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?"
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.
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_...