Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on the crucial importance of teacher quality and the difficulty of identifying talent is typically Gladwellesque in its irresistable readability, unexpected connections, and profound blindspots. Gladwell’s hook is the “quarterback problem.” Did you know that college performance fails to predict pro performance for quarterbacks? Interesting! But what on Earth does this have to do with teachers? Nothing, as far as I can tell. One comes away from Gladwell’s essay with the ideas that (a) success as a teacher, like success as an NFL quarterback, requires a combination of traits so ineffable and rare that (b) it can be determined only by actual performance in “the show.” But (a) is certainly false, which is a relief since we need many, many more successful teachers than the number of NFL franchises.
But who cares? The frothy quarterback stuff is a completely superfluous distraction from the point that emerges in Gladwell’s piece. That point is (b): to find out if somebody is a good teacher, you’ve got to see how well he or she actually teaches. Gladwell illustrates how this sort of thing works by inspecting the way one financial firm casts a very wide net and then narrows the field by filtering out candidate financial advisers on the basis of real preformance. Select and compensate people on the basis of their actual demonstrated skill. It’s so crazy it just might work!
So what does Gladwell have to say about this? He makes a number of outstanding suggestions and profoundly important points:
Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s [the financial firm recruiter's] training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance.
[...]
Is this solution to teaching’s quarterback problem politically possible? Taxpayers might well balk at the costs of trying out four teachers to find one good one. Teachers’ unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement. But all the reformers want is for the teaching profession to copy what firms like North Star have been doing for years. … What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
Now, there’s no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words on quarterbacks instead of on the deeper mechanisms at work here. But why is it that “society devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?” The obvious answer is that care and patience are in greater supply when care and patience pay. When the provision of education was made a predominantly public, not-for-profit affair, “society” basically ensured that teacher selection would receive far less care and patience than money-handler selection. Maybe we should do something about that.
Also, why should teachers need a college degree?
However, the financial advisers at North Star become successful by making other people money. We show greater care and patience in selecting them because when they give good advice, we gain more wealth. The same can't be said for taking greater care and patience in selecting teachers. No matter how good the teacher is, they'll never make money for anyone but themselves. No one benefits in wealth gains if their children are better educated, even if the educational system is entirely privatized. (Well, technically, they would, but only in the extremely long-view, aggregate sense of a better society for everyone. That carries much less motivational punch for most people that the rather direct pay-off which comes from good financial advice.) So the disconnect you've identified here wouldn't be solved by returning education to the free market, but by giving parents checks whenever their kids' grades go up.
Not saying that's a good idea, necessarily. Just that whether the education system is for-profit or not is neither here nor there.
Jeffrey, The financial advisers at North Star become successful by making North Star money. Giving advice to other people about making money is just one of the things North Star does. Would you concede that parents generally prefer better rather worse education for their kids? And that the education service entrepreneurs of the future would like to make money? If so, what does a parent's ability to internalize their children's future income have to do with anything?
Wow. First, I totally agree that _somehow_ we need to reward teacher performance rather than teaching experience.
But! Your final few lines seem to imply that making K-12 education a public good _necessarily_ resulted in our society holding a diminished regard for teacher quality. But that's just completely illogical. When we made it a public good, we designed the system in a particular way, but we might have designed it differently. Indeed, the fact that we have reformers about pushing for _specific_ changes in our public school system to remedy this problem suggests that there does exist a public school system that does a better (adequate, at least) job of rewarding teacher performance.
This strikes me as a particularly lazy dismisal of the role of government in education not because you've argued that a public school system is _inherently_ incapable of rewarding teacher performance in a functional manner, but because you simply have a general distrust of government.
Also, I don't see what's so crazy about requiring that teachers have one level of education higher than that at which they plan to teach. Indeed, Jaques Barzun argued that simply requiring a liberal arts degree with a major in the topic you plan to teach was sufficient (and represented a relaxation of traditional standards or preparation).
Why do you think I inherently distrust government? I distrust schemes with stupid incentives. I think education is a public good. And I think parents ought to get government-financed vouchers or tax credits applicable to tuition. It just turns out that the way to improve the quality and affordability of a good is to have a competitive market in it. When you have a market in education, you don't have to wrack your brain coming up with schemes to somehow reward teacher performance, since that will be built in the to incentives of the system.
Making a college degree a barrier to entry just doesn't make any sense if the idea is that the people who are the best teachers should be able to teach. If a high-school dropout is an amazing teacher, there should be no legal barrier to their getting paid for doing it.
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
We don't have a society doing these things. We have private firms doing one, and government bureaucracies doing another.
What evidence is there that it's rational to expect similar results?
Will's point that a high school dropout who is an amazing teacher should have that opportunity is merely a continuation of Gladwell's observation that we should lower rather than raise standards for entry into the teaching profession. A degree in education will certainly familiarize one with the theory of learning. Can the teacher now impart wisdom to his or her charges?
