Building a Better Teacher (2010)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
She now runs a non-profit educational news network called Chalkbeat: https://www.chalkbeat.com/
She's pretty smart regarding journalism and media stuff generally so if you're working on something related shoot me an email (in profile) and I'll try to make an intro if it seems interesting.
http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2013-14/School_Quali... http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2014-15/School_Quali... http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2015-16/School_Quali...
> Yet so far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning.
Yet, I imagine you'd find it odd to suggest that better programmers shouldn't be better compensated in some sense.
I think merit pay (or just higher pay) and high demands are too different things, and the latter often destroys the benefit of the former. I recall reading an article where teachers were measured on many different axes with insane expectations. I imagine that works about as well as micromanaging a programmer's time.
I don't know how the Equity Project was ran, exactly, but it's trivial to mess that kind of thing up. Compensation is absolutely relevant to teacher quality: it has to be. Pay and other factors (respect, benefits) influence how people choose their profession, do they not? So it will influence who becomes a teacher, so if we posit that teachers matter, this will have an effect. A study is not required here.
And as I've noted in my other post, this didn't seem widespread or covered well. Having one small program esoterically targeting some teachers and giving them more money a large shift does not make. I'm not going to become a teacher all of a sudden because one small program shows up that could theoretically offer someone money anymore than I'll become a professional StarCraft player because a small city in Canada is experimenting with basic income.
They don't even require rudimentary training or experience with teaching to apply, nor even a plausibly applicable major.
I think merit pay (or just higher pay) and high demands are too different things, and the latter often destroys the benefit of the former
I have to respectfully disagree, and I don't think you truly believe that given your 2nd to last paragraph. Following the logic, more money -> more competition for that employer -> employer can have greater selectivity in hiring people who can handle higher demands. Also, TEP is largely if not entirely exempt from lengthy union due process in dismissing underperforming teachers.
This was as good a lab experiment as you'll get in educational research, and the empirical data simply was not positive. There is legitimate discussion to be had about potentially improving the model - there are even legitimate arguments NOT to improve the model but run it on its own merits for moral reasons if people like it - but we cannot use a data-driven philosophy and then let our eagerness to disprove the null hypothesis lead us to ignore the data point.
Any brave soul to provide a tl;dr? I understand that some journalists love to write but for the love of God, if you have a point to make, make it! No need to disguise it as a life story full of characters.
Speaking with her, it sounds like teaching theory and technique has as much churn and reinventing the wheel as software engineering. Everything old is new again, eternally. Particularly with her students, in an economically depressed, rural area, no amount of teaching skills can offset disinterested parents, dysfunctional family life, hunger, and poverty. At least the poor buggers get breakfast and lunch provided through the federal free and reduced lunch programs; for a staggering number of her kids, those are the only hot meals they get regularly.
Surely the endgame is that an effective teacher can, despite all of this, still attempt to engage with the student and engender some kind of interest in learning the basic skills that they need to survive in the adult world? Maybe every student won't get it but the better that the teacher is at doing this, the better results they will have, with any population.. if this skill set is not natural then teaching the teachers to develop these skills will in turn increase their effectiveness?
Identifying the skill set is the difficult part, I think .. and the churn in teaching theory is in part because nobody really is able to define what is successful or not and an election cycle is far shorter than the time needed to prove any particular method.
Well, not teaching skills alone. But what about teaching skills + experience + passion + willingness to be a social worker and defacto parent? Maybe teachers who have all these qualities can 'offset disinterested parents, dysfunctional family life, hunger, and poverty'?
