This article on education policy from The Economist makes an observation about improving schools that seems obvious to the point of banality:
Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold—McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says*, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly “first-of-its-kind” (which is how Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, describes McKinsey's approach): schools surely do all this already? Actually, they don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.
But this is surprising:
You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren't. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.
School systems that get good teachers do so not because the pay is extraordinary, but because teaching is a high status job. In fact, successful countries may be successful because they restrict the number of teacher training slots, which makes teaching hard to get into, and therefore well-respected.
But I don't know what that suggests for America. How do you make teaching into a highly respected job, one that top graduates (rather than, as now, mostly the bottom third of the class) want to go into? It seems like there's a chicken and egg problem.
My solution (and here I violate everything I just said earlier by advocating a Federal program): create a Federal corps of really, really, well paid teachers (starting salaries in the high five-figures). Let those teachers take their salaries anywhere, which should help solve the problem of underserved rural districts; $75K is a fortune in a country area. Make admission to the program dependent on having a four-year degree in something other than education, and passing a really, really hard test that combines general knowledge and knowledge about whatever subjects they want to teach. Gradually expand until teaching is on par with banking, consulting, law, medicine, or journalism as a preferred destination for high-performing graduates.
Megan,
Participants in your program would crash and burn at a high rate, just because you haven't included classroom experience in your formula. How about including two years full-time working under a master teacher? The master teacher can get a whopping big salary, too, and can mentor 2 or 3 trainees at a time. The hard work is identifying the master teachers.
If a school district really wanted to make teaching a respected position in their community, they could start by, um, respecting teachers.
Well, I love your teaching corps plan. Living in suburban NJ, with high quality students and teachers, it's hard for me to imagine teaching as a low-status job, though. Teaching positions in my county are highly coveted and very difficult to land.
I would love to live in the Ozarks making 75k teaching little hillbilles, though I make much more here.
What about Teach for America? Although it does not satisfy your steep salary requirements, it does meet your prestige criterion. Indeed, it seems to bear out your argument that highly-qualified applicants are attracted not to the salary of the profession, but to its exclusivity. But of course, the commitment is only two years, so this is not a long-term solution to ensuring equitable access to highly-qualified teachers irrespective of location.
I think that the problem with salary is that, with teaching, you want one that is neither too high or too low compared to alternatives. If salaries are too low then you will lose people to competing opportunities and it will be impossible to replace inadequete performers.
However, teaching is a job with too many soft metrics -- if salaries are too high you will get people who hate the job, get in well with the union but will never leave because teaching pays better than the alternatives.
I note that the countries with the best teaching appear to pay average which is kind of interesting.
I don;t think you need to attract teachers per se; in Canada we have a permanent glut and people are quite happy to go to teacher's college despite it. I suspect that the trick is to use proper incentives. One of the hard things about government services is correctly aligning the incentives to be performance based.
Good, even great, teachers are only part of the solution. Discipline and "profiling" are the remainder. It is extremely difficult for even a great teacher to be effective in the midst of chaos; and, for even an exceptional student to learn. It is also extremely difficult for very bright students to achieve their potential in a mixed class with the average, the slow, the disruptive and "special needs" children.
The only thing worse than being "left behind" is being "kept behind".
Teach for America is actually an argument against Megan's plan in its pure form. If you look around the web, Teach for America teachers seem to really struggle. I think a slower start, with more opportunity to learn from experienced teachers would be kinder to participants, as well as being more effective.
Overpaid yankees parachuting into rural districts to finally give the hillbillies a little knowledge does not sound like a recipe for success. The admnistrators and other teachers would hate the new teachers even more than normal.
A better use of the money would be to give teachers at low performing schools the equivalent of combat pay. Currently the best teachers gravitate toward the schools with the best clientele since the job is easier and the pay is the same. Also sort of merit pay for the best teachers would encourage teachers to get better. I have heard "I get paid the same whether I leave at 3:30 or 5:30" a thousand times from teachers. There is no incentive to improve as a teacher when they look around and see someone who doesn't give a rat's ass make 50% more than they do simply because of seniority.
