Improving Education Through Better Teachers 446
theodp writes "The teaching profession gets schooled in cover stories from the big pubs this weekend, as Newsweek makes the case for Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers, and the NY Times offers the more hopeful Building a Better Teacher. For the past half-century, professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language — but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements. But what they ignored was the elephant in the room — if the teacher sucks, the students suck. Or, as the Times more eloquently puts it: 'William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge.' But what makes a good teacher? When Bill Gates announced his foundation was investing $335 million in a project to improve teaching quality, he added a rueful caveat. 'Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn't have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,' Gates said. 'I'm personally very curious.'"
Those that can't... (Score:3, Insightful)
The best teacher can not only "teach", they can also "do"
Re:Better teachers and more funding ! (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers. And shutting down infrastructure projects that will last 200 years to start another failed experiment in teaching seems foolhardy at best.
The best teachers I ever had weren't making that much money. The highest paid teachers I've had, A) seldom taught, B) did a horrible job, and C) used a lot of TAs to actually do the work while the prof was out D) selling his book.
When the rot is entrenched at the highest levels (Score:2, Insightful)
of State Government there is no chance for improvement in the trenches. The whole system, from soup to nuts, needs to be dredged out and rebuilt and there is zero chance that will ever happen, specially in California with it's all-powerful teacher's union.
Schwarzenegger wasn't the first to try, and he won't be the last to fail.
Re:Fire teachers? Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
So you think they should be fired on the basis of a mere accusation?
Re:Teachers Unions (Score:5, Insightful)
You know the best way to break a union? Pay the better employees more than the lesser employees.
As long as you're unwilling to admit that the better employees should earn as much as, if not more than, their boss, you will always be under the union's heel, and rightfully so.
Good Teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
How about hiring some charismatic, experienced teachers who will inspire the kids on a daily basis? And they won't need higher salaries - just a nice bureaucracy and politics-free workplace. I'd love to teach and make a real difference in our future, but the environment is just too toxic.
You know it after you have seen it. (Score:3, Insightful)
In my personal experience, students are the best judge of teachers, once they reach the JR High/Middle school and are exposed to more than one teacher at a time. Grade school kids usually have nothing to compare with "She who must be obeyed".
Looking back, students can identify the best teachers they ever had, those that got them interested in subjects, who got points across, who came prepared, and who usually had a closet full of source material accumulated over the years.
In a move that would surely bring the swat team today, we were handed a Civil war rifle to examine (inert), often instructed by "The general" in full period uniform (regardless of the period being discussed), and howled in laughter as a canoe paddle and coon skin cap was produced from under the desk and he paddled his desk chair across the room.
This kind of imaginative teaching is now gone. Instead we have dumbed down books and teachers instructed to follow it to the letter.
I suspect everyone can think back on their education and immediately identify a particular teacher that made an impression. Both good and bad. And more often than not that teacher will not have been the one teaching their favorite subject.
Huge changes needed in the schools (Score:2, Insightful)
1 teachers should go down for treason if they can't teach but keep trying to
2 every administrator should be required to put in say 2 "credit hours" of teaching every year
(unless it can be proven they are geniuses at admin but can't teach)
3 the first 3 years of teaching should be done by folks that are a combo of MR Rogers and Judge Dred
4 most of the first 3 years should be focused on A that you can learn B respect for others C how to teach yourself
(who cares that a 5 year old only knows 1 language if said kid is able to respect the other kids long enough to learn the other languages)
Re:Better teachers and more funding ! (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers.
Indeed, the international PISA study found out just that. What might help is adopting teaching concepts from countries who did better than the US (which are 2/3rd of developed/OECD countries [wikipedia.org]). It's not like this kind of problem didn't show up before anywhere else.
And just firing bad teachers is not nearly enough if their replacements are only marginally better. Applying the natural selection principle here is terribly wasteful. I assume one aspect will be a vastly improved teacher education which does the job of selecting good and bad ones, preventing the latter from doing much harm in the field.
Re:Those that do... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I had a CS prof who could write great papers, but had no clue about the subject he was teaching. He would have a summary of the next chapter of the book, that he would read to the class, then take questions. We would ask questions, he would write them down, then figure out the answers and then go over the questions/answers at the start of the next class. Repeat for the entire course.
And then we had a math professor, who was super enthusiastic about teaching math, would notice if you missed a class, made classes interesting to be in as well as getting the material across to the class, but didn't pump out the papers.
Guess which prof the university ditched.
Re:Those that do... (Score:2, Insightful)
That is what I said, the best teacher had to be able to do both.
Re:Fire teachers? Good luck (Score:3, Insightful)
They can't fire them for an accusation and they can't let them teach if the allegations ultimately turn out to be true. For a school district the size of LA or NYC, 160 teachers isn't great but it isn't that bad. The problem to me isn't the system to pay the teachers, but instead the system that takes seven years to determine worthiness to teach. I think hiring a teacher that required a $14/hr assistant is part of the problem as well.