Maybe the comparison to a quarterback isn't exact in that the future teacher has no experience teaching, while the future quarterback has been playing that position since grade school. The education major gives a great interview while regurgitating all of the currently recognized methods of education. The individual gets the job. The individual sucks. No charisma, no listening skills, no energy and weak results.
Perhaps the education degree factories could work more closely with school systems to actually evaluate their future teachers in actual classroom situations?
Let's also not forget that when there is no parenting going on, students perform poorly.
I don't doubt that parents prefer a better education for their kids, but I do doubt whether they're willing to fork over the money necessary to purchase that better education when it comes time to do so, regardless of whether that education is financed via taxation or trade in the private market. And if it is taxation, I doubt even more the willingness of other individuals to sufficiently finance the education of other parents' kids.
And education providers make money now. The incentive to provide education through private firms is to make more money, which means more costs to consumers, and thus adverse selection as the rich get a quality education and the poor still don't. I'm sympathetic to a competitive market financed by public vouchers myself, but I'm cynical as to whether we as a society would actually fund it sufficiently to create a dynamic all that different from a purely private market. Might be an improvement, might not.
At any rate, I think Gladwell's question reflects a cultural problem as much as a economic/structural one. How much value do we place on education, really? Maybe not that much.
“When the provision of education was made a predominantly public, not-for-profit affair, “society” basically ensured that teacher selection would receive far less care and patience than money-handler selection.”
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for me to have (mis?)interpreted this statement as conveying the claim that making education a government run public good, by itself, ensured that “teacher selection would receive far less care and patience than money-handler selection.” (Keep in mind that I don't know much about your education policy prefs, and your post doesn't go into much detail.) And as I said above, I disagree with that claim. I believe that it is possible to have a government run education system that achieves our (shared) goal of improved teacher selection. Can I take your position to be that you agree, but that you simply think this solution to be far inferior to yours (vouchers, etc)?
I apologize if my lack of knowledge of your education policy positions led to a misunderstanding. My comment was meant to push back against a strain of thought that I find frustrating: that when government does something badly, that implies that it shouldn't do it at all. Maybe it just means that we should think of a better way for government to do things!
I'm more interested in the second piece:
“Making a college degree a barrier to entry just doesn't make any sense if the idea is that the people who are the best teachers should be able to teach.”
I think we have an interesting disagreement about what makes a good teacher. I have some experience teaching math (high school and college), so I'll stick to that for my examples. In my experience, being a good high school math teacher requires (among other things)
0.) knowledge of how to teach (math)
1.) knowledge of math
2.) a mind that is generally predisposed to learning and inquisitiveness
Despite our best (and worst) efforts (0) is tough to “teach” people. The more you do it, the better you get. Some people are better than others.
(1) I'm not sure I can justify this in a blog comment, but I really think that teaching high school math requires a deeper understanding of mathematics than what one would receive from high school math classes themselves.
And as for (2), I think that a traditional liberal arts degree represents a general interest in intellect (the activities of the mind). And the most important thing a teacher can do (IMHO) is to convey genuine excitement and joy for both a particular subject and learning in general. I will stipulate that many people have this quality w/out a liberal arts degree, but I think that such a degree does enhance this aspect of one personality, and is beneficial enough to be worthwhile.
So my point is just that being a good secondary math teacher requires a lot more than just (0), which seems to be what you're implying. And I think that (1) and (2) are best acquired/enhanced with a BA. So an undergraduate degree with a math major (or at least a minor) together with a lot of apprenticing seems ideal prep to me. But additional degrees in teaching/education specifically are (for this example, HS math) not IMHO necessary.
Will,
I am operating with a knowledge-deficit here, so excuse missteps in protocol, but what exactly is the measure of a good teacher? The financial advisers have a fairly empirical basis for proving their fitness as FAs. How does one quantify teaching? At what point does one become a good teacher and cease to be a bad one?
No sports fan will get past:
“(a) Did you know that college performance fails to predict pro performance for quarterbacks?”
What in the hell is that statement supposed to mean? In any ordinary reading, this is not a premise associated with the sports world I observe. I can only guess “fails to predict” must be something along the lines of “fails to /perfectly/ predict”, or the “performance” metric is a very narrow interpretation and divorced from expert interpretation. Links please.
Without any need to review extensive statistics, I find it simply impossible that one cannot find a correlation between college performance and pro performance. It may not be perfect, but there are indicators. There must be one whopper of a qualifier on that statement somewhere. Why not just pick the worst performing quarterbacks in college and pay them a pittance—and still have a successful team.
Reduction to the absurd. Do many Division III quarterbacks succeed? Do they even make up a statistically significant cohort?
Let's be event more absurd: how about selecting quarterbacks that have no football experience at all? Would absolutely no performance record at all be acceptable?
Forget whether the lesson transfers from NFL quarterbacks to teachers, let's nail down the first absurdity.