This will come across as offensive, but the objective is to have the kids learn. The teacher is just a tool.
Some schools have problems. A lot of those problems won't be fixed by more money, or by better teachers. It's going to take an attitude change by the kids.
Vouchers could be an answer. What we are doing now isn't working very well.
I agree on the usefulness of making teaching a high status job as opposed to merely a high paying job. But the problem in the US is that money equals status (over-stating the case a bit) much more than it does in Germany, Japan or Singapore. So I see no way to raise the stausof the job without rasing the pay.
From what I remember of high school, the people who did poorly were mixed in with the people who did well. The difference was often one of self-discipline and paying attention. Something I see lacking in many of our youth today.
The people who did exceptionally well, usually had parents who were driving them, and keeping them focused on learning.
It's easy to look at one aspect of the problem, and forget that there are other, equally important components of a quality education.
Allowing more portability and control by parents of where their kids go to school is only a band-aid.
I think more needs to be done to study the decline in achievement. I mean, more and more money is being poured into some schools, with no, or negative results.
Amy-
Not really. Megan was concerned with, first, injecting the profession with some prestige in order to increase the number of highly qualified teachers. ToA has, in a very limited way, done this. And, presumably it his done this by reducing the opportunity costs for students from prestigious universities going in to teaching by substituting affluence for prestige. The next step, of course, which Megan assumes away as being a natural byproduct of the more intelligent and more capable pool of teachers, is the impact this new stable of teachers has on student achievement. And, the research on the effectiveness--or ineffectiveness--of ToA on student performance is not as unequiovocal as you suggest, especially when you compare ToA teachers with a similar comparison group of non-ToA teachers with equivalent experience.
teaching is on par with banking, consulting, law, medicine, or journalism
I see what you did there.
I suspect that, should this be implemented, you will be surprised by where teachers with $75k salaries choose to live, and that the vast majority will actually choose rich areas where $75k is a comfortable middle class salary. For example, I make about $75k doing work that I could do anywhere, and the thought of moving to the wilds of Oklahom so I could be the richest person in town never even occurred to me.
see... yeah the reason it is about the money is that you come out of college with a ton of student loans you have to pay off...
and get a job with lower pay, among jobs where professional degrees are required. The other countries mentioned... how much debt load do their teachers come with. If you know you are going to have a high debt load with lower pay, what're you going to do? Either try and get a job with a district that pays really well, or not go in to teaching.
The pool of starting teachers has shrunk much, simply because people who don't feel a 'calling' to teach, run the numbers and realise that it'll be a difficult pull if they have to take a student loan. People who feel the call will simply scarifice to make it happen, live small, and so on.
Well, gee, what do districts with less money do? Student loan companies are famous for not taking prestiege as a form of payment.
The pool of teachers who already exist is heading toward retirement at breakneck speed, and there are few who wish to replace. Regardless if you trot out the not-always-truism that they work less and get summers off, when confronted with the fact that average salary is lees out the gate, for the same education? They may decide to do something else, ESP. if they will have the loans to pay back.
IIRC, in Germany you don't get out of your undergrad $20k+ in debt...
If you're looking for 'high-quality' Teachers that have real world experience, I suggest that one should start looking at organizations like:
http://www.score.org/
as a model.
We've been on the 'super-duper' degree/certification track for awhile already, doesn't seem to be helping.
And, obviously, if you're looking for long-term improvements in the Educational field, strip them of their monopolies/subsidies and allow them, and their students, to compete(to succeed).
Both my parents and bother and sister are teachers. I am the black sheep of the family.
The really tough thing is how little first year teachers make. In the long run teaching is not that bad of a gig (great healthcare, retirement, summers off, the ability to feel like you are making a difference). But you make almost nothing right out of school and the pay is not differentiated by major area of study. My brother is a Math teacher and he is getting half of what he could get in the private sector. As a new teacher you essentially have to live well below your college graduate peers for 5-10 years. That really discourages people from going in to teaching.
