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.'"

Comments

Roland Piquepaille, is that you?

[Frosty Piss]

This guy Hugh Pickens, he's Roland Piquepaille back from the grave, right?

Apples and Oranges

[elrous0]

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.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[grasshoppa]

You touch on some good points, but fail to address the real issue with education today; Parents. Education starts, and never ends, at home. If parents aren't valuing education at home, then kids are learning that education is a waste of time.

An overwhelming majority of parents today view education as free day care. That's it. The best teacher in the world has a 50/50 chance of any kind of impact on a child when their parents don't care. That's why poor schools tend to have poor results; it's not the money specifically, but the fact that poor folks tend to be less than college education and, generally, hold a negative view point of higher education.

Just some things to think about.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[bbasgen]

I think your premise is incorrect: evaluating teachers is actually very difficult to do. I think that one way to sum up the challenge is that teacher's don't have a "boss" in the way of most other professions. Consider, for example, in higher ed where a faculty member may have something that amounts to a dotted line to an administrative dean. That dean may have 50 or more faculty under them, with no intervening layers of management. This is obviously untenable by design. One could go on and talk about the dynamics of student evals, department chairs, and student learning outcomes. For the sake of brevity, I'll just say that evaluating a profession that is as much an art as a science is rather difficult. I'm hopeful MET comes up with a good model.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[ColdWetDog]

Make them compete.

With WHAT? The problem is that poor schools already can't compete even with regulatory pressure to help them. They need MONEY. If they had money, they wouldn't have the problem they are having. The poorer neighborhoods are already at huge disadvantage to Elrous' "Whitey McRichkid" schools. If they have to 'compete' on a flat playing field, exactly what would they bring to the table?

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[tbannist]

Actually, it is. Frankly most organisations do a terrible job of evaluating the performance of any complicated role. If a job can't be automated, most businesses are unable to reliably evaluate performance. How do we evaluate doctors? Engineers? Software developers?

This things are difficult to evaluate and when pressed, businesses usually come up with terrible measures of performance. Just look at the games that CEOs play with their bonus requirements. They're often able to hit all of their bonus requirements even while the company struggles along with below market average performance.

I have no confidence that Bill and Melinda will come up with anything other than another wacky scheme that implodes after the first couple of years when it can be shown that it promotes people who game the system and punishes those who don't. After all, Bill Gates put Steve Ballmer in charge of Microsoft. If that doesn't call his judgement on competency into question, I don't know what will.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Pumpkin Tuna]

Expound on that for me. for example, in NC, the "union" can't negotiate contracts, they can't require members to join, and pretty soon, they might not even be able to allow members to deduct dues directly from their paychecks. The only thing they do is lobby, and they don't do that very well any more. I don't even call that a union.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[khallow]

You touch on some good points, but fail to address the real issue with education today; Parents.

And if you do nothing about parents, then that observation is garbage. Similarly, the "real issue" with living is the dying part at the end. But nobody has the fix for that either. (Also, if you happen to disagree that dying is the "real issue", then maybe that same consideration applies to your assertion about parents.)

There are two things to remember here. Teachers are the ones typically held responsible by society for the education of their students, not the students nor the students' parents. Given that, it makes sense to hold teachers accountable for the outcome.

Second, a good teacher or a good school can encourage students and their parents to be more receptive and responsive with respect to education. A bad teacher or school would IMHO be far less likely to.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[sigipickl]

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.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[msobkow]

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.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[asylumx]

It's not that we don't know HOW to evaluate teachers

Uh, yeah, it is. It is exactly that. There are so many variables and so few ways to measure. Is a student doing poorly because the teacher is bad? Is it because he is dyslexic and nobody has identified it? Is it because he's distracted by the fights going on in his home every night? Is it because he has to take care of his little brother while his single mother is at work, and he doesn't get enough sleep, or enough to eat? There are communities where these types of problems are the not the exceptions, they are the rule.

On the other side of measuring teachers, the only method we seem to have is to do standardized tests... and even if the rest of the issues I mentioned above are non factors, all these tests really do is judge a teacher's ability to get students to memorize answers. It's really hard to actually judge whether the student has learned the material from a pen-and-paper test. So you are bound to have teachers who are really engaged with their students but are not necessarily teaching the test material, and they get failing grades... and on the flip side you might get really bad, unengaged teachers who know how to get their kids to remember a few test answers to make them look good.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Exactly how is money going to help?

Its not going to help the way the fucking twits and geeks think its going to help.

First the kids need to be taught that the ghetto is not the "real world".

It boils down to the fact that the children need a safe environment where learning is actually encourage. Most of them don't have books at home, and aren't in an environment where education matters. The kids in the poor neighborhoods are starting school where their parents never read to them, and they weren't taught to read first.