What does Gladwell think is the basis for NFL teams in selecting picks for the NFL draft? How are the criteria they use unconnected to college performance?
Simply amazed.
This is my constant hobby horse, but talking about reforming education without ameliorating poverty first is pointless. Compare child poverty rates of first world nations with standard metrics of educational success and you'll see remarkable congruence. I always laugh when people say we should adopt the Swedish system. Sweden has a child poverty rate of 2.6 percent. The US has a child poverty rate of 23 percent. Start there.
My comment was meant to push back against a strain of thought that I find frustrating: that when government does something badly, that implies that it shouldn't do it at all.
Well, uhh…yeah. This, in its general form, is what just about everyone believes. Your own interest in teacher selection suggests that you're not quite as frustrated by it as you let on– when dropouts teach badly, you draw the conclusion that dropouts shouldn't teach at all, not that we should think of a better way for dropouts to teach. (The wishfulness of that prescription becomes a lot more obvious when it's applied to something other than the government, doesn't it? People have been trying to think of better ways for the government to do things for a long time now. If none such have made it into practice, it strongly implies that either the better ways aren't there to be found, or that something about the political process keeps them from being implemented. Neither state of affairs is likely to change very soon.)
JME,
For the sake of argument, let's suppose that you're right about 0-2 as prerequisites to teaching well.
Even if that were true…a college degree might correlate with 0&2, and might not. A math minor/major almost certainly correlates with 1.
I'm more concerned about the case of the semi-pro baseball player who starts coaching kids baseball, then figures a few of them need to learn to read because they're not going into the majors, and helps his kids with reading and discovers he loves it. From there, if he's doing well teaching the kids to read, and he's liking it, who's to say we should keep him from teaching? Would he get through 4 years of classes he didn't want to take in order to help 4th graders with their reading and basic math? Would it be a loss for the system when he doesn't?
I guess the question is…even if you suspect that 0 and 2 are correlated with a degree…would you want to limit the (relatively meager) pool of applicants by additional requirements? I'm inclined to say we shouldn't.
From my experience working in the field, I'm inclined to believe that the biggest barriers to having exceptional folks teaching are the credentialing process, which (coupled with the low financial returns) makes going into public teaching a year+ nightmare of stupid PC theory that doesn't often work in practice. The brilliant, folks I know who wanted to teach all ended up at private schools with more latitude for a teacher who gets success in an imperfectly conventional fashion and no mind-numbing credentialing rules.
I always laugh when people say we should adopt the Swedish system. Sweden has a child poverty rate of 2.6 percent. The US has a child poverty rate of 23 percent.
Except that your figures are based on country-specific measures, namely, the number of children in families with below 50% of the median income for a given country. But guess what, that statistic is meaningless if you're comparing countries to each other. If you look at absolute levels of poverty — i.e., if you compare the actual incomes in different countries — the Swedish child poverty rate doubles to 5.3% and the US rate drops substantially to 13.9%. See Figure 2 here.
Regardless, the presence of poverty is an utterly stupid excuse for refusing to do anything to improve the education system in the United States. We can walk and chew gum, you know.
This is more typical Gladwell nonsense, even on the quarterback part. It's true that success in college football doesn't mean, necessarily, success in pro football. But the reasons for this are often quite clear. Pro football players are, at all positions, faster, stronger, and bigger than college players. This means that quarterbacks will almost always have to be faster, stronger, and bigger, too. You can get by, or even be very good, in college football as a quarterback a 6' or even a bit less, but that's almost never true in the pros, because there are so many taller players that the shorter quarterbacks can't see down field as well or throw over people as well. Something similar applies for arm strength, not getting hurt, etc. These factors are, in fact, really pretty predictable, and explain quite a bit of why a quarterback might not be successful in the pros while very good in college. He's a guy who makes a living writing about things he doesn't really know about. I just wish people would stop reading him.
Kyle;
I think we basically agree here. It occurred to me after I wrote my comment that I neglected to note that it is entirely reasonable for our background requirements for teachers to be highly dependent on what subject/age group they plan to teach. For instance, I can easily see that requiring a BA (or worse, all sorts of extra Ed degrees and stuff) is not really necessary for, say, a kindergarten teacher.
So I think there is a real difference between what I would expect of a 4th grade teacher and what I would expect of a HS math teacher (who may be expected to teacher way more than HS algebra). And what I sketched out is pretty reasonable for a HS math teacher, but probably not reasonable (i.e. excessive) for teachers at the K-6 level, at least.
I should point out, though, that what we're talking about here is still consistent with my general principle that I laid out in my first comment: we should expected teachers to have progressed in their education at least one significant level further than the students they intend to teach. I just think that in the specific case of HS teachers in traditional liberal arts subjects, expecting teachers to have BA in that subject is not a crazy idea.