Imagine a teacher who discovers that a student is going hungry and visits the parent at home to explain in person why it vital for the long-term outlook of the student that the student not go hungry. In addition: (a) The teacher tries to understand the root case of the problem - is the parent on drugs, or has to work 3 jobs, or has an abusive husband? (b) The teacher investigates government or charity services that might have an impact on the problem. (c) The teacher visits the student's household regularly and tries various ways to motivate the parent to correct the problem. (d) The teacher contacts other members of the student's family like aunts, uncles, grandparents and elder siblings to explain the problem and try to get them engaged. (e) The teacher celebrates any academic success of the student with all members of the family and links this success to their efforts. (f) The teacher gives the student her phone number and tells the student to call with any questions about the homework - this gives the teacher the opportunity to find out in real-time if the student is going hungry at home, giving a deeper understanding of extent of the problem and perhaps allowing the teacher to tackle the problem in real-time.
Can such a teacher overcome the effects of poverty?
Here is a summary of a few studies as reported in Teaching as Leadership [1]:
"The schools that are highly effective produce results that almost entirely overcome the effects of student background" [2]
"Having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap" [3]
"Differences in this magnitude -- 50 percentile points in just three years -- are stunning. For an individual child, it means the difference between a 'remedial' label and placement in the accelerated or even gifted track. And the difference between entry into a selective college and a lifetime of low-paying, menial work". [4]
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achie....
[2] Marzano, R. J. What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD, 2003, p. 7
[3] Kane, T., Gordon, R. and Staiger, D. Identifying Effective Teachers Useing Performance on the Job Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2004, p. 8
[4] Peske, H. and Haycock, K. Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Short-Changed on Teacher Quality: A Report and Recommendations by the Education Trust. Washington, D.C.: Education Trust, 2006, p. 11
Your mother is clearer fighting an uphill battle, and wish her well. Yes, if you have the parents behind you everything becomes a lot easier.
The US spends more per primary age pupil than all but a few countries (Switzerland, Norway & Austria, I believe) and yet our educational results continue to get worse. I see no reason for optimism that this will change, and this article told me nothing to make me change that outlook.
School should be for socializing, working through problems together, study groups and tutoring!!
There are a lot of ideas on this and there have been for a long long time (look up philosopher John Dewey or Paulo Freire) but they still remain mostly on the fringe.
> As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t.
The idea that only a select group of individuals possessing a certain voodoo are capable of performing a certain task effectively is very pervasive. It also kills the desire to work on one's approaches, learn new things, and otherwise develop skill. I would say it should be considered harmful, whether we're talking about teachers or programmers...
> They decided that rather than buy talent, they would try to build it.
It's fairly rare to see anyone actually bother building talent. The expectation generally is that the person is either ready or useless.
> Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year.
This seems is not congruent with what I've been reading about teaching in the past few years: that student outcomes have mostly to do with the student's aptitude, and that teachers have a limited effect[1].
Intuitively, I feel that teachers (and other environmental factors) /should/ be able to have a large effect, and anecdotes about highly influential educators abound, yet other studies seem to make teachers look close to irrelevant compared to IQ.
Of course, these things are kind of related. The belief in the idea that you can train teachers implies that you should be able to train students.
> Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year.
Haven't heard about this, either. Both myself and people I talk to continue to perceive teaching as a low paying profession. Given that the article is from 2010, perhaps those programs have died out by now.
Awarding high salaries only to amazing teachers may not be terribly productive, though, especially if the measure is not reliable and people don't feel confident about it. Measuring teachers too much or too strictly causes all sorts of problems[2]. But I could scarcely imagine if teaching was overall perceived as a respected profession with a high salary ceiling and decent autonomy that it wouldn't have a large community of people to work out something similar to Uncommon Schools. Correct incentives absolutely align people to solve problems.
A lot of the techniques seem like they could have more general application as communication skills. Communication and social skills are still one of those things that are perceived as "voodoo" and haven't been documented terribly well.
> Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it.
This point is one of the reasons I could never agree with the idea that if a person understands something, they can teach it. Those are just not the same thing and being able to teach is its own skill.
[1]: https://rogertitcombelearningmatters.wordpress.com/2015/01/0...
[2]: https://disidealist.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/im-not-an-outst...