"There's no reason only poor people should have the experience" - TED video of Bill Gates
ted.com
ted.com
This is a statement of fact, not opinion of what ought to be. Part of what Gates (and others) are saying, I think, is that to have a better functioning society, we need to increase the value society puts on teaching.
If we provide the educational opportunity that Bill Gates, John Resig, or Larry Page got to every child in America, we will all be a lot better off.
That being said, I've discussed this with my friends many times and I've gradually been convinced that more than anything - parents' involvement in their education was/is vitally important. A couple of them made it out of the ghetto.
Why Teachers Hate Parents, Time Magazine
"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."
"Perhaps the most complicated part of the conversation—beyond all the issues of race and class and culture, the growing pressures to succeed and arguments over how success should be defined—is the problem of memory. When they meet in that conference, parent and teacher bring their own school experiences with them—what went right and wrong, what they missed. They are determined for it to be different for the child they both care about. They go into that first-grade room and sit in the small chairs and can easily be small again themselves. It is so tempting to use the child's prospects to address their own regrets. So teachers learn to choose their words with care and hope that they can build a partnership with parents that works to everyone's advantage and comes at no one's expense. And parents over time may realize that when it comes to their children, they still have much to learn. "I think that we love our children so much that they make us a little loony at times," says Arch Montgomery, head of the Asheville School in North Carolina. He winces at parents who treat their child as a cocktail-party trophy or a vanity sticker for the window of their SUV, but he also understands their behavior. "I think most parents desperately want to do what is right for their kids. This does not bring out the better angels of our natures, but it is understandable, and it is forgivable."
http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&...
And there are a lot of reasons other than financial, that people choose to become teachers.
From my observations on decent school systems (I haven't seen the TED speech yet), the biggest feature of schoolteachers is complacency. It's not that they aren't intelligent, it's that they aren't ambitious. People go into teaching in order to have a safe, comfortable, predictable career path. And in many cases that's what it is, and the result is that teachers wind up living in a different reality.
An important point is that the teachers in the 100k range have been teachers for 30 years. Starting salaries are much different.
And yes, starting salaries are much lower-- as they are for most graduates in most other industries.
I wasn't arguing that being a teacher is going to get you rich. But at least in NY, one makes enough to live comfortably. If you can handle dealing with kids on a daily basis, it isn't a bad career choice at all. Of course, NY State's public schools have a good reputation.
To begin, multiply teacher salaries by (12 months/year)/(9 months worked). Throw in the value of 3 consecutive months of vacation, great health plan, defined-benefit pensions (the pension plans that will soon bankrupt most states), and "can't get fired" job security. You'll find that teachers are paid quite nicely.
Teaching has a couple of advantages:
- The entry requirements are not that high.
- The degree program is not that demanding.
- There is always employment (compare that with journalism or pharmacology in some countries).
- There is a huge shortage of teachers in 1st world countries. For immigration to some countries a teaching degree can count more than an engineering degree.
- In some countries there are fairly long (paid) holidays for teachers.
- There are a lot of half day (08h00-14h00) positions available. This is especially important for someone with children. - There are generally a lot of bursaries available to fund study and distance study is also a good option.
- Some countries allow abridging studies: a person with another degree can work as a teacher while doing a 1 to 2 year diploma that will make them a fully qualified teacher.
One thing I think might help is to have teachers observe each other. I taught a bit in grad school and would have liked to observe some of the other teachers who were really good and to have them observe me and give me suggestions.
I associate with a nature school that runs weekly programs for home schooled kids (the kids come one or two full school days a week). The instructors and helpers interact with all the kids throughout the year (they break into groups, but change it up a lot). During prep time they will talk with each other about the individual kids - where they think they are at and what they can do to help the kids grow. I've been really impressed and was thrilled with the adult programs I have done with them. The instructors aren't paid very much either, they are passionate about it though. And they have helpers who are doing it for free (some are actually paying a little for it as part of an apprenticeship program).
1) Past Performance (presumably, whether the teacher raised his students' test scores the year before, although it's not defined)
2) Whether or not the teacher majored in math
3) Whether or not the teacher participated in TFA
4) Whether or not the teacher has a Master's in Education
The best predictor is #1, which just means that the best predictor of whether a teacher is good at raising test scores is to see if they were good at that last year too. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.
On teachers, Gates says that after 3 years, a teachers' performance generally doesn't change.
He put up a graph of what influences teachers' performance. By far the greatest effect came from 'past performance,' distantly followed by a having a math degree (for math teachers), and Teach for America experience. Almost negligible came the last item, 'having a masters degree.'
Next, Gates looked at the incentive structure within schools -- it's primarily seniority based, with a bonus if someone has a master's degree.
He noted that good teachers leave the system at a rate slightly higher than that of bad teachers.
He contrasted charter schools such as KIPP (http://www.kipp.org/), where the school evaluates teachers on their performance -- with the traditional model.
The traditional model contractually limits how schools can evaluate their teachers, for example, a principal is contractually not permitted to sit in on a teacher's class more than a few times a year (sometimes even once per year), and even those times, the principal must provide advance notice. Gates compared this to running a factory with some workers "making crap" but the management being banned from observing them without prior notice, so that the workers "might actually try and fool you into thinking we're doing a good job in that one brief moment."
Gates next noted that even a teacher wanted to improve -- can't. New York, for example, passed a law banning schools using teacher improvement data to determine tenure.
Gates closed noting his optimism, praising the testing data for revealing something. He posited the idea of using digital video to record all public school classrooms to give teachers the opportunity to review their work and consult with each other to improve. Gates said: "By thinking of this as a personnel system we can do it much better."