And again, I totally agree that the biggest barrier is the credentialing process and low pay. Most of my HS teaching experience is actually in the private school arena, for precisely the reasons you explained (I'm not suggesting in any way that I'm a particularly brilliant teacher!).
I never meant to imply that it wasn't possible to argue (as you begin to, persuasively) that if government has done a poor job of something routinely and repeatedly in the past, then we should consider some other type of solution.
The issue here (I think) is not whether a particular government solution to a problem is successful, but the number of instances that we are trying to generalize from. Let's take your example of the high school drop out. If you showed me a _single_ high school drop out who didn't teach well, I would, in fact, be reluctant to draw many conclusions from that. There might be many other drop outs who teach very well!
My point with government run education systems is analogous: our _particular_ public education system has (numerous) flaws, but it is just _one_ way of designing a public education system. So I'm reluctant to generalize to the claim _all_ public education systems are deeply flawed simply because our _particular_ one is.
One could conceivably argue that there are many other countries with stellar public education systems, and that hence the problem isn't “government”, but the particulars of how the government designs the public education system.
I will, however, happily confess that I don't know much about education systems in other countries, and would not be in much of a position to actually make such arguments. I was simply trying to argue that the position that government run public education systems are _inherently_ bad requires more evidence than a single example (i.e. the US system) of a public education system the works poorly. That's all.
Freddie is right. Discussing the “quality” of educators is mostly an exercise in question begging anyway. Stand By Me aside, teachers with better students are better teachers and those better teachers have better students and around it goes. The truth is that the professional capacities of individual teachers are irrelevant when set against the influence of a student body's broad socioeconomic standing. Poor schools in blighted urban cores are full of excellent, motivated educators and lousy ones, just like schools in Scarsdale. Gladwell entirely misses the point. Ed Deutschlander's selection method in a financial firm has extremely limited utility in conditions of prolonged deep recession. External factors would make qualitative selection of employees based on performance meaningless in those circumstances. The best traders would still lose money. Well, how would you describe the conditions of American public education?
I hate the teacher's unions and our current public education system, but I don't think that teacher quality is not our most pressing problem. IQ, which is highly correlated with educational outcomes and highly heritable, will not change much because you have an awesome teacher.
Cultural factors matter too. Different cultures place more or less emphasis on the importance of education. For example, northern Europeans tend to place more emphasis on education, southern Europeans less. Someone mentioned the Swedish education system earlier. How do people of Swedish heritage do (wrt educational outcomes) in the U.S.? I'm guessing well above average. I bet that Swedish-Americans do better in school than most whites, blacks, and hispanics of a similar SES. Also, poor Asians tend to do quite well in school. SES is overrated in explaining educational outcomes.
If we changed the teaching industry to a more competitive reward based system we would find a lot of different types of people entering the teaching field. A lot of people become teachers because of the security the job offers, and I imagine that is one of the reasons we have a lot of bad teachers. Paying great teachers tons of money and firing mediocre and bad teachers would be great for education but bad for so many of the people involved in the industry currently that it may never happen.
The fact that tenure rewards being a teacher for X years rather than increasing your students scores by Y points, shows itself that there are incentive problems in the industry.
I agree that changing incentives would help attract more talented teachers. But I don't think better teachers can cancel out low IQ and/or poor cultural mores in their students.
Public schools in WASPy suburbs presumably have their fair share of horrible teachers, but we tend to see good educational outcomes anyway. Why? (Hint: it is not spending per student).
So your claim is that the quality of the teachers isn't strongly correlated to the performance of the students? If that's the case then who we select as our educators is irrelevant, right?
The fact that kids who graduate from suburban public schools, for instance, score higher on their college entrance exams seems to suggest that the quality of the teacher is not a strong determinant of student success. Remember, these schools have the same terrible incentive structures as inner-city or rural public schools. Granted, maybe suburban schools draw marginally better teachers because they are more pleasant places to work, but I doubt the quality, however that could be measured, is much different. Plus, the fact that inner-city school districts pay relatively high salaries might offset the attractiveness of suburban schools for skilled teachers.
Is teacher quality irrelevant? No. Will increasing teacher quality dramatically help the students who need it the most? My prediction is no. I think that student quality is both (1) the main predictor of student outcomes and (2) that student quality is fairly non-malleable.
Okay, but Hillary Swank, in Freedom Writers teaches us unequivocally that teacher quality is a factor in student performance!
I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think that it is reason against making the market for teachers more competitive. Saying we can't show a correlation between student performance and teacher quality with todays population of teachers isn't indicative that we also can't with a more competitive system of hiring teachers.
I agree completely. My concern is that if libertarians exaggerate the benefits of school choice, people might wonder whether the benefits of free trade and other libertarian-favored policies are really all they are made out to be.
GU – you miss several other factors:
The quality of the curriculum.
The quality of the school administration.
The quality of the textbooks.