All sounds pretty logical. I also wonder whether, given America's star-oriented culture, it might be possible to create more of a star function for teachers. One reason people go into journalism is the ego boost of having lots of influential people (and your friends!) read your stuff. Is there some way to set things up so really successful young teachers could get, uh, famous in some way? (The closest thing I know of is Nicholas Kristof making Will Okun's blog widely read.)
Click my name to see an actual program that provides both a financial and star power incentive to good teachers.
This guy (the winner) is a family fiend.
I think Megan is right. There is def. a huge prestige factor.
public school teachers are often paid just as well, if not better, than professors.
yet the prestige draws many potential teachers to the over saturated field of academia, which too bad.
One way to make teaching a high prestige job and increase teacher salary would be to exempt teachers from the federal income tax, which is perhaps the one federal policy that federalist conservatives could get behind on education.
The problem, of course, is that public employee unions being what they are there'd soon be a movement to exempt other important jobs too -- firefighters and police first, then librarians and social works, etc. etc.
If you want to improve academic performance, I suggest that you make the students do the work. I also suggest that parents be liable under the law in some fashion if their child preforms poorly if they do not make the attempt to do the work. Oh, and give teachers the authority to have students removed from their class if they are disruptive or disrespectful. No second-guessing by the principle, the school boards, or - most importantly - the parents.
Want better teaching? Prefer experts in subject matter to experts in teaching methods.
Conors idea to exempt teachers from income tax is just plain wrong. We don't need a government appointed aristocracy, thank you very much.
Prestige is earned, not bestowed.
Teaching is only an intellectual job if the students and teachers can have what might be called a teaching alliance. Calling the teacher down for 'being racist' when they make a correction of you and being disruptive requires other than intellctual skills of the teacher and a milieu that has appropriate support for confronting parents with not so princely princes. The fact that the ISD can be on the hook for the cost of a psychiatric hospitalization because the school has to provide an 'adeqate learning environment' by federal law probably doesn't help.
Are teachers the primary cause of our problems in education? Who established that and how?
Our society is full of opportunities and resources for anyone interested in learning. I'd place blame for failure to learn on the students rather than the teachers, and look at factors affecting the motivation to learn.
1. At a minimum, let's create an optimum work environment for teachers. Many corporations have created an optimum work environment for engineers: a high degree of freedom to deploy one's creative intelligence; high standards of excellence & high expectations; high value placed on the engineer's time, so that expensive tools are readily provided & busy-work is eliminated; annual evaluation by managers and co-workers (with no excuses of abilities and work product being "too subjective" to evaluate); the highest degree of respect and courtesy between co-workers at all levels of the organization.
Some would look at the U.S. public-school teaching environment and conclude that creating such an attractive work environment is "impossible" or "unrealistic". This may be true of government-run schools, but many privately-run schools have achieved this.
2. Let's make parents accountable for their child's educational achievement. Even in a free society, we can insist that high school students learn how difficult it is to be an effective parent. To pass this course, the student shall write an essay detailing all of the economic and intellectual resources required to be an excellent parent. The student is also required to debate & discuss the reasoning that underlies each required resource. And hey, if you can't pass this test, then you're too stupid to be a parent (to state the matter bluntly).
We can insist that every student be subjected to an extensive, exhaustive evaluation of their ability to be an excellent parent -- evaluated by a master psychologist for the required "multiple intelligences". All students who fail this evaluation should be strongly discouraged from having children.
3. I would shift a discussion of "teaching" and "teaching methods" to a discussion of "facilitated learning", where emphasis is placed on the individual's innate desire to learn. A primary goal of education, even in the early grade levels, should be to encourage a high degree of student-initiated learning. Students should be evaluted on their degree of student-initiated learning, vs. teacher-directed learning.
Note: Over a lifetime, I've taught in very enjoyable teaching environments, grades 7-12; and I've worked in very enjoyable engineering environments.
I'd place the blame on the parents. I'd also like legislation enacted that would consider this sort of slacking either child endangerment or neglecting the welfare of the child.
The sad fact of the matter is that the American culture just does not place that high a premium on education, in fact, the default position seems to regard that book larnin' stuff as prissy and irrelevant.