I'll give a similar situation, I am a nurse, if I am accused of any sort of misconduct with any sort of substance behind it I generally get sent home with pay while an investigation takes place. I have never been in this situation, but about twice a year someone is and we only employ about 40 nurses. Sometimes people are sent home for the afternoon and then return the next work day, others involving actual allegations of abuse have taken days while police investigate. If the allegations turn out to be true, they don't get paid...they almost never do and so they get paid.
In my experience, authority (Score:4, Insightful)
As free, independant thinking geeks, we like to disparage authority. I feel wierd saying it, but in my experience authority is important.
You have to understand what I mean by "authority". It doesn't mean hitting people with rulers, or being stern all the time. It's something more like leadership. You just know it when you see it.
I spent 3 years in a private school that, while it had its failings, seemed to know how to control a classroom. (note, this is a 30 year old memory from when I was a kid, so I could be wrong; but these are the impressions I got)
Teacher walks in. Students get quiet. End of story.
You can't learn when the students are running the classroom, at least not when they're running it out of their id, which is where most kids operate. Yes, I'm aware of alternative schools where kids have free reign and positive outcomes; but there's some selectivity going on there. Trying to apply that en masse would be a mistake, IMHO.
Anyway, at the private school we had a very charismatic teacher who was in a bus accident. We went through at least two replacements until we found one that could command respect and control the classroom. The other two literally got spitballed out of class! In private school, this was not tolerated, and while individual kids would get punished if they got caught, it was also recognized that the teacher couldn't command respect or attention.
Now, all of this is very squishy. That's too bad. Either you've got it or you don't. That's all we know now. Maybe in the future we'll be able to run accurate psychological profiles that will prevent non-authoritative individuals from trying to run K-12 classrooms; but for now, firing is the only thing that works; ie, trial and error.
Re:Teachers Unions (Score:5, Insightful)
who are the best teachers?
the ones with the brightest students? but they have it easy, their students are interested in classes and want to learn.
so then the ones with the most problematic students? not necessarily, a terrible teacher would stand out less amongst low-performing students.
so, the ones with the most improved test scores (aka. no child left behind)? well, sorta. but excellent teachers who don't "teach to the test" will end up with poorer results than automatons that drill all day. do we really want to disincentivise imagination and creativity amongst our teachers?
so maybe test scores plus peer review? what are you a hippy? you can't have the teachers rating themselves.
right. test scores plus administrative review? sounds reasonable. but what about dysfunctional principles? and bias or personal grudges?
well no system is perfect.
not to mention how do you determine if a french teacher is better than an algebra teacher? or a gym teacher is better than a history teacher?
sure, you can come up with a system that takes into account all the variables, but will it be more efficient or less complicated than the methods currently being employed in public schools around the country?
What about... (Score:2, Insightful)
People love to blame problems on teachers (Score:2, Insightful)
because that way, no additional work or money is required by the complainer to solve the problem.
overwhelming social and economic forces (Score:5, Insightful)
The Newsweek article is about getting rid of incompetent teachers. The NYT article is mainly about figuring out specific teaching techniques that are effective. I doubt that either of these will have any positive effect on K-12 education in the U.S. -- in fact, I'm convinced that essentially nothing that our society does as a whole can have any significant effect on average educational outcomes.
Our school system sends kids to schools near where they live. Where you live correlates with your family's income and education. By the time a kid is old enough for school, a number of extremely powerful factors have been at work in determining how well the kid will do in school. One kid grows up in a house full of books; the parents subscribe to newspapers; the adults talk about intellectual things at the dinner table. The other kid grows up in a house with no books or newspapers; the parents spend their free time watching TV.
Let's say the authors of the Newsweek article get their way, and bad teachers are fired. The problem is that (a) the school now has to hire a replacement, and (b) there's a reason why the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around. There is a job market for schoolteachers. The reason the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around was because they had a lousy pool of applicants. Why did they have a lousy pool of applicants? Most likely because this is a school where 90% of the kids qualify for the free lunch program. The best teachers generally don't want to teach in that kind of environment. They know that if they teach in that environment, they're getting the kids who have been growing up with TV and no books. They know they're going to spend more time on discipline than on academics. They know that a lot of the families are financially unstable, so they're always on the move; of the faces in the classroom on the first day of class, maybe 40% will have been replaced with new faces by the last day of the year.
The NYT article talks about improving specific skills that teachers need. But they also admit that that can't make up for lack of subject knowledge, especially in math. As one of the articles notes, teaching and nursing are no longer the only career options for smart, talented women. I'm a college professor, and when I taught classes specifically targeted at preservice K-12 teachers, they were the worst students I'd ever had. In the job market, the vast majority of people applying for K-12 teaching jobs are just not such great students. In the US, 80% of them have bachelor's degrees education, meaning that they basically got a diploma without ever having to learn a deep and specific body of knowledge in any particular subject. Sure, a few people do go to highly selective schools, get stellar grades in a real academic subject, and then move on to a career in K-12 teaching. The problem is that those people are few and far between. When they go on the job market, they have their pick of schools. Most of them are going to end up in affluent, suburban districts.
