Harry beat me to the punch this morning. I was going to write about a "Room for Debate" post by Richard Rothstein at the New York Times, but he trumped me with a better Rothstein essay.
Rothstein questions whether union bashing will do much to change school quality, because teacher quality, while important, isn't THE most important factor in determining the success of a child. Rothstein says that, "Decades of social science research have demonstrated that differences in the quality of schools can explain about one-third of the variation in student achievement. But the other two-thirds is attributable to non-school factors."
When the president says that the single most important factor is parents, he does not mean the parents’ zip code or income or skin color, as though zip codes or income or skin color themselves influence a child’s achievement. Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee’s caricature of the research in this way prevents a careful consideration of policies that could truly raise the achievement of America’s children. What President Obama means is that if a child’s parents are poorly educated themselves and don’t read frequently to their young children, or don’t use complex language in speaking to their children, or are under such great economic stress that they can’t provide a stable and secure home environment or proper preventive health care to their children, or are in poor health themselves and can’t properly nurture their children, or are unable to travel with their children or take them to museums and zoos and expose them to other cultural experiences that stimulate the motivation to learn, or indeed live in a zip code where there are no educated adult role models and where other adults can’t share in the supervision of neighborhood youth, then children of such parents will be impeded in their ability to take advantage of teaching, no matter how high quality that teaching may be.
President Obama put it this way: “It’s not just making sure your kids are doing their homework, it’s also instilling a thirst for knowledge and excellence….And the community can help the parents. Listen, I love basketball. But the smartest kid in the school…should be getting as much attention as the basketball star. That’s a change that we’ve got to initiate in our community.”
I've been thinking a lot about non-school factors lately. I volunteered to give a talk on school reform to the local education foundation, and I've been putting together a powerpoint presentation in my head. The first slide was going to be about how wealth of a community is the primary determinant of school outcomes.
We've talked about the Iron Law of Money and Schools before. It's not just the actual money in the schools that makes a difference in the schools though that surely helps, but it is also a culture and commitment to education, a freedom of poverty, and a freedom from social upheaval that has to exist for a child to prosper.
I should note that it is tricky to separate school factors from non-school factors, because a wealthier community that has a commitment to education will also have parents who have the time to get involved with school practices and will demand better teacher quality. They will march into a principal's office and complain about practices. They will attend school meetings. They will be active members of the school board.
So, what can we do about it? Schools aren't going to change without major changes in society. Less poverty, better housing, better nutrition. Sure. But what can one particular school district do about those things? Not much. We have to change the entire culture of a community to change a school. I would love to see new policy ideas towards that end.
Apt. 11d 
Public unions are probably the area where I feel least like a liberal. They just don’t make sense to me the way that unions in private industry do.
If teacher quality is only “one third,” then isn’t that one third the low hanging fruit we should be plucking before we get to the complicated two thirds?
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“If teacher quality is only “one third,” then isn’t that one third the low hanging fruit we should be plucking before we get to the complicated two thirds?”
The quote in the post is: “Rothstein says that, “Decades of social science research have demonstrated that differences in the quality of schools can explain about one-third of the variation in student achievement. But the other two-thirds is attributable to non-school factors.””
This means that teacher quality is less than one-third, and is also not necessarily the lowest hanging fruit. Principals are more easily replaceable than a large group of teachers, for example.
In addition, I haven’t seen much for ideas on how to improve teacher quality after busting unions. And my standard isn’t what *might* happen in already-doing-well MiddleClassTown, but what might happen in doing-badly LowerClassTown.
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He doesn’t think that teacher quality is 1/3, but that in-school factors are (and elaborates what many of those beyond teacher quality are). I’ll add that having read a lot about school improvement, and witnessed one (so far unusually successful) effort very close to, there’s no avoiding the fact that the failure rate is like the failure rate of restaurants. Even if people knew what it took to improve the quality in a school (which the vast majority of school administrators and school improvement leaders don’t), getting it to happen is a completely different matter (taking skills that are in short supply in educational leadership). And getting our schools of ed either out of the business of training teachers, or doing it well, is a 100 year project. Screening for visual and aural impairments is cheap, beneficial in an beyond the classroom and we know how to do it.
