Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless | Hacker News Reader

Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless

blogs.law.harvard.edu

16 pointscomatose_kid10 comments

The title of this story is a bit misleading. From the Urban Institute website, the Teach for America teachers were "high-achieving college graduates ... [who in North Carolina] tended to have graduated from more selective colleges and universities". So they're essentially comparing the cream of the crop college graduates with a bunch of experienced (but presumably average) teachers. For the claim in the title to be really tested, high achievers with teaching experience need to be evaluated against high achievers with no experience.

Notwithstanding, I suppose the interesting conclusion is that intelligence and talent beats out experience (on average) in teaching. Ultimately the ideal situation would be to have teachers with intelligence AND experience.

That said however, I personally feel that using test scores as the metric for evaluating teachers is a bit dubious.

I just used the title of the original blog post.

What other metric could be used for evaluating teachers?

Derivative of test scores.

A good teacher should make your scores improve. The absolute numbers are much less meaningful.

No, it really depends on the teacher. My precalculus teacher (probably the best math teacher I've ever had) gives progressively harder tests/quizzes as we learn more about each topic. He ignores the textbook and writes the tests himself.

(Incidentally, we've recently been covering derivatives.)

What do we want to measure in students? Skills, creativity, "intelligence"...?

Standardized metrics are themselves dubious when we are dealing with highly chaotic systems (see: combinatorial explosion, etc) with drastically different properties.

I don't know, nor do I think a good metric necessarily exists. Teaching doesn't fit in neatly with the typical production metrics we use in industry, eg. widgets per hour. Those outputs are directly measurable.

But what is the unit of output for a teacher? Test scores could only hope to measure teaching quality indirectly. It'd be like using record sales to assess the quality of a musician... and we'd all agree that Britney and Mariah aren't the best musicians going around.

Since current educational objectives in the U.S.A have shifted from genuine, classroom-centric education to national simplified standardized testing, and schoolteacher skills can only be evaluated on their ability to teach to the test, this result can hardly be surprising. Older, more experienced teachers are distracted by caring about students and schools rather than tests, and do weird things that most of us might recall as great educational experiences that only distract from filling in the right bubbles.

Yes, inexperienced teachers are probably significantly better. Soon, computers with marginally skilled babysitters can take their place. Better yet, since standardized tests are all that matter now, we should just buy computers that can take the standardized tests for the students and be done with it. We'll get simple, easy-to-understand numbers and won't have to trust anyone so unstable as an experienced teacher.

There are somethings we can't measure well, and measuring poorly is only going to deliver a false confidence. I don't propose another metric. I propose we don't measure something we can't.

> Since current educational objectives in the U.S.A have shifted from genuine, classroom-centric education to national simplified standardized testing

The above suggests that schools were ruined by the shift to "let's see if we're getting what we're paying for". While there may have been a time when schools were considerably better than they are today, they weren't significantly better right before the recent testing push. The testing push was a reaction to crappy schools, not the cause.

Note that the charter school movement makes it possible for folks to have "old style" schools for many definitions of "old" Feel free to demonstrate the superiority of your approach.

Just because testing was a reaction to crappy schools doesn't mean that it leads to improvement.

* * *

I don't have time to start my own alternative school and report back to this thread. But I note that

  Brin & Page, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Will Wright

all attended Montessori or Montessori-influenced schools.

I think we might be seeing a bias here.

New teachers care.

In my experience that $80,000/year "experienced" unionized public school teacher stopped caring about teaching before I was born.[1]

[1] Yes I know that this is a gross generalization and that there are very good teachers that educated and inspire throughout their careers simply because thats the kind of people they are. They are rare. Thats why we remember them so fondly.

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