I don't see how you can blame that on the schools or the teachers, or what the public education system can do to counteract these cultural tendencies. The best to hope for is some draconian federal legislation that will punish bad behaviour.
how do you make teaching into a highly respected job, one that top graduates (rather than, as now, mostly the bottom third of the class) want to go into?
Ever noticed that a lot of the teacherphiles completely neglect this when arguing that teachers are woefully underpaid?
The Math For America program tries to exactly this, both in terms of funding and status. Part of the argument is that deep subject-specific knowledge is particularly important in math.
www.mathforamerica.org
In most areas there is no statistically significant difference between the performance of American students and students in other developed nations.
So how much are we willing to invest to make incremental improvements in our test score standing, particularly when most of that improvement is going to come from the bottom 90% of the population?
The bottom 90% can read well enough to get through vocational school or community college.
I think this blog entry is based on the false premise that there is a significant problem in education.
When you look at benefits and time off, pay for teachers is really not that terrible. I think the much bigger issue, is that public schools are really not that accountable to their customers (parents and students). When I look at the good local school districts, they are districts that are small, in communities where a high percentage of residents have school age kids, and in which the whole community cares that schools are good (often to keep property values up). This keeps the elected school board accountable to produce good schools. The pay in SF for school teachers is no worse than surrounding areas, yet our schools do much more poorly overall. I don't think this is due to "bad" teachers as much as a much more troubled student population and a really, reallly messed up school board that cares more about scoring political points with voters then producing good schools. San Francisco has a low percentage of school age kids, a low percentage of school age kids attending public schools, a low rate of home ownership, and so the percentage of the population truly vested in good schools is very low. So our school board debates meaningless items for months while basic needs aren't covered.
If our schools weren't on a lotto system for school enrollment (and therefore, didn't have to compete), they'd likely be in worse shape. But it's hard for me to believe that paying our teachers better would have more than a very slight marginal impact.
The puzzle about the article, and about your post, is that they appear to assume that the only variable within school districts' control that affects student's outcomes is the teacher.
This seems unlikely. Teachers do not teach in a vaccum. Other things in the school district matter:
- how is the school organised? I read a blogpost once by a teacher who estimated that her class was interrupted on average every ten minutes by annoucements, kids being pulled out for special programmes, choir, sports practice, health checks, etc. I read once about another school that, as part of an effort to improve its reading scores, had ruled that kids failing reading could no longer miss English class for choir practice. Now I am all in favour of music, sports, etc, but surely the school day can be organised to minimise the extent which they intefere with teaching time. How can any teacher teach well if they are being interrupted every ten minutes?
- what is the curriculum like? Does it allow for an orderly progression of topics? Are kids taught basic skills they need to understand further subjects?
- What are the textbooks like? Do they allow sufficient practice of key skills? Do they weave practice on previous topics into future ones, or is something taught once, then dropped for six months or a year until it is reintroduced? (At which point of course the typical kid has forgotten all about it and needs to relearn it from scratch.)
- Do the textbooks meet basic levels of competence? Eg are terms defined correctly? Are the answers right? The odd typo happens to everyone, but some textbooks are appalling.
- Does the school's administration support teachers in maintaining school discipline?
- Does the school's administration have resources to hand when it turns out something has gone badly wrong? Say a kid starts high school and it turns out they can't read, does the school have an equivalent of a hospital's "Code Blue" to deal with this emergency, or is it left to the poor teacher who is trying to teach 30 other kids?
- Can the school administration provide support to a teacher who is struggling? Doctors can get second opinions for difficult cases and extra resources when a patient needs a lot of care, can a teacher with a really difficult student?
Getting the best out of teachers, or more precisely, arranging the school so it supports teachers getting the best out of their students, strikes me as at least as important as improving the skills of teachers, perhaps more.
If you want to improve academic performance, I suggest that you make the students do the work. I also suggest that parents be liable under the law in some fashion if their child preforms poorly if they do not make the attempt to do the work.
What if the kids aren't trying to do the work because they were never properly taught the basic skills necessary for them to be able to do the work?
If a kid never learnt to read properly, is it their fault or their parent's fault, or the fault of their primary school?
