The magic bullet for raising tests scores is….constant assessment? Tracking the progress of individual students? Parental involvement? All of the above? An AP story quotes Colorado educators who have discovered — mirabile dictu! – there is no single magic bullet.
Apropos of that, the best post I’ve read this week comes from Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, who asks on the Gadfly, “Are we sure that “improving teacher quality” is the panacea that so many have suggested? Is it possible that our current fascination with ‘human capital development’ is misguided? That both presidential campaigns’ embrace of this issue is ill-considered?”
Yes, the research is quite clear that the quality of a student’s teacher has a greater impact on that student’s achievement than anything else that schools can control. It’s also clear that low-income and minority children are much less likely to be taught by “high quality teachers” (however defined) than are affluent and white children. So reformers make the jump: If we could just fill every classroom with society’s “best and brightest,” we’d have our education problems licked. Or, they continue, if we could just get our most talented teachers to serve in our neediest schools, we’d have our achievement gap beat.
The problem obviously, is that we’re unlikley to fill every classroom with the best and the brightest–the numbers are simply too great–and other favored solutions like merit pay are equally unlikely to work at scale. “Shouldn’t we be thinking about how to make average teachers more effective, too, and augmenting them via technology and other stratagems, rather than putting all our eggs in the “superstar teacher” basket?” asks Petrilli.
Petrilli’s measured and thoughtful post offers a useful roadmap. As Donald Rumsfeld did not say, “You go to school with the teachers you have. Not the teachers you wish you had.”
Forgive the inelegant analogy, but raising student achievement may not be a disease we’re going to cure, but rather a chronic condition we can manage with a cocktail of interventions and strategies. One of those strategies ought to be a national core curriculum and common standards. It would certainly be a great help (not a magic bullet) in improving teacher quality, since it would enable teachers and staff developers on improving the craft of teaching–focus on the “how” of teaching, instead of what to teach.
More: Joanne Jacobs agrees with Petrilli on the relative lack of superstar teachers, but has questions about the efficacy of technology
Robert,
You wrote,
Petrilli’s measured and thoughtful post offers a useful roadmap. As Donald Rumsfeld did not say, “You go to school with the teachers you have. Not the teachers you wish you had.”
I wish I had said that.
When I began teaching, we essentially had the “feed the chickens” approach. Teachers just threw the information out, and the students chose whether or not to learn. To their credit, NCLB supporters have killed that paradigm and have challenged us to create something completely new. In the real world, however, teachers continue to teach mostly the way they are taught. And given human nature, that will continue for the foreseeable future.
Liberals often take the easy way out, challenging the “best and the brightest” through high “expectations” and professional development in differientiated instruction to do “whatever it takes” and perform miracles just like in the movies. That way we can avoid tough conversations about race, class, and parenting. As William Julius Wilson says, in terms of race, we are all jockeying for “innocence.” If poor kids fail due to the benign racism of low expectations of teachers, then the market forces that worsened the problems of economic and social segregation, commercialism, and lousy parents are all innocent.
Think of all the watch dogs that don’t bark. Young teachers are brainwashed into believing that better classroom management and engaging instruction will make discipline problems disappear, and those solutions are virtually free. The Core Knowledge blog and the AFT American Educator are about the only two sources of common sense. As Mike wrote, we aren’t going to find and train three million “great” teachers. But under the rules of the game, the only way for an inner city secondary teacher to be effective in a neighborhood school is to be a great teacher. We must simplify and create a realistic situation where it just takes your “average” good teacher doing their job well in a sustainable manner to be an effective teacher.
We in education have to stop “laying the ball on the ground.” Our concept of “best practices” would be like a weak football team trying to turn around by adopting the most complex play book in the NFL. If you don’t have “the hosses” you need to simplify your playbook and reduce unforced errors.
And we should apply the same logic to teacher evaluation, implement the Toledo Plan and efficiently get rid of the 8% of the most ineffective teachers.
In commenting on the Flypaper post I AGAIN stole your line about the achievement gap being largely a “time on task” gap. We must restore safety and order to inner city schools. Do do so, we must have credibility in enforcing of rules. To do so, we must have the options that require alternative education slots. To do so, we must address fears that teachers will just kick out their difficult students.
If we are going to replace the feeding the chickens approach, we must listen to Lynn Canady who explains how we know by October that 20% of our students that they are failing hopelessly, but we haven’t had a better idea than to let them fail for the rest of the year. Like Betts and Zau showed, 4th grade behavior is a better indicator of high school success than academics. We need Accelerated Middle Schools that the What Works Clearinghouse says is effective on the average of 35 points for “progressing in school” and which can create order so that regular school teachers can teach.
We also need to address political correctness. We liberals shouldn’t have to sneak over to conservative blogs to read some common sense.