These bad schools are fighting a losing war against the parents and the community.

Sure there are a few loud-mouths out there, but most of the parents don't give a rats ass about education, and even the ones who do don't know or have the resources to take advantage of things.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

As the son of two retired school teachers I spent a lot of time looking at my public school years from a different perspective. One perspective was as a student and the other perspective was observer listening to teachers to talk outside of work. My father elected to a position in the NEA, so I got to see that side of it as well.

Not surprisingly, teachers come in all shapes and size: a few are lazy; a bunch are burned out from years of pouring energy into their profession; some are passionate about their material and their mission; others will bore you to death. Just like normal people. I also learned that teaching takes an enormous amount of energy, patience and dedication. And I learned that teachers who go into the profession without passion leave teaching in a few years-- it is impossible to sustain the level of effort required of a teacher without the passion.

When I was in high school, the teacher's union went on strike. They picked the school buildings. There wasn't any violence, but it was pretty ugly. I stayed out of school until the strike was over. The teacher's union had two big issues. The first was class size. The second was a provision that allowed school administrators to retroactively change students' grades without notifying the teacher. Would the teachers have taken to the pick line for three weeks if there were not passionate about their work?

The drop-out rate (from the start of freshman year to graduation) at my school was close to 50%. None-the-less, I felt like I got a good education. The value of education was instilled in me from a very early age. My parents attitude toward learning contributed more to my success than anything else. A teacher can open a door, but the student has to walk through it. Focusing only on evaluating and culling teachers will not improve public education.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[saleenS281]

There are two things to remember here. Teachers are the ones typically held responsible by society for the education of their students, not the students nor the students' parents. Given that, it makes sense to hold teachers accountable for the outcome.

Teachers are only being held responsibly by individuals who wish to have society raise their children. No competent parent thinks teachers are the source of their childs education. They're absolutely there to HELP and GUIDE, but it is a parents responsibility to be involved in every aspect of their education.

Second, a good teacher or a good school can encourage students and their parents to be more receptive and responsive with respect to education. A bad teacher or school would IMHO be far less likely to.

That may very well be the most ridiculous statement I've seen on this site to date. A good teacher can encourage bad students and their bad parents to suddenly be involved? Mr. Jones is going to convince Jimmy's mom to stop smoking crack so she can read to her son every night? You're out of touch with reality.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[HeckRuler]

Everyone, please pay attention!
This is a republican/libertarian that wants to remove government regulation of public schools.
The stated purpose is to end the "high pay" and raises of teachers.

The high pay of teachers.

Think about that. He doesn't want better teachers. He doesn't want poor schools to do better. The entire goal he's going for, in the grand sum of two sentences, is to pay teachers even less than what they're paid now.
This is why we need unions. This is why teachers unions fight this sort of thing. This is a roadblock to progress.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[djchristensen]

Evaluating teachers is extremely hard to do.

As an example, I'm very happy with my 4th grade daughter's teacher this year, yet at least three kids have been pulled out of her class by their parents. I'm choosing not to believe that this is because she is black in an area that is excessively white (I'm white for sake of disclosure). Rather, I think it has much more to do with the personality of the teacher, which is very compatible my daughter's personality. My daughter hasn't been compatible with all of her teachers, and we had to move her to a different class in the past. She had a very bad experience with that particular teacher.

So is one of these teachers better or worse than the other? From the perspective of my daughter's education, emphatically yes. But ask a different parent and you might get exactly the opposite answer as to which teacher was better. In both cases, these two teachers could be either the worst or the best in the school depending on the mix of kids they get. And since we're talking about humans (both the teachers and the kids), personality is an important and very difficult to measure aspect of performance.

So while I think it would be wonderful if there was a better way to evaluate teachers, it might be an untenable proposition. Kind of like reforming the tax code in the US.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[UnknowingFool]

In an ideal world, the teacher would be totally responsible but we don't live in an ideal world. I have friends who are teachers who work in these bad districts with parents that don't care. A hard part in teaching some of these kids is that they come to school hungry and sometimes dirty. What can they do about that? Feed them out of their meager salaries? Clean them and wash their clothes? Some have parents that downright don't care. Some of them outright told them that their job as teachers is to watch their kids during the day and not get the parents involved with the education part at all.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[schlesinm]

Parent-Teacher Conferences only let the parents talk to the teacher about how the child is doing in school. There is no way for the parent to know if issues in the classroom are from poor learning on the child's side or poor teaching on the teacher's side. I've dealt with both sides where I've had to complain to the teacher about how they were teaching my child and also make sure the child knows what's expected of them in the teacher's classroom. And it is hard to tell at times.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[grimmjeeper]

They're called Parent-Teacher Conferences.