And say that their primary school placed the blame for the kid's failure to read on the kid? That they called the kid a failure, an unmotivated student, a lazy student? How motivated is that kid going to be in high school? How likely are they to decide one of two things:
- I can't do the work because I'm a stupid person and there's no point in trying
- I can't do the work, and I'm not a stupid person, instead school sux, and its' stupid.
Of course there are kids who can do the work and just refuse to do so. But before you assume that this is the key problem at school, how about considering the possibility that the kid is performing some mental self-defense and it was earlier schools that failed the kid?
Let's make parents accountable for their child's educational achievement.
If parents are accountable for their child's educational achievement, then schools are not. Therefore we should shut down all funding to public schools and give the money to the parents.
This would also save all the arguments about teacher's salaries as the teachers would all be out of a job. I see no point in paying money to people who are not accountable for their job.
The problem with making parents accountable for their child's education is that many parents are not capable of being accountable. It's one thing for a parent with a university degree to be accountable, but how is a parent who dropped out of school themselves going to be "accountable for their child's educational achievement"? How about a parent with a mild case of mental retardation, or a problem with alcoholism? I am not willing to abandon the children who had the bad luck to get bad parents on to some idea of parental accountability. If schools are going to accept public money, they should be accountable for teaching the kids with the bad parents.
I would shift a discussion of "teaching" and "teaching methods" to a discussion of "facilitated learning", where emphasis is placed on the individual's innate desire to learn
And your evidence that this will lead to more kids learning how to read is?
Note: Over a lifetime, I've taught in very enjoyable teaching environments, grades 7-12;
How did you manage to accept payments for teaching when you think parents should be held accountable for their children's learning, not you? Or is this a view you have only recently come to?
Some good points here.
I believe that the problem with education is not primarily with the teachers. Most teachers can do the job and are not lazy.
A major problem is that many of our school systems fail to provide a diciplined environment conducive to learning.
The problem as I see it is that there are 40% of kids who are going to be ok no matter what 10% of the kids who are going to have major problems no matter what and 50% that can go either way.
Too often in our desire to save that 10% we screw things up for the 50%. That does not mean we should totally give up on the 10% but we cannot allow them to ruin things for the other 50%.
Take my mother's 10th grade english class for example. She teaches in what has become a moderate to low income school. She has told me that 15 minutes of each class period is spent just getting the class settled down and ready to learn. Kids don't bring thier pencil or paper, will not quit piching each other or talking, kids don't bring thier books. Several kids have major social/emotional problems as classified by the state. On top of this several of the kids could read at only a rudimentary level when they started so any class work must be driven by the needs of the slowest student.
The real losers in this situation are the 20 or so kids in the class that are missing out on 15 min a day while my mother is forced to cater to the 10 or so bad apples. Needless to say a total crack down strategy would not be supported by the school administration.
What ever happened to "reform school"?
The puzzle about the article, and about your post, is that they appear to assume that the only variable within school districts' control that affects student's outcomes is the teacher.
Posted by Tracy W | October 25, 2007 4:56 AM
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And the other problem is the article assumes that our public education is far from an optimal public education system.
I'd want to see the proof of that, including what the goals are for an optimal public education system, and just how far we fall short of those goals.
As an example, to the extent we are trying to teach math, English and history to students in the bottom quintile past the 9th grade, I think we are misguided in our goals.
On top of this several of the kids could read at only a rudimentary level when they started so any class work must be driven by the needs of the slowest student.
And of course the obvious question springs to mind - why are kids in a 10th grade class if they can only read at a rudimentary level? Why didn't their elementary school teach them to read?
And the other problem is the article assumes that our public education is far from an optimal public education system.
I'd want to see the proof of that, including what the goals are for an optimal public education system, and just how far we fall short of those goals.
There is a specific curriculum called Direct Instruction that has shown remarkable effectiveness in teaching reading and maths to kids in low-income schools. See http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm. Or http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ft/adams.htm.
Basically DI shows that it is possible to move low-income kids up to the performance levels likely of an average child (in the 1970s).