Prental Involment? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Those that can't... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the concept of "doing" is ill-defined. Does one need to be a published author to qualify to teach a 10th grade English class? How about an Erdos number to teach an Algebra I class? One of my colleagues specializes in teaching "lower level" math kids. He's great at maintaining discipline in his classroom, and many of his students actually experience some success in math. It has been 20 years since he's taken Calculus, and he really doesn't know integration-by-parts any more. Should he be fired for his inability to "do"?
The cliche is fun to bust out whenever bad education news hits the airwaves, but I think it distracts from some of the real issues surrounding education and good vs bad teachers.
Re:one problem (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course there aren't enough teachers. This is another product of teachers' unions. They have been very successful at putting up entry barriers to protect incumbents and justify higher salaries. Requiring certifications, graduate degrees, minimum college GPAs (despite the FACT that there is no normalization between GPAs of different colleges), etc. Put all these requirements in place and you would have a shortage in *any* field.
There is *no* reason why public high schools couldn't use large numbers of adjunct teachers. Many community colleges and small private colleges live off adjunct professors. There's no reason that the same model couldn't work at the high school level. I believe that many professionals would jump at the chance to go into high schools a couple days a week and teach a class or two. This would work; It would be great for the students and the schools. It will never happen because teachers' unions would throw a fit.
Re:The solution is easy (Score:2, Insightful)
So your point is skills can't be learned?
If we really need superstars to teach, then we're screwed. According to the BLS there are something like 3.5 million teachers in the US right now (kindergarten to high school). There are 660,000 physicians and surgeons. 1.3 million computer "engineers" and programmers. So it seems like if your strategy is to magically select exceptionally smart people, then we won't have good teachers.
I don't divide the world into "dim drones" and "brights". It doesn't have to be a "magic equation". The fact is there may be skills and techniques that make for better teachers, and those might be learnt to a certain degree. If that's true, we'll still have better and worse teachers, we'll still have to get rid of bad teachers, but we'll be in a better situation. More money would help, but it needs to be spent intelligently.
Re:Fire teachers? Good luck (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like they are already being punished.
Re:Fire teachers? Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
So, fire them on accusation?
Kids, of course, especially teenagers, are known for their measured approach, their abhorrence of drama. And we all know that parents never turn vengeful over Johnny's bad report or whether the coach is giving him a fair shake.
So I guess it'd be a good idea to hand out the power to destroy any teacher's life with a word.
Simple fact is, it's not actually that hard to fire a teacher. I've watched it operate over the course of decades. True: even for the ones are who just ordinarily bad, who just aren't cutting it, you have to go slow, you have to show that there genuinely is a problem and not a gaggle of histrionic parents, you have to show you tried to help with their weak spots, because teaching doesn't pay much and teachers who've gotten past the prerequisites, who look like they might be able to cut it, to do a genuinely good job, aren't easy to come by.
This isn't the corporate world, where people with friends get up-and-out promotions or just get ignored, given nothing meaningful to do. This isn't the corporate world, where little empire-builders hire huge teams to follow baroque procedures to solve problems better addressed by just one competent employee, if you could find one. This isn't the corporate world, where you can impress ignorant bosses by getting all showy with how hard you work and how much you produce.
These are schools, where slacking off hurts children.
Teaching shares this with programming: it's somewhere between a professional craft and an art, and anyone who genuinely knows anything about the product can see stellar work for what it is. Most people can identify a happy child with a lively, perceptive mind. It's strange, though: you'd be astonished how many people seem to be threatened by such children. You'd be astonished how many parents never give a shit about their children and then blame the teachers when their children don't care about themselves. You'd be astonished how many parents transfer fears and frustrations in their personal lives into their children's classrooms and start getting hysterical because of a chance remark.
And no, I've never been a teacher, never worked in a school, never been married or lovers or even friends with anyone who got fired or even needed help. But I have known someone well who was president of a teacher's union for decades, and I've been around for lots of bad or worse teachers getting fired.
Lazy principals who think growing good teachers is somebody else's job ... now, they're hard to get rid of.
Oops. Sorry, was that unfair?
Good examples are there... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is pretty nearly right. Of the many education systems worldwide, the finest is widely reputed (by many comparative reviews) to be that of Finland. Not necessarily because teachers there are so incredibly well paid, but because their profession commands RESPECT.
That means allowing them the space to exercise their experience and common sense rather than regulating their activities into a series of so-called "outcomes" that have to be ticked off so that petty-minded little bureaucrats can get a good night's sleep. It also means not leaving teachers exposed to be pilloried by media and politicians for their own ends.
We need to try treating teachers as valued members of society, for the fact that they are entrusted with the education of future generations, rather than treating them as political footballs. Of course, that also means that teachers need to be paid well enough that they don't feel exploited. After all, who among us really wants to give 100% when we are feeling aggrieved with our employer?