There was a big education study called Project Followthrough, which looked at whether low-income kids could be taught better by trying a variety of different school reforms. It found one curriculum that was successful – Direct Instruction, was successful in bringing low-income kids' educational performance up to the performance of middle school kids.
See http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summa…
The Direct Instruction curriculum consisted of the following main features:
– A set of lessons in reading and mathematics, written and field tested to provide unambiguous, clear and conscise explanations of all the skills necessary for reading and basic maths.
– The set of lessons also provided many opportunities for the teacher to seek feedback on how the kids were understanding the lesson (the general rule was that the students should be providing a response ten to fifteen times per minute), and to reshape the lesson based on that feedback.
– the high rate of student responses also meant that the kids had many opportunities to practice the skilsl they learnt.
– Kids starting at a Direct Instruction school would be tested on their existing knowledge in maths and reading, and be placed in the lesson sequence based on their performance, so a kid who already knew how to write their name would be placed later in the reading sequence than a kid who started school not knowing their alphabet. A kid could and often was placed in different lessons in reading and maths.
– Every teacher at the school taught reading and mathematics at the same time. Kids were divided into groups of 5 to 7 students all at the same point in the lesson sequence. The teacher would spend the session working with these small groups in turn, while an aide supervised the remainder who were doing more independent work. In one school there wasn't money for the aides so every adult at the school was roped in for this bit with reading.
– Kids' placement in the sequence was often reviewed, so the kid who started not knowing the alphabet could wind up surpassing the kid who started knowing how to write their name, if they happened to be a faster learner.
Some sample DI lessons are available at http://www.specialconnections.ku.edu/cgi-bin/cg…
Teacher quality is affected by far more than the individual teacher. There's also the support that surrounds those teachers.
I do not deny the importance of teacher quality. There are super-teachers out there who can succeed with shoddy curriculae, no textbooks and despite an unsupportive administration. And there is the odd teacher who should not be anywhere near any children, no matter how good the curriculum. But, when it comes to educational reform, Project Followthrough shows that we shouldn't just be thinking about teacher quality vs student quality, school quality is at least as important.
No one benefits in wealth gains if their children are better educated
This is wrong. Better educated people on average earn more money than non-educated people. (There are many exceptions, of course, but this holds true as a general rule). In many cultures it is extremely common for parents to be supported in their old age by their children, including in Western cultures until relatively recently. Therefore parents did gain financially from their children's wealth. And even in Western culture nowadays I know many examples of children giving money to their parents. I also know many cases of children paying for medical care for their parents, while this may not be an example of a weath gain strictly speaking, I do think that the prospect of better health care provides an incentive for better education.
And note that this analysis assumes that parents only care about their own wealth. However there is ample evidence that parents care about the wealth and happiness of their children in and of itself, even if the parent never gets any financial benefit directly. For example, in those cultures where a dowry is a common marriage tradition, why would any parent provide a dowry unless they cared about their daughters' happiness and future prosperity?
I don't doubt that parents prefer a better education for their kids, but I do doubt whether they're willing to fork over the money necessary to purchase that better education when it comes time to do so, regardless of whether that education is financed via taxation or trade in the private market.
Look at the fees charged by private schools some time.
And if it is taxation, I doubt even more the willingness of other individuals to sufficiently finance the education of other parents' kids.
I am interested in seeing if I can alleviate your doubts. After all, education spending strikes me as an incredibly popular political programme, one with strong support from the general public. But before I can do so, can you please define what you mean by “sufficiently finance”?
There are two problems with the words “sufficiently finance” without further definition. Firstly, there is far too much information out there in the world for any one person to learn it all given the maximum human lifespans so far recorded. We could spend all our spare resources on education (beyond those necessary to support human life), and yet everyone would still have something more to learn. But I do not think that is what you mean by “sufficiently finance” as that would imply no spending on health care or sewage systems or water quality or scientific research or civil defence or art or tasty food or warm houses.
Secondly, “sufficiently finance” assumes that if we spend more money we get more education out the other end. However, the education sector is notorious for the lack of correlation between spending and outcomes. See for example http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b5e0da2e-65c2-11dc-9f… . I believe that the main problem with education policy is how to improve the effectiveness of existing spending. However, people in the education sector who would benefit from extra spending have a tendency to always claim that more money would improve matters, without ever stating what this quantity of money is.
So I would feel much more confident of alleviating your doubts if I knew what level of spending you think would “sufficiently finance” kids' education.
Will, one issue bothers me here. Gladwell says
This scares me a bit. After all, teaching is not like sports. The teachers are teaching real students, and if those students have an incompetent teaching their education really suffers. If the incompetent teacher happens to be the very first teacher the kids get, so the kids are not properly taught to read, then the kids' education is going to be harmed for the rest of their careers. Even if the kids eventually run into a teacher who can correct their reading problems, there will still at least have been a year lost of learning vocabulary and practising reading skills, and in all the other subjects that depend on reading and a year is a big issue for a five-year old. Furthermore, bad teaching creates problems for all the future teachers, who then having to cope with a variety of levels of educational quality.
