved to the US in her early 20's. She was never trained as a teacher. She teaches in the US. My sister is a teacher. She first got an arts degree, then an education degree. She occasionally also teaches elementary school music. She studied music for 7 years. After all of my sisters education, after she got a teaching job, they insisted that she take several more courses (about 1 year in duration each) on her own time. They are mostly related to dealing with children with special needs: ADSHD, Developmentally disabled, mild cerebral paulsy, dyslexia, autism, and other disorders. My US teaching cousin doesn't have any of these, but my sister does. My sister doesn't teach in the US. She teaches where British Prime Minister David Cameron described as "the jurisdiction with the best educational results of any English speaking jurisdiction in the world", and its isn't in the US or Britain. You need good, trained teachers. They need to be paid well to stay, and there must be adequate resources for them to teach (books, paper, etc.). The kids also need to be fed. If they live in a poor neighborhood, the school should try to put a bit of food into the kids before they can learn. You can't assume there is food or good parenting at home.
Wow! As a teacher, holding multiple State certifications and 8 current IT certifications I am amazed by the lack of discussion surrounding outcomes.
Forum posters talk about attracting better teachers, parent interventions, accountability and more, but they are missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. Nobody in the /. forum mentioned the fact that schools aren't teaching students to DO anything! Approach the other 98% of the population that does not read ./ and ask them:
When was the last time that you were paid to use the quadratic equation?
When was the last time that you were paid to write a paper about Shakespeare?
When was the last time that you were paid to discuss the Roman Empire?
If all of these things are useless to 98% of the population, then why are we teaching them? We have created a system whereby teachers train future teachers without thought of the remaining students' future or the public good. States impose standards that do not meet any realistic goals. I have taught mathematics in such institutions, but now train students to run networks, fix PCs, program, and administer servers.
Most of the students are successful and never have to ask, "When am I ever going to need that." Many of them are gainfully employed in their chosen field, even the one who used to live out of a car. Many pursue post-secondary education. All of them have had their paradigms challenged.
FFS... he's a dropout.
From the post: "For the last several years, the Gates Foundation has been working with more than 3,000 teachers on a large research project called Measures of Effective Teaching to get a better sense of what makes teaching work (PDF) so that school districts can start to hire, train and promote based on meaningful standards. 'Once the MET research is completed, we hope that school districts will work with teachers and their unions to create fair and reliable evaluations that reward teachers who are effective and identify and help those who need to improve."
Microsoft would soon be out of business if they hired, promoted and fired programmers based on this sort of approach. But then they have competitors...
Now that Steve Jobs is certified dead and buried Billy B. Gates goes on a Pinis rampage to avenge his Pinis.
Little twerp should have never been born.
Teachers unions protect teachers from nutty parents.... A few years ago a friend of mine, a dedicated teacher, had to pull apart two 10 year olds who were fighting. One parent walked in as he's trying to separate these boys and promptly accuses my friend of assaulting their child. My friend ends up in court, is suspended from work, is facing losing their job, being banned from their profession that they've gone to college to be qualified in, to be publicly denounced as violent: all because a parent is a complete idiot and thinks their little thug is all sweetness and light and butter won't melt in their mouth.
I don't know how it works in your country, but in my country (UK) sometimes the person in the right doesn't win, it's the person who can afford the best lawyer, can spend the most money. My poor friend was terrified. Luckily, he belongs to the union, so they could get a lawyer in on his behalf, fight his case. He was completely proved innocent. Idiot parents nearly destroyed his life but were proved totally wrong. The other parents, incidently, had apologised to him as soon as they found out their kid had been in a fight that the teacher had had to break up, and had disciplined their child.
Unions protect teachers from parents who believe the teachers are always in the wrong and that butter won't melt in the mouth of their little darling children. You want good teachers to work in run down areas? Protect teachers from crazy parents for a start, let them get on with teaching and ensuring order in their classrooms.
Surprised that different teachers get paid different amounts in different schools in your country - over here there is a national pay scale.
Steve Jobs was no republicans/libertarian and he blamed the unions for protecting bad teachers. He saw the need for competition in schools where parents are the customer. The customer went away, particularly when women started working in large numbers. Schools became institutionalized, parents become less involved.
He spoke at length to the Smithsonian on education in 1995. Read it here.
First off what can Gates really teach us? Start with daddy's money, "acquaire" technology from public sources and private companies, use patents and lawsuits to build a business, starve local schools of revenue by getting tax breaks for his company, send the labor forces overseas, and give you and your friends bonuses. Oh yeah, give a few scraps off of you table at the end for charity.
Second, running a business is not like running a school. In a school you are teaching children as a public service as a public institution. That is different than running a private company making "widgets" for a profit. They don't equate. The laws are different, local control is different, the goals are different.
Why do we think people with a business background can do this? The current economic crisis is enough to make us wonder if business leaders can get anything right.
Here's what I see a business solution would look like: offshore teachers to India, make the students audition for placement, and give bonuses
to the school board and the administration.
Cynical? Yes I am and based on personal experience.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
...as the business world! Huzzah!
"In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic."
"Most workplaces build a system to evaluate worker performance, provide feedback that yields information employees can use to improve, and then hold employees accountable for results."
Bullshit.
Most workplaces build a system that gives the facade of evaluating worker performance, with the intent of providing a claim of unbiased reviews for legal defense against discrimination lawsuits. Every single one I've ever encountered boils down to stating a managers opinion using an official scale. They generally revolve around collecting reviews from co-workers that are scientifically combined in a witch's brew during the secret conclave of managers, and the employee's rating is spit out the other end.
Last year, the manager's secret conclave was held before the co-worker reviews were even collected. I got a low rating for having a "self effacing sense of humor" (The dumb asses were actually fool enough to write that in the report.)
As always, and as it is with teachers, reviews always boil down to popularity contests.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
You're just making a demand for proof beyond any reasonable expectation of proof that money is the big problem so that you can ignore having to spend some.
NYC have the highest per-pupil expenditure but they get exactly the average performance of NYC school performance.
NYC is more expensive to work in, remember.
The other alternative is that the kids in NYC are dumber than the average. Hardly likely, is it.
Regardless of the debate raging here, about what does/does not work... Know this the MET research will come to this conclusion: "more computers/technology is needed"
Why do we require a class full of students to progress at the speed of the slowest student. Kids are never held back a grade and why should they.
Kids learn at different speeds. This may be radical thinking, but what if we assigned kids to a SocialStudies level x or Math level y until they pass the test. Teachers could be assigned to teach specific classes they are good at and at a level that they are comfortable with and kids come to them to learn. Sort of like colleges. Elementary schools could transition kids years quicker and reduce costs drastically if they used a little more planning and flexibility.