Re:People love to blame problems on teachers (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with US education is NOT one of funding; governments have been throwing more and money at education over the past decades and it hasn't made any difference in outcomes:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1980_2020&view=1&expand=&units=b&fy=fy11&chart=20-total&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&title=&state=US&color=c&local=20-total [usgovernmentspending.com]
Of course, it's usually the people who stand to benefit from having even more thrown at this problem, who cry out about how the problem is "we need more money". Which makes me wonder if you're part of the system.
Re:Better teachers and more funding ! (Score:2, Insightful)
What these projects are really are massive gifts from those of us who can't make use of the lines to those who happen to live nearby and want to travel along the rail corridor.
i currently live 1 block from a BART station in walnut creek, CA. BART is a multi-track, multi-line high speed train network which runs into san francisco and the rest of the bay area... if the train station wasn't here, i wouldn't have moved here. so your assumption that the only people to benefit are those that "happen to live nearby" doesn't take into account that everyone has the option of benefiting by moving closer to a train station.
Re:Good Teachers (Score:4, Insightful)
Just a nice bureaucracy and politics-free workplace
This is why teacher evaluations will always be extremely difficult to determine.
Both my parents are teachers. One university and one middle and grade-school. I don't know that either have taught at any school that wasn't rife with bureaucracy and politics. "Well that's what you get with government." No. One of them teaches at a private school. Every school I've attended both public and private has been full of politics and bureaucracy. Teachers driven out because an administrator wanted to hire one of their friends. The most difficult part of this process would be finding a way that those politics don't just get empowered by the ability to easily fire teachers.
I have a theory as to why this is the case. It's because nobody is well payed. When you don't get monetary compensation all you're left with is power.
Even then I don't see what good any of it will do. I went to a private school for almost every single year except the first half of Kindergarten. In that time I had great teachers and I had terrible teachers. The administration had total power over hiring and firing. I can't think of a single instance in my entire life where a poor teacher was actually fired. I can think of numerous instances where teachers who I thought were amazing were driven to quit.
So how do we find the good teachers?
Do we ask the students? Maybe in college. But students are always split. My favorite teachers actually required the students to think. This usually resulted in a large subset of students hating them. One of my favorite teachers would throw chalk erasers at students who weren't paying attention. His argument being if they were paying attention to class they would see it coming! I got hit a bunch of times but still thought it was hilarious. Some of the teachers I despised who simply forced 18th century rote memorization of useless facts were hugely popular with the students who didn't care about relevance and would spend all night memorizing lists of things.
Do we ask the other teachers? In which case you're back to the teacher cliques and politics.
DO we look at test scores? Do we want all the teachers just competing to get the best test scores? Can we fully compensate for the students' natural talents and quality and home life? My high-school always was in the top 5 percentile for test scores. We achieved that imo largely through our expulsion policy. Get caught smoking off campus. Expelled. Get caught drinking off campus. Expelled. Get arrested for vandalism off campus. Expelled. Get pregnant. Expelled. Through a stringent expulsion policy we managed to expel anyone and everyone who statistically would be a poor student.
Improving Education through Better Parents (Score:4, Insightful)
not everyone can be a fantastic teacher (in the same way that not everyone can be a concert pianist) no matter how well they are trained. and there aren't enough people with the temperament, focus, love, patience and understanding that make up a fantastic teacher to teach every child on every subject.
unless you're very wealthy (and probably even then) your children are going to have teachers that are not inspirational. and perhaps they're not even particularly well informed. or perhaps your child's teacher is truly inspirational, but it turns out that he or she is not inspirational in a way that works for your child. your child will spend day after day, hour after hour sitting through interminable lectures and stupid pointless presentations. they will get useless comments on their school work and they'll bring home ridiculous assignments. And just in case you think it's just in your imagination, your neighbor's lod will be assigned to a more capable teacher in the same subject.
well clearly, due to this terrible misfortune, your child will end up working at a gas station for the rest of his life.
it seems to me that many parents look on education as some sort of passive process (your kid goes to school for 12 years and comes out Enhanced With Knowledge® ). so when they see their child struggling in school they naturally think the school is broken. they want better teachers and better facilities to put the knowledge into their child! Well, it couldn't hurt. But real learning happens only when the student is actively involved in the process. Yes, excellent teachers know how to make subjects come alive for their students, but students need to be able to inspire themselves.
If it takes an army of miraculous teachers to get a person to graduate high school, that person is going to have serious issues when they confront a world full of people who aren't exerting every particle of effort into making them successful.
New Approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better teachers and more funding ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Better teachers and more funding ! (Score:5, Insightful)
The other thing that you want to be alert to, though, is the confounding effects of non-teacher-related variables. It isn't exactly news, or rocket science, that some demographic variables work strongly in favour of educational success, and others work strongly against it. In a wealthy district with educated and engaged parents who would be furious with junior if he doesn't do his work and make the grade, and are happy to hire tutors, and test prep outfits, and whatnot, a teacher could probably do just about anything and have their students get good results on any of the major standardized tests(though they would face the risk of being lynched by parents if they slacked off too much). More demographically hostile areas are notorious for chewing up and spitting out the most idealistic and comitted teachers with not much in the way of results to show for it.