There will always a learning curve in teaching, as in any other skill, but on the other hand students do need some protection. Would you go to a doctor whose competence was not judged before they were let loose on patients for the first time? Would you drive a car which was only judged based on performance in the real world, and not on a testing track first?
Trainee teachers should have opportunities for real-world practice, properly supervised. But we should be assessing their skills before they start their jobs, at least to filter out the really bad ones.
Doesn't the fact that there are more variables than just teaching skill that affect the quality of educational outcomes for students strengthen my point? How do you decided whether to go for better teachers, better administration, better curriculum, or better textbooks? Most schools will be making trade-offs if they reform. The fact that there are more variable involved in school reform makes it more likely that schools will choose the wrong mix of reforms. Some mixes will help students, some will be neutral, and some might make things worse. How do you choose?
Also, as I stated before, I think SES is overrated in explaining educational outcomes, so the fact that low-income kids did better under one curriculum doesn't say much without knowing more about those kids.
Finally, I don't doubt that educational reform can help students, but lets not oversell it.
How do you decided whether to go for better teachers, better administration, better curriculum, or better textbooks? … Some mixes will help students, some will be neutral, and some might make things worse. How do you choose?
Well one possibility is that you perform a big study trying a variety of different interventions, and including control groups, and you see which interventions perform the best. That's what Project Followthrough did. And what the results from that imply is that teacher quality is not independent of school quality.
Having a massive variety of variables that affect outcomes is an extremely common occurrence in the real world. Take building a wind turbine (if you have moral objections to wind turbines, please substitute another engineering project of your choice). The materials you need in your wind turbine need to be both strong enough to stop the wind turbine from falling apart in high winds, and light enough that the wind turbine can operate at much lower wind speeds. You need to chose a site for wind turbines with good wind speeds, and also one that you can get access to install the wind turbines on a suitably strong base. The gearing inside the turbine in the engine needs to control the frequency of the electricity despite variable wind speeds. You need the tranmission connections from the turbines to wherever the power goes, which come with their own host of issues. Once you have installed the wind turbines you need a sufficient maintenance schedule to keep them operating. How do you choose the mix? Well, manufacturers pull this off all the time.
Another example is medicine. While of course individual patients have managed to survive actively-bad medical care, overall outcomes are improving by the healthcare system getting a lot of things right. If a patient is wrongly diagnosed, then that's generally bad for the care (this happened to me). If the patient is rightly diagnosed but the doctor prescribes the wrong drug, then that's generally bad. If the right drug is prescribed but the pharmacist dispenses the wrong drug, then that's generally bad (this happened to my Dad). If the patient picks up an infection while at the hospital then that's generally bad. The healthcare system needs to get a lot of things right. Often of course they don't, but it's hard to imagine that they could improve outcomes just by going for one factor.
If we are to have effective schools we can't just focus on one thing, we have to find a mix that works. Which we have. Now we face the problems of getting schools and school districts to implement it.
so the fact that low-income kids did better under one curriculum doesn't say much without knowing more about those kids.
Why not? This was a large project. From the link I supplied in my previous comment, 9,255 students were evaluated in the schools that received interventions, and 6,485 in the control schools.
Finally, I don't doubt that educational reform can help students, but lets not oversell it.
What are you talking about? What have I said that was overselling?
I am really surprised. I point out the example of an educational reform that has shown to be effective at improving the educational outcomes of deprived children. You don't say “Oh, that's great!” or “Oh, that sounds positive, but I have a few questions.” Instead you worry about overselling? What am I missing here?
Well… Everyone “knows” that it's best to start saving for retirement when you're in your teens and early twenties, and yet most people don't get serious about it until their forties. That poor decision literally costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps more than a million, and it can be quantified pretty accurately. Conversely, what's the financial loss from having your child educated by an average teacher vs. one in the top decile?
Re: the dowry example – I suspect that's as much about fear of loss as gain for your children. It looks very bad to not provide a dowry. Further, those cultures generally devalue women relative to men, so the dowry is a form of compensation, too, since the dowry comes from the bride's parents, not the son's.
Derek, Jeffrey's argument was that parents don't gain in wealth if their children are better educated. This was a flat out assertion, he didn't restrict it to short-sighted parents.
You also appear to assume that the relevant factor in education spending is the quality of the teacher, not the quality of the school. However, there is a lot of evidence that the quality of the school in terms of the principal and the quality of the students attending it matter greatly. See for example http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/esp/esp95toc.html Hedonic studies of housing prices imply that people are willing to spend more in at least some cities for access to better quality public schools (though measuring the quality of the schools :
http://cedb.asce.org/cgi/WWWdisplay.cgi?0609543
http://ideas.repec.org/a/jre/issued/v18n31999p3…
http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/labor/lap04/s…
People may or may not be short-sighted about their retirement (I spent my teens and early twenties studying and travelling, rather than saving for my retirement, and I don't regret it), but many parents are willing to spend on their children's education.