He mentioned _Work Hard, Be Nice_, a book about KIPP: http://www.amazon.com/Work-Hard-Be-Nice-Promising/dp/1565125... Gates said he sent everyone at the TED talk a free copy.
He finished by saying he thought "education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have." He mentioned the House-version of stimulus bill had funding for "these data systems," but the Senate version took that out, because "there are people threatened by these things." He reiterated his optimism, however, saying that people were beginning to recognize the importance of education.
I think you must mean predicts. I hope Gates didn't say influences.
Gates used the word explain. At about 12:50, he said "This chart takes four different factors and asks how much do they they explain teaching quality?"
Here is a very good article by Gladwell comparing the difficulty in finding good teachers to that of choosing NFL quarterbacks:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_...
Is philanthropy really the only way?
Or we could just go with Bill Gates for President in 2016.
Want to figure out which teachers are the best ones? Pay for student performance. The market will sort everything else out. You don't have to publish standards of what makes a good teacher, heck you don't even have to make pursuit of good teachers a defined goal, any more than you need to pass a law saying "Make sure you hire those programmers who are ten times as effective as the other ones."
(I know there is one glaring problem here, namely that a politically powerful lobby considers that solution anathema, but it would work.)
More than one, really. State schools in the UK are incentivised in a way similar to this.
What it results in is gaming of the performance measures.
For example, pupils are steered into softer subjects where results are easier to attain. Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade left to their own devices.
Push that down to the per-teacher level and good teachers would not want to work with difficult pupils, since they will get poor results and less pay. "So make the pay conditional on improvement rather than absolute attainment". OK, in which case you've just made an incentive for children to be labeled as behaviourally difficult and academically poor so that they can be improved more.
Want to get better teachers? Pump more damn money in. Get good managers and get good quality people teaching. Make it a profession people aspire to work in once more.
The thing is, you'll have to keep it up for about a generation (with not much to show for it), to flush the system through. Good luck with that politically.
Markets are not a panacea. Particularly so with subjective measures.
Education (in the broader sense of what we want to achieve) is subjective - even academic results are more subjective than one might think - how many mathematics qualifications is a history qualification of the same level 'worth'?
>> Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade left to their own devices. >>
I could think of worse outcomes than public schools discovering triage. Academic triage, like medical triage, would probably result in more survivors. I mean, we're certainly not effectively educating the highest risk students now: if making that explicit saves education for the average folks who share the same classrooms, well, that is a price I'm willing to pay.
The other option is that you monitor students for achievement. Again, it's hard. Is that based on money? Personal student happiness? Again, depending on what the metric is, teachers will game it. Go for money and English teachers will start encouraging students to do something more worthwhile than write and study English for a living. If you make it "how many students get a college degree" then you're diluting the college pool further and you're neglecting students who're interested in vocational school and in working on their own rather than continuing education.
The best solution is to remove metric and go by the opinions of experienced people. Good administrators know good teachers when they see them. Good teachers always go by their own formula. If the system effectively removes restriction amongst teachers, then you'll see an increase in student performance, and suddenly paying teachers more is worth it. The problem is that teaching is an act of creativity; it's an art as much as anything is. Formula kills teaching. The minute you make something mandatory it's dead to kids. The problem is, formula feels safer, but it never works.
If you choose to reward achievement, you have to measure achievement. If achievement is measured by standardized testing, then people will game the metrics. However, if the market chooses the testing procedures, it will reward metrics which are harder to game. This would take several iterations (read: many years) to stabilize, but it should converge on some sort of solution.
I think the fundamental problem here is forcing the market to not become complacent. This sort of thing needs to be done like a genetic algorithm. Every state tries a different testing procedure and then tests cross-pollinate and evolve under the pressure of market forces. There would need to be some way to reward experimentation as well, so that we don't wind up with one homogenized solution that stops progressing; there would need to be "random mutations".
How would you achieve this?
> This would take several iterations (read: many years) to stabilize, but it should converge on some sort of solution.
What makes you think this? Markets aren't immune to fashion and fad. We don't see stable financial markets, why should we see stable markets in education?
If you want to see a market in action, look at TV networks. The big networks move farther and farther away from actual reporting. They go for lowest-common-denominator. The channels that do produce great pieces of TV either do it only sporadically, or they're pay-for channels that attract a more sophisticated audience. Even then, the show that critics call the greatest show in history - The Wire - had to fight to get its last season aired. It had an extremely small viewing audience.
However, if the market chooses the testing procedures, it will reward metrics which are harder to game.
Which metrics possibly exist that can't be gamed? The minute you have any metric, you're creating a "good" and a "bad" scale, and that means that people can cram towards the good as much as possible.
Of course, campaign finance distorts the incentives, which is why it needs to be reformed.
Yes, the best teachers I had may have increased my standardized test scores some as a side effect, but it would be an insult to them if that's why I admired them so much as teachers.
Test prep can be done in a factory, but not education.
Dont know whats the big deal over simple mosquitoes !
The question to this forum is, what technology is needed to help make great teachers? To Tim O'Reilly's slogan, this is clearly the stuff that matters.
As for the practical consequences, if there is a congruency between the words and how they are expressed (body language, tone, etc.), the message tends to land a little heavier.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25afr...
I know, most people will think mosquitoes aint important and have no feelings. That they are like machines.
Personally, when I look at the behaviour of mosquitoes, they have a lot in common with me and you. So I would prefer to leave them alone and let them decide on their own where to go. What if some more complex animal then humans comes along and decides "Oh, humans are so simple. We can just treat them like stones or wood". Would we agree?
I devote my resources to the sentient first.