The ideal research programme, for someone who wants to improve education, would really seem to have at least two parts. The first would be trying to determine what makes a good teacher good. Compare teachers in highly similar environments to one another. Observe their rates of success, student improvement, etc. Compare their behaviors and methods, try and establish correlations. Test the behaviors and methods that correlate with good results to see if they are in fact causative. That's a nontrivial piece of social science work, and there are probably a lot of unionized fossils who won't like it; but it seems conceptually simple enough.
The much hairier project is working out what demographic and cultural factors work for and against education and then trying to do something about that. Unfortunately, that is likely to be a lot more difficult. Firing teachers deemed bad will be child's play compared to, say, eradicating pockets of entrenched poverty and violence and cultural dysfunction.
Re:People love to blame problems on teachers (Score:4, Insightful)
Truth is there's plenty of blame to go around and teachers certainly deserve their fair share.
Re:Good Teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
And they won't need higher salaries - just a nice bureaucracy and politics-free workplace.
Personally, I've never understood the resistance to paying teachers more. Our entire push in the last decade has to make schools more business-like. Normally, the measure of a good business is whether it stays in business. With schools, however, that metric doesn't work. No Child Left Untested is an attempt to fix this. If we have a metric for schools, then we can "bankrupt" those that aren't performing. We are trying to fit our schools into our free-market philosophy. However, for some reason, we ignore an elementary free-market observation; if you don't have enough qualified candidates for positions, then you need to improve working conditions and/or offer more money. Simple, and yet rather than recognize this, people complain about "administration" and call teachers whiners.
Since we can't outsource education, we've decided to put the squeeze on artificially. Give schools less money, while at the same time, expect more. The schools I worked at could use *more* "administration". Our principal was overworked. Our secretary was deciding which classes students should be placed in, because our *part-time* counselor was only on campus half the day. Rooms only got cleaned every third day. Roofs leaked. Heating failed. Our school had no librarian. There was no music program. There was no dance program. There was one visual arts teacher. After-school programs died as their funding was cut. What an inspiring place for a student to be. Really expresses the concern society has for their education.
And you've got curriculums that are created are created by textbook makers and suits far removed from the realities of students. You can't teach something to someone who doesn't care. But "inspiration" is secondary. Spend a week studying imaginary numbers that culminates in students who actually understand what they're looking at when they see the Mandelbrot Set, and, officially, you've wasted a week, cause that isn't on the tests. Spend a week working through some of the details and mathematics of how, exactly, your voice is transmitted from your cell phone to mine (something students are always *very* interested in), and, officially, you've now wasted two weeks. And the tests will show that you're behind. You must be a bad teacher.
I often think that our society's vision for teachers is to remove all individuality, all wiggle-room, all deviations from the norm. In our attempts to make sure that curriculum is presented exactly equally to all students in all schools, we will soon remove teachers all together and replace them with DVD's.
Re:Fire teachers? Good luck (Score:4, Insightful)
I think all the teacher hating is BS, FIRE THE STUDENTS, seriously. I'm sure many University professors would like to fire their students (if you're a prof mod me up!) :)
Seriously teachers can only do so much if students won't meet them half way and do the work, no amount of excellent teacher's can turn slackers who don't want to do the work into stellar students.
Re:Better teachers and more funding ! (Score:1, Insightful)
And of course, in Randroid-land, the teachers' opposition to vouchers has nothing to do with the fact that voucher systems tend to act as negative selection systems, further depleting the public schools of students whose parents give a fuck. This, of course, leads to more calls for vouchers and more disintegration of the public schools, and gives Grover Norquist a raging hard-on.
Meanwhile, the private schools run just like a business - which means that cheating on standardized tests is the rule of the day, and students who are "difficult" (ie, expensive) are told to GTFO.
Unions (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with your general sentiment. I will note that one of those groups who uses teachers as a "political football" in CA is none other than the teacher's union.
(Yes, I mean that as an insult to them, and to every other union that places their own political power above the well being of their victims-- I mean "members".)
Re:Fire teachers? Good luck (Score:2, Insightful)
As the child of 2 teachers, I hear stories from my parents all the time about the horrors of the teaching system.
In my mother's elementary school, the parents regularly threaten to sue the school board over the grades that their supposedly perfect children are not receiving on homework. The board caves every time a lawsuit threat is filed. I can't even begin to imagine what would happen if the teachers themselves were easier to fire. You'd have great teachers being sued by parents and losing their jobs all the time.
My father's high school is a robotics teacher one of the leading edge tech schools in the city, with over 20 world place finishes in these competitions. Recently, he came under fire from his principal because he wasn't willing to play along with her personal ambitions that were detrimental to the student's education. If it wasn't for his union rights, he would have lost his job over a matter of politics and an unethical principal.
I've had more than my fair share of poor teachers, and I do wish that they could be encouraged to quit. However, I think that stripping union rights would be a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. There's many better ways to encourage good teaching, such as through positive reinforcement systems.
