Bill Gates On What Business Can Teach Schools 272
Hugh Pickens writes "Most workplaces build a system to evaluate worker performance, provide feedback that yields information employees can use to improve, and then hold employees accountable for results. However, Bill and Melinda Gates write that in the field of education, we really don't know very much at all about what makes someone an effective teacher. 'We have all known terrific teachers,' write the Gates. 'But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding.' For the last several years, the Gates Foundation has been working with more than 3,000 teachers on a large research project called Measures of Effective Teaching to get a better sense of what makes teaching work (PDF) so that school districts can start to hire, train and promote based on meaningful standards. 'Once the MET research is completed, we hope that school districts will work with teachers and their unions to create fair and reliable evaluations that reward teachers who are effective and identify and help those who need to improve. When that happens, we believe that districts will be on the cusp of providing every student with an effective teacher, in every class, every year.'"
Apples and Oranges (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that we don't know HOW to evaluate teachers, it's that you have to cut through miles of bullshit from teachers unions, state employee unions, and assorted political allies to actually DO IT and USE IT for anything. If you think that unions are about to negotiate away things like teacher seniority, tenure, automatic raises, etc. then you're high. They protect their own, and they have the emotional political/public appeal of the underpaid noble teacher to use if they need to (even though teachers are actually usually very WELL paid).
There are also real world issues that no one wants to talk about that effect teacher performance at the best and worst schools. Poor schools tend to be in shitty neighborhoods where teachers don't want to work, for example. Improving a school in a shitty neighborhood isn't as simple as "We need to get good teachers." You're NOT going to get the good teachers because the good teachers would be fucking crazy to teach at Gangbanger High when they could make more money and put up with less threats of physical violence if they go to the suburbs and teach at Whitey McRichkid High. So you're stuck with the worst teachers, the one's who had no choice but to come there. School stays shitty, vicious cycle continues.
Breaking that cycle requires real money to recruit better teachers, and the shitty schools usually have the LEAST money. If you want to get rid of the bad teachers in a crappy school, what are you going to do, fire everyone? Where are you going to get replacements? Some crappy schools are having to recruit overseas in places like the Philippines just to find teachers as it is.
This is approaching the problem the wrong way. In an ideal world, it would be great to evaluate teachers and pay/promote/fire based on performance. But in the real world, it doesn't work that way.
Re:Teachers already have performance reviews (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Teachers already have performance reviews (Score:5, Insightful)
They're called Parent-Teacher Conferences.
That was effective back when parents were interested in making their kids knuckle down and accomplish something in school. But that's becoming less and less common. Instead, we have parents showing up to yell at the teacher for not giving their idiot slacker offspring better grades even though the urchin does none of the work required to earn the grades.
No, I think this effort by the Gates foundation is a noble one. We really do need to come up with a realistic way to evaluate our entire educational system (not just the effectiveness of teachers). We need a way we can identify the real faults in our educational system.
Realistically, I don't hold out much hope that the territorialism and politics that are pervasive in our educational system can be overcome. So I'm not sure how effective this drive will be at affecting change. But the goal itself is noble.
That's an easy one (Score:2, Insightful)
Bill Gates On What Business Can Teach Schools
1) patent
2) lawsuit
3) profit!
Re:Teachers already have performance reviews (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Teachers already have performance reviews (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. Because poor people or people living in bad school districts ALWAYS have the option of doing that.
Even if true, how is that different from now?
Re:Not again.... (Score:2, Insightful)
How many times have people tried this? How many different answers do we need anyway?
Many, and the teacher unions have shot it down every time. Good teachers can not be rewarded and bad teachers can not be punished. The only reward is for those who stay around the longest.
Re:Apples and Oranges (Score:4, Insightful)
Make them compete.
With WHAT? The problem is that poor schools already can't compete even with regulatory pressure to help them. They need MONEY. If they had money, they wouldn't have the problem they are having. The poorer neighborhoods are already at huge disadvantage to Elrous' "Whitey McRichkid" schools. If they have to 'compete' on a flat playing field, exactly what would they bring to the table?
Elements of a good teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Gives a shit.
2) Knows their shit.
3) Low tolerance for shit.
Or, more to the point, the elements of a bad teacher:
1) Wants to expend the least amount of effort to collect a paycheck.
2) Has a head full of stupid ideas like: these kids probably aren't doing drugs or bullying each other. The stupid ones will always be stupid and the smart ones will always be smart no matter what I do. Cheerleaders wouldn't lie to me. I don't have to know my subject to teach it well, I can just read the book as I go. Disagreeing with me means the answer is incorrect, even if it is clearly an opinion-seeking question. The correct remedy to low grades is MORE HOMEWORK! Rote memorization of boring facts is a great way to get young minds interested in higher learning. etc.
3) Refuses to adequately punish the trouble-makers or under-performers, to the detriment of the rest of the class.
While we are at it, we should more intelligently align the curricula with age groups, as suggested by Piaget [wikipedia.org] (e.g. young kids should study foreign languages rather than math, because the brain is far more capable of learning language when young, and will be able to pick up basic math very quickly when a bit older).
Oh, and the phrase "zero tolerance policy" usually means "zero thought put into proper enforcement or deciding what constitutes infringement" which means "zero respect for authority learned at an early age."
Ok I'm done.
Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming) (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when Mazda joined with Ford to make cars in the US they had a problem. Ford was building all the parts to spec but the transmissions didn't run as nice as the Japanese built ones. Then Ford ripped apart some Japanese engines and found the parts were made to MUCH tighter tolerances than the specs called for. This was because of Deming's Quality program he taught the Japanese. Basically it is never stop improving quality. Even when you are within specs keep getting better because quality will improve and your customers will be happier.
This is what needs to happen in education. It's not setting a standard and making sure teachers meet it. It is setting up a culture of excellence and pursuit of perfection even knowing it is unobtainable.
Re:Not again.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Go to any random business school and take a look at their various case studies on managers. It's usually quite difficult to find any common thread in any of them, other than "this guy's company was successful, therefore what he did is the right way to do it." Of course, in every one of those studies, the manager did things differently than the other managers. The upshot of it is that the best managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and are successful, while the worst managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and aren't successful
In short, why does Bill Gates think business can help evaluate teachers (leaders of students) when business isn't even very good at evaluating their own managers (leaders of corporations)?
Re:Apples and Oranges (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a republican/libertarian that wants to remove government regulation of public schools.
The stated purpose is to end the "high pay" and raises of teachers.
The high pay of teachers.
Think about that. He doesn't want better teachers. He doesn't want poor schools to do better. The entire goal he's going for, in the grand sum of two sentences, is to pay teachers even less than what they're paid now.
This is why we need unions. This is why teachers unions fight this sort of thing. This is a roadblock to progress.
Re:Elements of a good teacher (Score:2, Insightful)
Punishing should only be for trouble-makers. Punishment is a deterrent against unwanted behaviour. Punishing under-performers generally makes them perform worse, because it associates punishment with the subject being taught. Just my opinion though, feel free to disagree, I don't have a large sample-size.