One of the things that has me completely puzzled in the education reform debate is why so many people seem to expect a magic bullet solution…
It seems to me that a discussion of “teaching quality” would be a lot more useful than a discussion of “teacher quality,” and that a basic question that is being asked too rarely is “What do teachers need in order to teach well?”
Part of the equation may be the checklist of qualifications that NCLB uses to define “highly qualified teacher,” but I think there’s growing agreement that that isn’t the magic bullet. A lot of teachers would agree with you that clear curriculum guidelines are important — the AFT’s Spring 2008 American Educator as a number of articles on that theme — and almost all would point to a safe, orderly school culture. And I’m sure there’s more that teachers and principals could point to.
“…focus on the “how” of teaching, instead of what to teach.”
To be honest, I’d like to see a little more of both. As a high school English teacher, and then as the English III Team Leader, I saw too many student teachers and new teachers coming in who had an enormous amount of information about classroom management strategies (unfortunately many of them not very realistic), and severely limited knowledge of *what* to teach as well – not knowing anything about rhetorical devices, persuasive appeals, logical fallacies, elements of fiction, etc.
I had one student teacher who, when I asked him why he wanted to teach high school English, could only say he “really liked reading” and wanted to share that with students. He did not last through the program. I had to make the very difficult decision to have him sent back for more training when I a) heard him read aloud and realized he couldn’t very well, and b) found out he knew nothing about grammar or teaching writing. It would have been irresponsible of me to allow him to continue to transition into classroom employment without some serious remediation.
Ultimately, though, I agree that the idea of “superstar teachers” is both misguided and limiting. First of all, it’s difficult to pin down what a true “superstar teacher” looks like, because everyone’s expectation will be different. Is it the high energy teacher who gets the kids excited every day, or is it the thoughtful, methodical teacher whose calm presence keeps the kids working and provides stability in the classroom? Throwing money at teachers without providing more training and better curriculum isn’t going to magically improve their performance either.
As soon as I posted I realized I’d just been reading something about this.
“The fourth myth (the myth of good teachers) is that good teachers are the most important variable to students’ eventual success. A good teacher outweighs everything else…This myth attributes most of the variation in teacher quality to intrinsic qualities of the teacher, but attributes very little of the variation to the teaching methods or curriculum, which are alterable factors that can be taught and replicated in many classrooms…[by this logic] a teacher could believe that the zaniest kind of snake oil teaches reading, and it would work.”
-”Myths and Misconceptions About Teaching,” Vicki E. Snider
As a teacher, Red, I simply never understood a management system that was utterly silent on what I was to teach, but deeply concerned with how I taught it. In what other line of work do you leave the product up to the employee, but concern yourself exclusively with the process of how he produces it? This, in a nutshell, is how I became a curriculum zealot. Give me the keys to the classroom, tell me the curriculum, then get out of the way. If I fail to deliver the curriculum effectively, by whatever metric you choose, fire me. But for Lord’s sake, don’t dictate how I am to do the job. That’s a function of my professional expertise and judgement.
At a time where education is sloppy with managers who cut their teeth in the business world, the fact that this standard management strategy — hire good people, free them to execute, and hold them accountable — hasn’t become a standard practice never ceases to amaze me.
I think there are a lot of businesses that don’t have any analog of “curriculum,” and that that’s one of the things that complicates bringing in managers from business.
In some businesses the “what” is obvious (e.g. “sell cars”), and in others (such as practicing law) the “what” is deeply embedded in the “how.” As a result “free them to execute” means different things to different people — some teachers find a carefully specified curriculum constraining, others find it freeing — and “hold them accountable” immediately leads to the question “accountable for teaching what?”
As someone who worked outside education for a relatively long while before becoming a teacher, I never saw any job where not only did they say “develop your own product (curriculum),” but they also said, “find your own materials.”
I am in agreement with much of what you’ve said, except that I do believe that for teachers who haven’t yet developed professional expertise and judgment some targeted training is necessary. But that probably goes without saying.
Robert,
Your perspective is quite illuminating. And I agree that it is the lack of systemic organization that perpetuates poor student learning.
You are quite correct in asserting that quality curricula is essential. But there is so much more that is needed to ensure quality student learning.
Those school systems (internationally) that enable their students to learn well fully realize what an important job that a teacher has in connecting with the students and actually teaching (as opposed to developing curricula, assessing the students, admin work, etc…).
It would be somewhat capricious/misguided to fire a teacher just because their students did not do well on one exam without providing at least some guidance on how to possibly improve teaching or classroom instruction. What support mechanisms do our teachers really have?
Where is the systemic support for improvement of teaching ability? It is not enough to ask our teachers to jump through every hoop without providing them with the guidance on how to jump.
We lay too much blame on the shoulders of our teachers. Our system provides no support for quality teaching, effective curricula or in developing assessments that measure quality learning.
I, too, am disheartened by the sloppy management of our schools. But all those ineffective management strategies are a direct result of specific state laws. How can we possibly change that without a legislative change?