Another Education Post

Lately, I've read some really interesting articles on education. Not surprisingly because education was one of Obama's priorities coming in and there's a debate waging among the Democratic party on how to fix it. The Republicans have been largely out of the discussion because they are still stuck on ideas that don't really work like vouchers, which apparently don't really work at improving academic achievement for low income schools.

In the Democratic party, the debate is between educational reformers and the traditionalists, and the front lines recently has been about Obama's choice for Education Secretarty. David Brooks talks about this debate here.

The reformers, according to Brooks, include the celebrities like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee who support teacher's pay for performance and charter schools. Michelle Rhee's name is significant because I've heard of her :-), because of the Atlantic's articles here and here.

Here's a quote from those articles:

"Many people believe that teachers and the classroom are only one part of a vast web of relationships and environments that determine educational success. … In [Rhee’s] opinion, external factors simply underline the need for better educators. … “As a teacher in this system, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for ensuring your children are successful despite obstacles,” she told me. “You can’t say, ‘My students didn’t get any breakfast today,’ or ‘No one put them to bed last night,’ or ‘Their electricity got cut off in the house, so they couldn’t do their homework.’” This sort of moral certitude is exactly what turns off many veteran teachers in Washington. Even if Rhee is right, she seems to be asking for superhuman efforts, consistently, for decades to come. Making missionary zeal a job requirement is a tough way to build morale, not to mention support, among the teachers who have to confront the D.C. ghetto every day."

In reading about Rhee and advocate and a graduate of Teach for America is a type A personality who literally works constantly and is not afraid of ruffling feathers.

But here's a quote from Rhee that resonated with me in the second link:

"One of the things I’ve been talking about a lot is time and how you treat time. In so many of the classrooms I go into, it’s like people are just biding time until the end of the day. They’re just passing it."

and

"Yes, or saying to the kids, “OK, let’s just get through 20 more minutes, we only have 20 more minutes and then you can go.” And that just sends kids the wrong message. Great teachers squeeze every second they can out of the school day and they don’t waste a single moment."

In my memory it seems like most of my teachers were just passing time, I had some notably good teachers, but the majority of them...

But an article I just read in the New Yorker was particularly profound. It's here.

In this article, Gladwell talks about how its impossible to rate college quarterbacks on how well they would perform in the NFL because success college tells you nothing about how they would perform in the NFL because the jobs are so completely different. And that teaching has a quarterback problem. You cannot tell if a teacher is going to be good until they are actually in the classroom.

Some quotes:

"This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching."

"Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers."

"Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar. The preschool teacher with the alphabet book was sensitive to her students’ needs and knew how to let the two girls on the right wiggle and squirm without disrupting the rest of the students; the trigonometry teacher knew how to complete a circuit of his classroom in two and a half minutes and make everyone feel as if he or she were getting his personal attention. But these aren’t cognitive skills."

A solution for reform:

"In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. 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 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. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward."

And that sounds really good to me.