Any school teaching low-income kids that is not getting equivalent results to those Direct Instruction does is a sub-optimal school.
It may indeed be possible to get better results than Direct Instruction, but at the moment it's our benchmark.
On top of this several of the kids could read at only a rudimentary level when they started so any class work must be driven by the needs of the slowest student.
And of course the obvious question springs to mind - why are kids in a 10th grade class if they can only read at a rudimentary level? Why didn't their elementary school teach them to read?
Tracy, I asked the same quesion.
Here are the answers that I got
Many of these kids are just above (or perhaps at) learning disabled or whatever the term is now. They have very low IQs and I am not sure it was ever reasonable for them to get to a 10th grade level in 10 years. They probably should be in special programs but there has been a goal over the last 10 or so years to mainstream these children.
Second many have very unstable home lives they have moved from school to school and have never gotten into a consistent learning environment.
Finally there are many institutional pressures on teachers not to fail kids. When a kid is held back it is viewed largely as a failure of the teacher and the school does not want high failure rates. The goal of school system seems to be largely to pass the kids through the system.
I think the thinking is that if you hold a child back it will do more harm than good and that it is better to get them out with a degree if they know anything or not. I don't agree with this logic, but that is what it is.
This is why my mother while she does not like all aspects of the program is generally supportive of NCLB. At least it brings some of the problems of schools passing kids along to light.
You could be on to something here. But I don't see anything about controlling for parental involvement or amount of hours spent studying. Do you have those figures? Did I just miss them?
And in any case, in my particular venue, math, this would not apply. I repeat - before we address the poor performance of teachers, let's look at how much work the students are actually doing, and how involved the parents are in the work they are supposed to do. It has been my overwhelming experience that it is the people who don't do the work - and I know that they don't - who are the performers.
There are always exceptions, yes. I am not an absolutist. But you seem to imply that this is what is happening in the majority of cases in which there is poor performance. Most emphatically, where I teach, this is simply not the case.
Megan:
I'm afraid if you want some little dears to get a good education you're going to have to have them yourself.
Complaining about public education is the first step in arguing that we need vouchers, which in turn allow Christianists and bigots to remove their children from the various taints of public schools.
Absent a clear showing of a problem (reasonable and salutory goals being missed badly), I take such complaints as more right wing dissembling.
You could be on to something here. But I don't see anything about controlling for parental involvement or amount of hours spent studying. Do you have those figures? Did I just miss them?
There was a control group of schools, who qualified under the terms of Project Followthrough, but did not participate.
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ft/grossen.htmSee:
before we address the poor performance of teachers, let's look at how much work the students are actually doing, and how involved the parents are in the work they are supposed to do.
No. Let's first look at if the students are capable of doing the work they are meant to be doing. And let's look at the performance of the schools the kids attended before the current year.
(As I've said before, I think it is at least as important to look at how a school is operating as how individual teachers are operating, a school environment can help or retard any teacher.)
Why am I so focused on looking at whether students are capable of doing the work they are meant to be doing, and whether they were will taught before?
Because motivation is affected by how easy you find something. Let us imagine a kid who starts off at kindergarten all fired with enthusiasm, but, sadly, their learning goes wrong somewhere. Perhaps, when learning multi-digit multiplicaton, they get confused about the rules for carrying extra digits and add it to the next column and then multiply (this is what I did when learning multi-digit multiplication, luckily my teacher picked up on it and corrected it - but we will assume a school that didn't do that, perhaps because the teacher is being interrupted every ten minutes by the administration). The kid doesn't figure out their mistake, and sometimes by chance they will get the right answer on math questions and sometimes they won't. This will seem random. Perhaps a confident kid will stick up their hand and say "Miss, what's going on here?", but kids often keep quiet. Perhaps one of their parents will pick up on the mistake, but traditional methods of teaching math were not that good - the parent may be equally as lost. Math will get more confusing. And math builds on itself, every question afterwards that includes a multi-digit multiplicaton will often result in a wrong answer. Even if the student studies extra hard, that won't help, as they learnt the rule wrong in the first place. The student could use a calculator, but then they'll lose valuable experience with place-value, which can cause problems further down the line. So the student's failing math tests and getting more and more lost in math classes. And then, if the school tries to improve its students' performance by lecturing them about how important it is to study and to do well on math tests, they just increase the feelings of guilt for the kid, who doesn't *know* why they keep getting things wrong.