As for the dowry, I don't understand what you are trying to say. If no parent cares about their children's financial future for that child's sake, then why would the culture think it very bad to not provide a dowry? Especially in a culture that devalues women relative to men? And I am well aware that the dowry comes from the bride's parents, that is why I was talking about daughters in the comment you responded to.
Has anyone thought of a better way to measure teacher performance than how their students do on standardized tests? The idea that standardized tests are a good measure of anything besides how well students take standardized tests is absurd. How many of you take a standardized test every day at work and are paid based on the results of that test?
Much of the discussion here focuses on reforming schools and how to fix the teacher credentialing process, etc. These are good questions, but there are some far larger questions that Gladwell misses and that aren't discussed here as well.
Our students are in school longer than they've ever been before, why aren't their scores improving? Perhaps they should be in school less? No one ever asks that question because we need kids to be in school so their parents don't have to be responsible for them. Lets not forget that teachers, at a certain point, are nothing more than glorified babysitters. I am one, and the fact that I could lose my job pretty quickly if I didn't take attendance as opposed to the fact that I could show my students movies every day for years and very likely not get fired suggests as much.
Of the best and the brightest students we've had in the past ten to twenty years, many of them went into investment banking because they were taught for years that the most important measure of success is money. I-banking was a great place to make a lot of money. All these kids that scored off the charts on standardized tests and went to the best universities in the country just drove a giant financial machine off a cliff. Why? Is it because they had bad teachers? Is it because they were perhaps taught to work within a system and to not question it, particularly not to question it if it led to greater profits, the holy grail of our society?
Does anyone ask what we did wrong with these kids? They have high IQ's, they got straight A's, they got all the right stamps on their passport to financial success, but they completely missed a hundred huge clues that something was very wrong? Why? Were they not spending enough time in the office? Should they have had more math class and less gym class so they could really be prepared?
I agree with much of what's been stated here, the credentialing system is terrible and not worth the time and money spent on it, majoring in Education should be outlawed because most of it has almost nothing to do with teaching in the real world and being competent in the subject you plan to teach is far more relevant than a degree in Education, teachers ought to be compensated better so that you can encourage more talented and motivated people to enter the field and STAY in the field, all these things are true.
But there are larger problems that have to be addressed first. Why are high school kids in school at 7:30? It doesn't make any sense physiologically or psychologically, they'd be better off coming in at 9 and leaving at 2:30.
Is it rational to expect teachers to be able to adequately prepare for 4-5 classes a day every day with only 1-2 hours of prep time? Would any college professor agree to this? Would any manager agree to run 4-5 meetings a day with anywhere from 15-40 people who may or may not want to be there, and then be responsible to tracking the progress of each of those employees and adjusting practice based on that? And do that every day, every week for 180 days of the year? Of course not, they don't get paid enough to do that. So why on earth would they choose to do it as a teacher?
As long as we run our schools like factories where children progress down an assembly line according to bells that ring and we measure them by standardized tests that measure one form of intelligence, we will continue to destroy creativity and initiative in more than ninety percent of our students. As long as we pay teachers a pittance compared to professions with similar demands, we will continue to get a lackluster crowd of folks doing it with a few exceptions. As long as we think about schools as a way to get a certain product rather than a place to grow students into whatever they want/need to be, we will continue to fill the workplace and the world with a few bright successes and dump the rest into reject lots just like Detroit's has done with all the cars that don't pass inspection at the end of the line. As long as it is less expensive to run education that way, we will continue to do it.
The problem is that very soon we are going to have to pay the piper and very few people understand the scale of the problem or the enormous expense it will take to fix it. This financial meltdown is just the tip of the iceberg in comparison.
I have to raise one last question: Perhaps the problem with measuring teachers is actually the same as the one with measuring quarterbacks. Talent is not something that can be measured with a test nor is it easily quantifiable. You can't really say what the things are that made Dan Marino great and Tim Couch bad. Physically they appear similar, they can do similar things, but when it comes down to it, one is completely different than the other.
If teaching is in fact a talent, and we pay people according to talents and their rarity given a particular demand… suddenly good teachers are worth a lot of money. Not NFL quarterback money but…
The idea that a great teacher is worth 500,000 bucks a year is not something we are comfortable thinking or admitting, but if you want to see a lot of talented and smart people be motivated to do great things as teachers…
I sent this email to Gladwell after reading his article, just because I don't think he does justice to the research on what is being done to identify potentially good teachers:
“I have followed your work for years in “The New Yorker” and have found your writing to be consistently interesting and intellectually thought-provoking, even when I disagree with your conclusions. A case in point is your latest article about education. I have recently spent the past week boning up on the literature related to what, if anything, can be used as a proxy to determine whether or not a potential teacher hire will be effective in the classroom…
So when I came across the following sentences in your article I did a double take:
“A group of researchers–Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard's school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress–have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications–as much as they appear related to teaching prowess–turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.”