Education works as designed . . . TO FAIL. (Score:2, Insightful)
I suggest the works of John Taylor Gatto.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ [johntaylorgatto.com]
A former teacher who won awards as Teacher-of-the-Year for both New York City and New York State, Gatto has looked into the history of education in the United States and came to the conclusion that the Education system is working exactly as it was designed.
However, the U.S. education system was designed to prepare students to be cogs in the industrial machine, and that requires workers who have some basic skills but no independence or spirit of inquiry. In short, it requires workers who are half-educated - no more, no less - and so countless reforms never work because the system is already working exactly as intended.
These little piddling changes will make no difference. Allow the money to follow the students, that might make a difference. The government monopoly on schools will just continue on its old course.
Re:overwhelming social and economic forces (Score:1, Insightful)
How easy is it to identify a good teacher in a job interview? Even if you have them do a demo lecture, that is one that they had weeks to prepare, not 1/3 of a night (if teaching 3 preps in block, even less for traditional scheduling). Even if 75% of your hires turn out bad, if you are able to keep the good ones and fire the bad, you should still be able to end up with a significantly better teaching staff than the applicant pool as a whole.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet other countries with public schools don't have our problems. The difference? Education and the teaching profession is respected in those countries.
Of course, we do have a system exactly like what you want in our universities. And there people complain about poor teachers who are generally paid well, because their metric for success is not educating students, but giving the school prestige to attract students in the first place. There students succeed in spite of poor teaching because the filtering has already occurred - the best schools have students who are already highly competent, self-motivated learners.
Re:just pay them more (Score:5, Insightful)
You showcase your ignorance. Any teacher is going to put a lot of hours in at home, making tests, grading papers, creating new lessons, doing committee work. I know because my wife teaches high school English and I have an aunt and a couple friends who teach. They also don't get the whole summer off - there are committee meetings to go to, inservice days to attend, and they come in about a week before the students do to get their rooms prepped and learn about what new madness the administration and legislature have decided on.
They work much more than 8 hours a day, for a comparative pittance. Sure, they're paid more than J. Random Schmuck at McDonald's, but it's a job that requires a college degree and a certification. Still, my wife makes about $40k/yr on her eleventh year of teaching, which is only slightly more than I make fixing computers for not quite half as long, and I never take my work home with me.
Teaching is a full-time job (Score:1, Insightful)
I actually think this is a great idea, but a major stumbling block would be the amount of non-class time a consultant-teacher would need to devote to preparing syllabuses, correcting tests and papers, etc.
I've been a part time teacher, and the amount of out-of-class work to be done is considerable.
Why would they? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can do, why on earth would you settle for a teachers salary?
And I notice that so far, the simplest rememdy, pay more, goes unexplored.
You pay peanuts, you get monkey's.
I have worked with a lot of ex-teachers, who now do things like IT-training, they make several times what they would make in front of a class-room filled with kids, so why would they do it?
That, and more... (Score:4, Insightful)
Here in British Columbia, the good teachers (who actually manage to get full time work, frak you union/management collusion) generally have to work about a 60-70 hour week, plus be available for phone calls. The work load can get insane, because a good teacher is working HARD during those hours... I've put in long hours at various jobs, but there's usually way more 'down-time' or light load work in a week than a teacher gets.
This is all for a lower middle class income until your seniority gets big. Time off in the summer amounts to about 3-4 weeks or less since there's always professional development and prep.
The general public just has no idea.
On top of that, a good teacher deals with intense frustrations over curriculum, bureaucracy, feckless parents, and lack of support for special needs... most spend an inordinate time with 'classroom management', meaning discipline.
The thing is, good teachers will work for enough to live on, because they will do the work anyway, that's what makes them a good teacher. What they really want is the ability to properly teach without burning out; i.e. adequate prep time, smaller class sizes, more support staff targeted at the 10% of the class that takes 90% of the attention, and fewer overall hours. Burnout turns good teachers into indifferent, bitter staff working for that pension.
The problem is far to complex to solve (Score:4, Insightful)
Roughly, you got the following groups involved:
And all the time, teachers see those who take their teaching talent to private industry make several times their pay, with none of the hazards of getting some parent upset or a student who desides to file charges because daddy touched them.
No, if you want to fix education, you got to make a drastic cleaning action.
Re:Prental Involment? (Score:3, Insightful)
You know what? I agree, except for the homework point.
Homework is irrelevant. An inefficient learning environment needs homework to keep up, the kid doesn't need 10 hours of learning a day to learn a few things.
The parents aren't teaching their kids curiosity. They aren't teaching them focus. The kids aren't getting a sense of goals or meaning from the prospect of learning. Likewise, the curriculum fails at this too.
Most homework is obviously make-work or catch-up. It's no wonder it isn't valued. Gatto has a pretty good take on this. Motivation comes from the context as well as from within. There is all kinds of meaning in how work is presented to the kids, and just because they don't put it into words, they can often see through the crap.
The crux is that inefficient learning environment. Blame apathy at home, sure, but blame misguided curriculum too, blame Taylorism that depersonalizes the kid, blame culture, blame admin, but mostly blame the educational system overall, its ideology and inequalities and denial.
