How to Overhaul US education system
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Here's something I didn't know. If you've seen Waiting for Superman you'll recall that when Rhee proposed contract changes to pay teachers more as long as they would allow bad teachers to be fired, the teachers' union blocked the proposal from even coming to a vote. (How evil is that?) But they did eventually get one, and here is what I learned:
In truth, when the union finally allowed them to vote, the teachers passed it overwhelmingly, by 80% to 20%
That's a really good sign.
Union officials place priority on the organization, and not the individual.
The first is why the teachers that are bad are actually bad. I would be interested in what would happen if the lowest paying teachers were forced to addend additional training. Perhaps all they need is a refresher. It is also possible that they have become disillusioned with what they once thought was a great way to make an effect on children's lives. I could very well imagine this happening to me were I to become a teacher.
The other is how they are measuring teacher performance. The only way I have seen this happen is though standardized tests. I do not believe that these actually measure much. The best teachers I have had have not taught me based on what was on the test, which would have meant spoon-feeding me facts and telling me to memorize them, but rather what they felt was important, which often included explaining how I could find the information on my own if I even needed.
I suspect the same goes for lawyers, law programs, and their bar exams, engineers, engineering programs, and their EIT exams, etc. Why shouldn't kids learn to play by the same rules their parents do? Indeed, isn't that what kids want to do?
Even then, there are plenty of people whose MCAT scores were high enough to get them into medical school who ended up being terrible doctors, just as there are plenty of people who barely got into med school who ended up being terrific doctors. I can't cite any studies, but I imagine that just like anything else the variability within a score band is just as much as the variability between score bands.
(Similarly: plenty of bad lawyers have passed the bar, just as plenty of good lawyers failed it before they passed. There's enough variability between the Bar exams of different states to make this possible. I suspect the same is true about engineering programs as well).
It may just be that the MCAT is a good indicator of one's ability to become a doctor. Med school admissions are so competitive right now that these schools are able to be pretty selective about who they admit.
It may be that these tests were designed at least in part by the professionals in those respective fields to measure knowledge and competencies that directly relate to the domains in question.
More to the point, this is a specious comparison because the exams you cite are professional vocational exams which correspond to a specific career path/domain.
There's no such vocational test that will adequately cover every child, nor do we even have philosophical agreement about the skills necessary to live a good life, much less the relative importance of such skills, and even if we did, there are so many different ways that things like literacy and numeracy manifest that it'd be downright impossible to construct a test that can even come close to measuring it.
The tests you cite are tests that limit who can practice in a given profession, and while they're not perfect, I'll concede their usefulness. More importantly, they're on an individual basis. There'll definitely be some false-positives (people who are good at taking tests but poor at performing the basic skills necessary for competency) and false-negatives, but those can be corrected.
It's a whole different ball-game when you're talking about a non-vocational test, particularly one aimed at people who are not yet adults and who have not yet chosen a particular career path.
The USMLE exams (Step I: basic science, Step IICK: clinical knowledge, Step IICS: clinical skills, and Step III: clinical problem solving) are more like the bar exams.
> this is a specious comparison because the exams you cite are professional vocational exams which correspond to a specific career path/domain.
Well, you're throwing in the MCAT, which is an aptitude test based on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, more like the GRE than the USMLE or bar exams.
> there are so many different ways that things like literacy and numeracy manifest
Literacy and numeracy can't be measured? You sure you want to hang your hat on that?
Look, to quote Allah, I mean, pg, himself, (http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html)
> To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.
We can easily modify this paragraph to most if not all domains and industries. I leave as an exercise to the reader to modify it for "improving education".
Do you have any evidence to support this notion at all? Or is thus just some religious notion that we're supposed to take on faith?
It's harder to identify what makes an teacher ineffective, and harder still to identify what makes an effective teacher.
Even harder still when lesson plans are mandated from up top and are seen as things to "deliver" (like a pizza, or a newspaper). I worked in a school district in which some of my lesson plans were written for me (down to the "Spend 5 minutes on this, 8 minutes on that" level), and was evaluated (on those days) based on my ability to comply with them to the letter. One of the comments I received on an evaluation was "We were hoping you'd show more creativity in your teaching" of a lesson that was assessed on how well I followed a script and how well I got students to follow the script.
Frankly, I think the thing that will truly reform education is an entire change in mindset away from students "doing well on tests" and toward students doing good and interesting and challenging work.
That said, your notion of attending professional development is good not only for struggling teachers, but for everyone. It's stupid to expect teachers to improve if the only thing we give them is a carrot or a stick.
Everyone always talks about how overwhelmingly complicated these problems are. No doubt that's true, especially if you accept certain premises. But there are also some no-brainers. The ideas that teachers get jobs for life, you can't fire a teacher for underperforming, and layoffs proceed in order of seniority are mind-bogglingly stupid and evil (as Rhee writes, running the schools "for the benefit of the adults in the system, not for the benefit of the kids"). No one can tell me this hasn't had devastating effects.
If the best we can do right now is apply crude and mediocre metrics (like standardized tests) to stanch the social hemhorrage that is the failure of our public school system, we'd better do it. Real education, the kind that prepares whole human beings to do great things with their lives, is absolutely what we should shoot for; anyone working as an educator ought to have that in mind at all times. Nevertheless, a system that produces trained rats is not as evil as one that turns out prison fodder.
Under what circumstance are you willing to buy a poorly made car? After all, maybe the workers could become better given additional retraining, etc.
> The other is how they are measuring teacher performance.
Feel free to provide a better measurement scheme. Until then, why should we prefer nothing?
In practice, we find that the "need better measurement" folk are actually unwilling to accept any measurement scheme. Yes, even one of their own devising.
Unfortunately, I also have to say that our kids got their best years of education thus far in New Orleans private schools, and the private schools aren't ranked in psk12.com stats. The best indicators I've found for private schools in cities have been word of mouth. Anyone have a more systematic resource?
American education system won't improve until American kids get off their asses and study hard.
All these movies and articles about fighting w/ teachers unions aren't the real issue. Many of those "bad" teachers would be more motivated if they didn't have to babysit lazy brats all day and if they earned a decent wage.
Charter schools mostly work because they siphon off the most motivated kids and teachers. I am skeptical that they help the system as a whole. Maybe they raise test scores but mostly by helping the most enthusiastic kids get higher scores, not helping the average non-charter kid get higher scores.
btw, i am an american who has spent 6 years living in both(South Asia and East Asia), where kids do get off their asses and they don't have complex charter/teacher motivation/reorganization schemes. Why do kids study so hard there? Because there parents beat it into their skulls that they will be dirt-poor farmers unless they get an education.
Not really. At least in the university programs I know about, the biggest problem is that teaching sucks because the administration doesn't care about instructional quality at all. That's why you end up with professors who literally can't teach: their value to the organization comes from the grant money they pull in, not their ability or interest in teaching.
Given how wrong you are about the problems of university level instruction, I'm not sure whether to trust your claims about primary and secondary education.