There may be a few kids who persist in being motivated and studying and doing the work, but how likely do you think is that kid to decide one of the following things?
1) I'm stupid at math, and there's no point in me trying hard as I'll just fail anyway.
2) I'm smart but I'm not doing well at math, so therefore it's a waste of time and stupid and pointless.
Motivation is not independent of past school performance.
Only once a school district has thoroughly investigated its own curriculum and teaching and is sure that all the curriculum and teaching was:
- unambiguous (see http://d-edreckoning.blogspot.com/2007/09/root-cause.html
- covered all the necessary skills (eg when I first learnt algebra math class that year included weekly tests - I failed the first test along with about 50% of the rest of the class because the class hadn't covered that 3x meant 3 times x, every other test that year I passed. Was my fault due to me or the curriculum?)
- included plenty of practice (this varies from kid to kid)
- gave students consistent feedback when they made mistakes
...should it start blaming the child or the parents.
People at schools are paid to teach. Yes, sometimes the fault is in the students or the parents, but the first thing schools should look to is what *they* should do better. And by "they" I mean the previous schools.
And, just to repeat myself, I don't think we should firstly blame teachers. I think this is a school, or a school-district level problem. Clearly there are some problems with the odd teacher who is personally underperforming, but I think the major gains will come from looking at how a whole school performs.
Ecdogg:
Many of these kids are just above (or perhaps at) learning disabled or whatever the term is now. They have very low IQs and I am not sure it was ever reasonable for them to get to a 10th grade level in 10 years. They probably should be in special programs but there has been a goal over the last 10 or so years to mainstream these children.
"Learning disabled" means not performing to the level expected of your IQ. Low-IQ kids are not learning-disabled, they are cognitively-disabled (or whatever the PC term is now).
Of course, it is entirely possible that the reason a kid is not performing to the level expected of their IQ is that they are badly taught. However, mysteriously, whenever a school psychologist is called in to look into a kid's academic problems, they never conclude it is the fault of the school. Apparently every school in the country is absolutely perfect in their curriculum and teaching, the problem is that the kids are learning disabled!
When it comes to kids with actual cognitive disabilities, the sort who score low on IQ tests, I do not have any evidence to hand, but have heard ancedotally that the two goals of mainstreaming and them actually learning can often be achieved by pre-teaching the kid before the class. So by the time they are in the class they are learning everything the second time and can keep up much better. This seems plausible but should be tested properly.
Second many have very unstable home lives they have moved from school to school and have never gotten into a consistent learning environment.
This is the one thing that makes me think there is some merit in a strictly standardised educational environment across schools. Normally I am 100% in favour of diversity, but it's hard to see how that can cope with children moving so often.
Finally there are many institutional pressures on teachers not to fail kids. When a kid is held back it is viewed largely as a failure of the teacher and the school does not want high failure rates. The goal of school system seems to be largely to pass the kids through the system.
I think the thinking is that if you hold a child back it will do more harm than good and that it is better to get them out with a degree if they know anything or not. I don't agree with this logic, but that is what it is.
Actually I know this logic, and also don't agree with it (I read something every single day of my life, which is far more often than I produce my credentials).
I actually was not thinking about holding the kid back, but about correcting education the moment the kid starts getting lost. For example, in Direct Instruction, the teacher is continually getting feedback to see if the students are understanding the work. If there is a misunderstanding, the lesson is changed on the fly to fix it. If students are forgetting things, more review is added that week. It's not at all surprising that holding students back a year doesn't work, especially if it simply means that the kid is exposed to ineffective instruction again (oh, I forgot - if the kid fails to learn it is the fault of the kid, never the fault of the school, the school is always doing its job perfectly).