Re:Good examples are there... (Score:3, Insightful)
We need to try treating teachers as valued members of society...
Do they have to earn this respect? What do they have to give up for it? Do we still have to listen to the all-purpose excuses they offer (family issues, poverty, culture, lawsuits, etc.) when they fail? Do we get to fire the teachers unworthy of this respect?
Or are we just supposed to pretend to respect them, like we're acting out a role in a play that everyone knows is fictional and unrealistic?
The OTHER Elephant (Score:3, Insightful)
Having attended grad school to secure a teaching certificate, I can tell you that the education culture will resist any attempt to cull poor performers from the pack. The emphasis is on never criticizing and being exceptionally inclusive. When peer review was done, all reviews were A+ while performance varied considerably. The instructors and students "accommodated" the poor performers because I was told "They need jobs too and it's our job to help them.".
And I'll bring up the other elephant in the room: it's because education is, in the USA at least, a very female culture. You can see the effect of this in the entire process, much to the detriment of the students: management by consensus, emphasis on behaving "well" and being quiet, institutional enforcement of the status quo, heavy reliance on social rules, reliance on strategies like "think of the children" when engaging in discussion and so on. Sadly, this aspect has been discussed for years and since the education/female culture is threatened by it, it is never fully addressed and typically dismissed as not relevant. The female culture of caring and nurturing is wonderful for day care, but not for educating. And what is it our schools appear to have become? Institutions of babysitting where the emphasis is on "getting along", "respecting diversity", improving "self esteem" and walking quietly in a straight line down the hall. The nod to learning is achieving a good score on a standardized test, which the teachers in Norfolk, VA have been manipulating (cheating) to artificially inflate score to keep their budgets and jobs. There's nothing wrong with female culture, it's simply misapplied in education.
Given that Bill Gates is not an educator, he is not aware that the characteristics of a good teacher have long been known (but he could "Bing" that, I suppose), it's how to communicate and teach those that is still undecided (RTFA). It's just that those characteristics seems to be at odds with the moribund education culture.
Re:Good examples are there... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fire teachers? Good luck (Score:3, Insightful)
Dead on. Society is the real customer and it is getting the shaft. Parents think they are the customer and as the comment below me indicates, they complain loudly when their perfect child gets mistreated. Consider that these urchins are the ones that are going to be building your house, filling your prescription, flying that airplane, when we are retired. I'm expecting to be OD'ed in a house that crumbles based on what I hear. I've heard a good idea recently to incentivize the kids. No drivers license if you drop out till you are 21.
Re:Good Teachers (Score:1, Insightful)
I would be happy to have an administration that backs up teachers and funding for proper classrooms with seats and books for everyone. Smaller class sizes are a perk, but I can work with larger classes if it means never having to supervise school fund raising projects ever again. If the schools would fund after school programs, I'd give my time to those more happily too. Instead of offering higher teach pay, how about funding student programs properly so that the teachers don't have to worry about getting money for student programs?
Re:Fire teachers? Good luck (Score:3, Insightful)
Who in the hell do you think /wants/ to be stuck in a room all day doing nothing? For years?
It'd be maddening even with a laptop, wireless Internet connection, and a bagful of books.
Re:Good Teachers (Score:2, Insightful)
Do they have the same useless majors in Finland? (Score:4, Insightful)
while in Finland it's considered so valuable to society that it actually pays you to get it.
I'm guessing they severely limit the number of philosophy & english (Finnish?) majors, and don't have 'victim group x studies' majors at all.
In the United States there are a significant number of majors that add no value whatsoever to society, and more often than not produce a strain of 'educated' people who have nothing but grievances against productive people.
I'd say the following applies to a good third to half of the useless twits America gives bachelor's degrees:
-Theodore Dalrymple
Re:Good examples are there... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, the university level education is pretty much free in Finland. They also have 22% sales tax, 75% gasoline tax, 50% tax on cars, extremely high income tax (goes very easily over 30% and can go up to 60%) etc. Also the salaries paid after getting a good education are very bad. There is pretty much only Nokia that is doing R&D, which means that it does not much make sense to get a PhD. In fact I saw that most people were making a complete U-turn after getting their PhD - they usually ended up being elementary school teachers (very expensive ones as measured by the money invested in their education by the tax payers). In general you will end up doing much better moneywise if you stay away from the university and just start working directly.
I was actually involved in teacher training in Finland (and since that time have moved to US because they actually pay me here for doing my job and the government does not steal everything I make). In my opinion the main problems with the US school (or at least in California) system are: 1) lack of well defined curriculum; 2) lack of proper teacher training; 3) excessive testing of students; 4) attempting to teach too much and too sophisticated material to young students; 5) trying to just get students to memorize things rather than teaching them to solve problems; 6) powerful teacher unions and the incompetent school district administrators will block any attempt to change things towards the better; 7) parent involvement and language problems.
