Bill Gates On What Business Can Teach Schools

Hugh Pickens writes "Most workplaces build a system to evaluate worker performance, provide feedback that yields information employees can use to improve, and then hold employees accountable for results. However, Bill and Melinda Gates write that in the field of education, we really don't know very much at all about what makes someone an effective teacher. 'We have all known terrific teachers,' write the Gates. 'But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding.' For the last several years, the Gates Foundation has been working with more than 3,000 teachers on a large research project called Measures of Effective Teaching to get a better sense of what makes teaching work (PDF) so that school districts can start to hire, train and promote based on meaningful standards. 'Once the MET research is completed, we hope that school districts will work with teachers and their unions to create fair and reliable evaluations that reward teachers who are effective and identify and help those who need to improve. When that happens, we believe that districts will be on the cusp of providing every student with an effective teacher, in every class, every year.'"

Re:Apples and Oranges

[AnonGCB]

Wish I had mod points.

Remove government regulation public schools, make them have to compete, and we'd see the end of teachers unions that force high pay and automatic raises, tenure, etc.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[grasshoppa]

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

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

Just some things to think about.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[bbasgen]

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

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Pumpkin Tuna]

A lot of what you say makes sense, but you need to rethink the first paragraph. What about all those states, primarily in the South, that have toothless unions or no unions at all?

I'm in education and I agree that we don't have a good evaluation system. I also agree that unions push too hard against real evaluation systems. But I won't go as far as saying that we know how to evaluate teachers. Gates, Arnie Duncan and their ilk would have us pretty much use test scores. That's not a realistic measure of teacher ability. We need real assessments that include input from multiple administrators, as well as highly rated teachers and even students. This, combined with test scores might give us a better picture of which teachers are good, which need help, and which need a new job.

But the real problem is that if we could snap our fingers and fire all the idiots tomorrow, we don't have anything better to replace them with. That's where your "recruit better teachers" idea is right on. We need to look at Finland, where most people who apply to ed schools can't don't cut it. They accept only the best, train them well, pay them well, and then let them do their thing without a lot of meddling. It works.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[tbannist]

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

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

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

A teacher's work yields results much later

[Hentes]

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

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

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

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