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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.'"
Gates, Arnie Duncan and their ilk would have us pretty much use test scores. That's not a realistic measure of teacher ability
You obviously didn't RTFA, but whatevs. The Proposed Teacher Evaluation and Development Criteria chart on page 2 describes a more holistic system incorportating: rigorous classroom observations, school working conditions, student feedback, and pedagogical knowledge content. Hardly a simplistic test score approach.
Money is not the problem, accountability is.
Here in California, local property tax money is redistributed throughout the state. Often schools is poorer neighborhoods get more money per student than the schools in more affluent areas. Heck, in some districts teachers get paid more to teach in the under-achieving schools. Nothing has gotten better except the employment at schools.
Never trust anyone who takes pride in being called a 'geek'....
I agree that there is a real issue with getting rid of a bad teacher over the objections of a union about "seniority", but it can be done. Many of my relatives are or were teachers (most of them retired now), and every one of them had to deal wtih parents who were screaming to the board about how they're a "bad" teacher for failing or reprimanding their precious and flawless child. Some of those parents engaged in rather vicious smear campaigns against teachers they hated. So the union system is needed to protect teachers from arbitrary firing when those outraged parents are on a mission to destroy their careers.
What Bill is talking about, though, is the actual process of evaluating teachers and teaching techniques fairly. The effectiveness of different approaches in the field have never been properly evaluated before. Some districts "evaluate" a teachers performance by considering how their students do on standardized tests, but such simplistic approaches are white-wash to appease people who are demanding that the teachers be evaluated, not an actual evaluation of the teacher's skills as a teacher.
Worse, such simplistic approaches don't make any attempt to evaluate why one teacher's students do better on the tests than others. If teachers are to improve, they need that feedback so they know how to improve.
No matter what the results of the studies are, there will be teachers, unions, school boards, and parents who resist acting on that information. Bill and Melinda are to be commended for tackling the issue when they know full well that it's going to be a battle to get the results of those studies applied to practice.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.