Tracy? Your math example? That Just Ain't So. Spoken by one who has taught math for, well, some years :-) Yes, kids often do make mistakes at first when doing multiplication of multi-digit numbers. One of the jobs of the teacher is to not just catch these mistakes, but diagnose them, and this one happens to be rather easy - just see when they do their carries, and see if the same type of mistake is repeated from problem to problem.
Trust me on this one - the number one reason kids don't do well in school, at least on the math part, is because they don't do the work. Many kids these days have gotten the idea into their heads that after the fifty minute hour is over, that's it. One of my standard tricks to see if people are actually opening their textbooks, studying and working the problems is to give quizzes that are exactly the same as the homework problems they are supposed to have done. The kids who have done the homework . . . do well. The ones who haven't, don't. And they are exactly the ones who frequently complain about how hard the quizzes and tests are, that 'I never talked about that', etc.
I'm not saying there aren't 'at risk' kids out there, but hey, can't we at least do a few simple tests first, separate who is truly struggling from the ones who just aren't trying?
Tracy? Your math example? That Just Ain't So. Spoken by one who has taught math for, well, some years :-)
So, you mean that in your experience a kid never has ongoing problems because they misunderstood a rule and their teacher at the time didn't catch it?
The multi-digit multiplication is an example, there are plenty of other places where a kid can go wrong in maths - does this never happen in your experience?
The ones who haven't, don't.
Do you know if the ones who didn't do the work were capable of doing the work?
can't we at least do a few simple tests first, separate who is truly struggling from the ones who just aren't trying?
I am totally in favour of doing a few simple tests first, (well, depending on the level to which you are teaching - a 10th grade class generally requires more skills than a 3rd grade class, so the preliminary tests should be harder). How many of your students pass the simple tests but then don't do the work in class?
No, I don't mean to imply that at all. Of course there are kids who have genuine problems grasping the material, and of course sometimes it's because of early errors that are not caught by the teacher.
But that has been, in my experience an extremely small minority of the cases. Most of it is laziness and a poor work ethic.
So to answer your question, of the ones who do poorly, it's by far more likely that it's because they are simply not doing the work.
Now, I freely admit this is anecdotal, and so perhaps I should explain my background: I have taught K-12 in a private setting, and am now teaching math at a public university. Every fall I teach an introductory level math class that is, essentially, high school (and jr. high school) algebra for people who weren't paying attention. And, sad to say, these were not underpriviledged kids, they were not on scholarship, some of them drive better cars than I ever owned, they have had a number of financial advantages a lot of students simply never have. I did do one summer in St. Louis. Never again. I will not tolerate that sort of abuse, nor the complete lack of support the administration gave us.
ScentOfViolets - I may have been one of your students (though my parents never bought me any sort of car). University was a *massive* shock to me - I actually had to study on a consistent basis to understand things for the second time in my life! And not just in chemistry, but across all my subjects! My poor professors - though I will say for myself that I never blamed them for my bad study habits.
I think the fault in this plan is that it assumes 'top of the class' means best teacher. Does the #1 chemistry graduate make the #1 chemistry teacher?
Often I think the 'top in the class' can be very frustrated by teaching. Instead of exploring new material the same 'basics' must be taught over and over again and kids will be frustrating because they don't get what the #1 person found easy to understand when he was in school.
Sometimes the 'best' isn't the best. I remember that story about the town that administered IQ tests to those applying to become police officers. They raised a rukus because they used the test to disqualify smart people. They had a point, though, when they said this is a very boring job where nothing will happen most of the time but you have to be alert enough to act when it does. They found that 'smart' people tended to get bored and loose attention faster than 'dumb' people.
Megan bemoans the bottom 1/3 but what should those people be doing instead? Perhaps it makes more sense that the bottom 1/3 of chemistry graduates teach while the top 1/3 work in R&D for pharmaceutical and industrial companies. Resource allocation is still at play here. If you have the top 1/3 teach then that means the top 1/3 will have to cut back doing whatever they are doing now. Your opportunity cost is there and it's not at all clear it is less than the benefit of supposedly better teaching.
The plan would be great if you had a sure-fire way to identify the best teachers but how do you do that? This would be especially difficult considering that the best teachers might actually look like mediocre students in college!
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