First of all, I'm sure you had to simply this section for the demands of an magazine article, but still, I don't think you do justice to the state of the art research on this subject. First of all, there is a bunch of research (including a recent NBER Working Paper by among others Kane and Staiger) which suggests there are some tools that can help screen for effective teachers. To quote from the abstract (“Can You Recognize An Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?”):
“…we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected this information on a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument. Individually, we find that only a few of these predictors have statistically significant relationships with student and teacher outcomes. However, when all of these variables are combined into two primary factors summarizing cognitive and non-cognitive teacher skills, we find that both factors have a modest and statistically significant relationship with student and teacher outcomes, particularly with student test scores.”
Other older studies show that in certain cases content knowledge can increase student performance (mostly for math and science and for high-school students as opposed to elementary school students) and even more intriguingly, the general literacy level of teachers can be a powerful predictor of their effectiveness with students (check out page 8 of the this booklet published by the National Council on Teacher Quality:
http://www.nctq.org/p/publications/docs/nctq_io…)
So I think you mislead your readers to suggest that there are no good predictors of teaching prowess. On the other hand, the conclusions you reach still make sense for most large school districts, given that “value-added” is still the gold standard for determining who will be a good teacher over their career. Therefore, the idea that we need to make it easier for lots of different types of students and/or mid-career professionals thinking of going into teaching to become teachers and then be willing to take the time and effort to weed out the bad apples and reward and nurture those individuals who show promise, is right on.
The idea that standardized tests are a good measure of anything besides how well students take standardized tests is absurd.
For an absurd idea, it's generated a lot of research:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id…
http://epm.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/…
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_…
http://www1.istation.com/en/corpsite/research/p…
http://www.readnaturally.com/pdf/RFBATechnicalD…
http://etd.lib.ttu.edu/theses/available/etd-073…
There is no reason to believe that just because a standardised test measures something that the measure is valid. But, a standardised test can be validated, and if it is properly valid then of course it measures things other than how well students take standardised tests.
How many of you take a standardized test every day at work and are paid based on the results of that test?
Actually my husband does this about once a week, he's not paid on the results of his test, but the company's finanical rewards are tied to his results. He's an engineer.
Of the best and the brightest students we've had in the past ten to twenty years, many of them went into investment banking because they were taught for years that the most important measure of success is money.
I don't believe you. Hollywood movies and TV have been teaching for years that family and friends are far more important than money. I think the students went into investment banking because they decided, for themselves, that they wanted money, despite the propaganda of the media and schools.
Why? Is it because they had bad teachers? Is it because they were perhaps taught to work within a system and to not question it, particularly not to question it if it led to greater profits, the holy grail of our society?
Or, alternatively, it's because humans have a tendency to do something that produces rewards in the short-term, but every now and then turns out to be really risky. After all, humans often drive cars despite the risks involved in that.
As for teaching time – the results of Direct Instruction curriculum I discussed above shows that it's possible for a school to track the progress of every single kid at the school and adjust their practice based on it – this however is not just about teachers, it's about the whole of the school.
The idea that standardized tests are a good measure of anything besides how well students take standardized tests is absurd.
For an absurd idea, it's generated a lot of research:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id…
http://epm.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/…
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_…
http://www1.istation.com/en/corpsite/research/p…
http://www.readnaturally.com/pdf/RFBATechnicalD…
http://etd.lib.ttu.edu/theses/available/etd-073…
There is no reason to believe that just because a standardised test measures something that the measure is valid. But, a standardised test can be validated, and if it is properly valid then of course it measures things other than how well students take standardised tests.
How many of you take a standardized test every day at work and are paid based on the results of that test?
Actually my husband does this about once a week, he's not paid on the results of his test, but the company's finanical rewards are tied to his results. He's an engineer.
Of the best and the brightest students we've had in the past ten to twenty years, many of them went into investment banking because they were taught for years that the most important measure of success is money.
I don't believe you. Hollywood movies and TV have been teaching for years that family and friends are far more important than money. I think the students went into investment banking because they decided, for themselves, that they wanted money, despite the propaganda of the media and schools.
Why? Is it because they had bad teachers? Is it because they were perhaps taught to work within a system and to not question it, particularly not to question it if it led to greater profits, the holy grail of our society?
Or, alternatively, it's because humans have a tendency to do something that produces rewards in the short-term, but every now and then turns out to be really risky. After all, humans often drive cars despite the risks involved in that.
As for teaching time – the results of Direct Instruction curriculum I discussed above shows that it's possible for a school to track the progress of every single kid at the school and adjust their practice based on it – this however is not just about teachers, it's about the whole of the school.