That was effective back when parents were interested in making their kids knuckle down and accomplish something in school. But that's becoming less and less common. Instead, we have parents showing up to yell at the teacher for not giving their idiot slacker offspring better grades even though the urchin does none of the work required to earn the grades.

No, I think this effort by the Gates foundation is a noble one. We really do need to come up with a realistic way to evaluate our entire educational system (not just the effectiveness of teachers). We need a way we can identify the real faults in our educational system.

Realistically, I don't hold out much hope that the territorialism and politics that are pervasive in our educational system can be overcome. So I'm not sure how effective this drive will be at affecting change. But the goal itself is noble.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[Jawnn]

Let's see..., percentage of all parents qualified to evaluate a teacher's effectiveness - (being generous) maybe 20%. Percentage of that set that has the interest and ability (time) to get involved to an effective degree, maybe 20% again? Yeah, I can see why the PTA has been such a huge success in setting effective performance metrics for teachers. Just like those standardized tests handed down by state bureaucrats...

3,823,142 teachers in the US

[More Trouble]

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.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[khallow]

Right. Because poor people or people living in bad school districts ALWAYS have the option of doing that.

Even if true, how is that different from now?

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[grimmjeeper]

Those parents probably got their grades for free, so why should Little Jimmy have to work for them?

Hardly. Parents these days just want to be friends with their kids and make it easier for them than they had it. Either that or they want to make sure their kids have the grades to get scholarships or just admittance to some trendy prep school, etc. Or their motivation is banal enough to just want the stupid "my kid is an honor student" bumper sticker to put on their car to show off at the local overpriced coffee shack.

That's easy: get the government out of the way. Then parents will send their kids to good schools and bad schools will go bust.

That may be an enticing slogan for someone who doesn't think the issue all the way through. And it's unlikely someone who only spits out one sentence talking points like that will put forth the effort to investigate the real causes of the problem, no matter what kind of well documented research is posted. Suffice it to say that while the government doesn't get everything right when it comes to education, removing the government altogether will only cause more problems than it solves.

Re:Not again....

[sigipickl]

How many times have people tried this? How many different answers do we need anyway?

Many, and the teacher unions have shot it down every time. Good teachers can not be rewarded and bad teachers can not be punished. The only reward is for those who stay around the longest.

Elements of a good teacher

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[Anonymous Coward]

Punishing should only be for trouble-makers. Punishment is a deterrent against unwanted behaviour. Punishing under-performers generally makes them perform worse, because it associates punishment with the subject being taught. Just my opinion though, feel free to disagree, I don't have a large sample-size.

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[Jack Fat]

3) Low tolerance for shit.

3) Refuses to adequately punish the trouble-makers or under-performers, to the detriment of the rest of the class.

I agree with both short lists of elements, but I think this pair (for good and bad teachers, respectively) needs to be expanded because there's more to it than the Iron vs Lenient Fists that it implies.

Which is to say that all of my best teachers were adept at being approachable and friendly while also maintaining the authority to be taken seriously by (all but the most deliquent) students.

The worst teachers erred on one side or the other. Some created an atmosphere where they could be treated as peers (and were often charismatic or generally thought of as "cool" by students) which undermined their authority when they finally did have to lay down any law, be it punishment, reward, policy, whatever. The rest were nothing but authority figures which made them less effective with most students because they were just another incarnation of "The Man."

My assessment of my own best and worst teachers is of course subjective, but it does include plenty of adult reflection after the fact, and the general observations apply to several teachers I had between 4th grade through undergraduate college. (I graduated from college in 1996. I recognize that the abililty to have "adult reflection" doesn't necessarily coincide with any age or event.)

Re:Not again....

[LWATCDR]

Well that is the problem. How do you know if teachers are teaching. The old answer of "you just know" isn't good enough.
Looking back the teachers I had varied from very good, over worked, and some where just terrible.
My second grade teacher hated kids. She was very old and really disliked me because her son knew my father and got into a lot of trouble a decade before I was born. She was the only 2nd grade teacher so i was stuck. My third grade teacher was great and found out that I was reading way above level but was in a very low reading group. She moved me to the top reading group and I got all As. Fifth grade teacher hardly ever taught science because she didn't like it. She also refused to use the new Science books because she knew the old ones. So in fifth grade I had book with a Gemini capsule on it and it talked about how some day man would walk on the moon. The funny thing was that we lived only 50 miles from Cape Kennedy and all the kids grew up with the space program. I could go on pointing out really good teachers and really bad ones but i think you get the point. And just for the record I lived in a very well town and my elementary school was in a well to do area.
So how do judge teachers?
When you test the students they game the system by teaching the test.
It isn't a secret and not one gets upset over it which is odd. The FCAT was a test for teachers but it was turned into a test for the students.

Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[trout007]

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.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[trout007]

Reading the article it gives the example of one teacher reviewing her own performance and thinking how she will do better next time. That is what I was trying to convey. You don't HAVE to measure how well the teachers are doing if you have a culture where everyone is expected to improve and given the tools to do it. In the case of the cars the machinists building the parts. They weren't told they had to make parts of a certain tolence or they would be fired. They were given the tools and the education to keep improving the process. These people were then allowed to do their job. Most parts coming off a Japanese line aren't inspected. Why? Because the parts that are inspected are of such high quality they know the process is under control and there is no need to waste money testing every part. In fact you make more money concentrating on making good parts than if you test everyone because you don't have to waste time and material on scrapped parts.

This is the same with teaching. You don't have to keep testing every single kid over and over. If you examine the process, ie teacher, and know they are good.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[HeckRuler]

Let me boiled that down for you:

Read about Deming.
Test less, save money.

It'll be fine since good teachers know how their kids are doing. Principles will fire bad teachers. They just know.

Sorry, I really don't mean to pick on you. You have some good points in there. It's just that you come off as such a manager. In an empty suit sort of way. For example, you just assume that the principles inherently know who the bad teachers are. And then you trust them to behave accordingly. Suits look after suits. You also just kind of assume that principles can fire people. This isn't your business. There is the teachers union, tenure, seniority, and the parents, and maybe even some of the kids that would be up in arms if the principles fired off whoever they wanted. And there are a lot of ways to get fired besides not teaching well. If you weren't aware, there's a bit of a schism between teachers and administration. Probably because it's a position ripe for abuse.
Additionally, so what if the teachers know who the stupid kids are? What are they supposed to do about it? "Improve quality" is vague to the point of meaningless when it comes to teaching.

Bill needs to looking a little deeper

[tiberus]

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.

Good teachers are only part of it.

[jellomizer]

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.

A teacher's work yields results much later

[Hentes]

You can only understand to full extent what a teacher has done when the kids they have taught grow up.

Re:Not again....

[eln]

I think the problem here is that such a system seeks to evaluate teachers as if they were line workers, cogs in the machine. In reality, teachers operate more like managers. As anyone who has been involved in management or management education should be able to attest, getting a good read on exactly what makes good managers so good (and bad managers so bad) is a lot harder. The metrics are a lot fuzzier, and there tends to be a lot of different ways to get good (or bad) results. In many cases, two people doing things that look on the outside to be very similar can lead to wildly divergent results.

Go to any random business school and take a look at their various case studies on managers. It's usually quite difficult to find any common thread in any of them, other than "this guy's company was successful, therefore what he did is the right way to do it." Of course, in every one of those studies, the manager did things differently than the other managers. The upshot of it is that the best managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and are successful, while the worst managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and aren't successful

In short, why does Bill Gates think business can help evaluate teachers (leaders of students) when business isn't even very good at evaluating their own managers (leaders of corporations)?

What research can teach education policy makers

[DoctorLard]

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.

It's not a money problem

[Quila]

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.

Easy answer for that.

[khasim]

In many cases, two people doing things that look on the outside to be very similar can lead to wildly divergent results.

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?

The upshot of it is that the best managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and are successful, while the worst managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and aren't successful

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.

Re:Not again....

[hedwards]

You make that sound like a bad thing. The reason why most universities provide tenure is so that the professors don't have to worry about being fired when a new dean comes in and decides that a teacher is being controversial.

Likewise with the K-12 system teachers are always under pressure from administrators and parents to do this or don't do that, and without job security in that form, it gets really tough for the educators to make any decisions about how to run their class as a single minor complaint can result in termination.

But, lastly, at this stage, we don't really know what makes a particular teacher good, there are a lot of ideas, but when it comes down to it, even with resources and time, there aren't any assessments that can fairly and accurately judge good teacher from bad in a reliable way.

As for rewarding good teachers, they certainly can, there just isn't usually money to do so because the tax payers aren't willing to pay more than they absolutely have to. They reward good teachers by paying a stipend for passing the national boards or by improving the work environment.

Re:Exactly how is money going to help?

[Fujisawa Sensei]

First off, when schools are asking for more money, first they spend it on administrator salaries, because they need talent to manage the system (See comment below). That's followed by whiz-bang gadgets, because they need something to show for that money. Next comes things like building maintenance; because they spend jack-and-shit on it until the poor kids roof starts leaking. Lastly it goes into teacher's salaries. Then if there's anything left, classroom supplies.

But money doesn't attract talent; it attracts bullshit artists. Just look at the overpaid fucks running Corporate America.

That isn't to say that you aren't an outstanding teacher, but I would guess that there are other mechanisms in place to help you along that most teachers hired off the street don't have access to.