Point 1) leads to a very inconsistent overall teaching process. This will hit especially hard the students who have lazy or inexperienced teachers. These teachers have hard time in preparing the core curriculum and communicating to the students and parents what will be taught and what will be required from the students. I suppose that we would call these the "bad teachers". In Finland it is not necessarily such a disaster for the students if you have a bad teacher since the curriculum was designed in such a way that even an "idiot" can teach it. All the textbooks are prepared so that they are compatible with the national curriculum. In addition to coherent teaching plan, one needs to consider also simple practical issues. For example, students can concentrate on a given subject for about 45 mins after which they will need a break. This break is also important for teachers so that they can prepare for the next class (photocopies etc.). This is how it works in Finland but in California, for example, things are completely upside down. Even at the university level studenst can at most concentrate for two hours on the subject being taught. At high school level one should make mathematics courses, which include calculus and integration, mandatory. Most students tend to skip these courses since "it willl ruin their GPA". The outcome is that their math skills as completely inadequate when they enter college.
Regarding 2) the teacher training programs at least in California are a joke (as compared to Finland). In Finland students are actually chosen to the teacher training programs based on their abilities to communicate and teach (usually a group of teachers will be judging them before they get accepted). This weeds out people how would not be able to teach no metter what one does - it makes no sense to try to turn them into teachers. In addition to the subject training (masters level in the main subject and bachelors in the 2nd subject; grades 6 and above), they will have pedagogical training with directed classroom teaching, courses which emphasize classroom demonstrations and doing experiments with students. In the directed classroom teaching they will be dealing with real students (they are the teacher in charge) and an expert who is giving them feedback how things are going. You can also fail this part in which case you will not become a teacher. Here the state of California (= all the highly paid half politicians - half bureaucrats who run the system) has its own vision what teachers need to know and do in the classroom
Re:Teachers Unions (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sick of your "teach to the test" idiocy.
How does one "teach to a test"? If the student memorizes every possible answer to every possible question in a given format, would he not know the subject matter?
If whatever we're calling "teaching to the test" is what results in the best test scores, isn't it then the best teaching method since the test wasn't known in advance and students had to be trained well enough to score the best given any test? You're dumb enough to be a teacher.
You socialists and your doublethink catchphrases make me sick.
Re:Better teachers and more funding ! (Score:2, Insightful)
A big part of the problem is that teachers aren't taught well. I worked in a private school without a teaching certificate for 10 years. Later I went back to school and got a B.Ed. Two years of sand piling.
My headmaster would NOT hire someone who only had a teaching degree. Claimed that a border collie could do a better job, and the kids would like her better. He preferred young people with a 'hard' degree -- one that required either brains or scholarship -- figuring he could teach them how to teach in a year.
Rather than create a darwinian survival of the fittest, I think it would better to create a positive feed back loop.
Try this: Most school districts have some form of peer selected teaching execellence awards. Take the N runner ups. Secund them away from the school, arm them with clipboards, and let them loose in the Education college at the local university.
Let them rewrite the entire curriculum. Chuck the sandpiling courses.
Move the education system away from the universities and into the Community colleges, and the Institutes of technology. Run it more like the trade program rather than college.
Here's how the teacher training system would work.
1. You pick up a 3 or 4 year degree in some subject. For high school teachers it's related to their specialty. For elementary teachers it's some combination of childhood psychology, and general level courses in everything.
2. You go to 'Normal School' (What teacher's schools used to be called.) This is your typical trade school program. 12 weeks of training, followed by a minimum of 24 weeks of work experience in the field. You get paid for work, just not as much as a journeyman does.
3. You get out, and join the fray.
4. After N years experience you can apply to become a teacher at the Normal school. N should be short initially 5 years or so, to maximize feedback.
***
The second aspect that needs to change is the expectations of parents and kids. Teachers are expected to put up with behaviours from both that are off the wall:
* My sister-in-law had a grade 2 student that was acting out. She kept her after class to talk to her at the start of lunch hour. Possibly kept her for 5 minutes. The girls mom stormed in, said that Libby had no right to keep her kid late at all without written notice. Grabbed her kid, as didn't bring her back that day. Mom complained to the principal, and Libby was required to apologise to the mom.
* I worked for a while in a school where almost none of the kids wanted to be there. Most kids, when push comes to shove recognize that they need an education. They may not like it, but they tolerate it. Add to the social group, and school isn't as boring as just being at home. In this school I had one bright young blade come up and inform me that he wasn't coming back. "Why not?" "I want to go to a school where there are otehr kids in my class who want to learn"
* Merging the seriously learning disabled into regular classes is a mistake. A teacher teaching 24 students has about 2 minutes per kid in the course of a class. Typically 1/3 of the kids get it from being shown once. They learn from your talk at the beginning. Another third will learn from a few seconds of 1 on 1 showing an example or two. The final third need several examples and coaching. This gets really difficult if you have a kid who is noisy or otherwise disruptive. It gets difficult if they have such special needs that the regular curriculum doesn't work. If they are quiet, try hard, and don't need a separate curriculum, then merge them in.