Most Likely To Succeed

Malcolm Gladwell takes on the teaching issue. I basically agree with a lot of the things he says about teacher sand teaching, but it is unlikely there will be any radical reform because the Teacher's union is too strong.  I think teachers ought to become more professionalized as they progress with additional pay to keep the best and brightest around. Here's what Gladwell has to say in a piece from The New Yorker:

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.

It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

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.

Comments

[Edward Hathway]

Australia is debating performance based pay for teachers and similar matters. The idea is good of course, but difficult to do successfully. I think the problem might be that some teachers will get a good short term return on their efforts, but others might raise their students learning potential in the long run, without having instant effects in the year in which they teach the students. It would certainly be disconcerting for some to try and create future educated adults and not be recognised, whilst others successfully teach to the tests (like in Japanese and Korean high schools perhaps) and yet fail to make a lasting impression. It's a bit like most corporate bonus systems - they reward short term profit decisions, which are sometimes at the expense of (or at least do not contribute to) long term success. Perhaps this type of grading could be used best to identify the extremes of performance, rather than reward (or punish) all teachers. It certainly sounds like there are some extremes to be exposed.