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Sorry that I mis-read the 1/3 statistic. But isn’t the point sort of like arguing against cutting any particular point in the budget because you that item, by itself, won’t be enough to eliminate the budget deficit?
If getting rid of the worst teachers would improve things by 5-10%, and we don’t do that, why would we think we can work on any of the even more intractable problems?
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There is no low hanging fruit on education reform. Eliminating poverty isn’t any easier than changing teacher education or dumping the teachers’ unions or finding a satisfactory way of evaluating teachers. I’m with Ragtime on this one. I don’t like Rothstein’s premise that we have to choose one or the other type of reform. Let’s try it all.
Harry mentioned vision and hearing screening as a cheap, doable sort of reform for schools. I am interested in low hanging fruit today. What other reforms could be put in place?
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I am interested in low hanging fruit today.
Send your kid to a parochial school with a cost per pupil that is 1/2 what the local public schools are running and let other people worry about this stuff?
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“If getting rid of the worst teachers would improve things by 5-10%, and we don’t do that, why would we think we can work on any of the even more intractable problems?”
Because there’s a cost to identifying and removing the worst teachers. Part of that cost is the false positives of removing good teachers (who had a worst year, or a worse class) and replacing them with novice teachers (who are identifiably worse than more experience teachers). Of course the hard work of removing the bad teachers should be done (and when it’s not been done, I think principals and management are to blame). But removing the bad teachers isn’t the same operation as trying to remove the “worse” teachers, which has been interpreted as somehow trying to find and remove the tails of a distribution, rather than identifying those teachers who behave/teach/do things that are ineffective and don’t work and getting rid of them if they don’t stop.
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“I am interested in low hanging fruit today.”
“Send your kid to a parochial school with a cost per pupil that is 1/2 what the local public schools are running and let other people worry about this stuff?”
Or send your kids to a great private school that costs 2X times as much as the public school and “let other people worry about this stuff?”
Does that sound more obnoxious and self serving? I hope not.
I care about schools because I care about my community. Of course my first priority is my own children, but addressing their needs doesn’t make me stop worrying about the community.
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“I am interested in low hanging fruit today. What other reforms could be put in place?”
Ensuring that kids in elementary school have a good breakfast once they arrive at school so that they are ready to learn.
Making elementary schools “one stop shops” with before and after school care so that working parents don’t have to worry about getting their kids to/from daycare/school.
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The papers that Rothstein is relying on for the 1/3 – 2/3 split (one from 1966, one from 1998) control for socioeconomic factors and run linear regressions. Aren’t you fucking blown away?! We now have deep insight into the school effects — so long as it is a stagnant, perfectly linear world where education never changes.
If you’re looking for the sophisticated sort of counter-factual analysis that would be necessary to estimate effects in a world where teachers are trained, hired, evaluated, and promoted differently (and fired at all)… don’t look to social science.
Everytime the results of one of these “studies” is mentioned here, I say “Hmm, that’s really interesting,” go chase it down, and find out yet again it’s some Stats101 level dreck. Fool me twice…
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I care about schools because I care about my community.
I must admit to being more or less “Meh” about my community. I never intended to be here and came when I was much too old to develop the sort of civic identity that would let me bond with the place. I care about schools because kids annoy me far less than adults.
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And I meant to say: of course any reasonable person will concede that there’s a limit to what any teacher can do with a students whose parents should not be parents. But I reserve the right to be annoyed by people who make a career out of pretending to have measured some deep, meaningful truth, when all they’re really doing is endlessly re-applying the technique they learned in their one quantitative class in grad school.
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“If you’re looking for the sophisticated sort of counter-factual analysis that would be necessary to estimate effects in a world where teachers are trained, hired, evaluated, and promoted differently (and fired at all)… don’t look to social science.”
So, how would you do this experiment? What kind of data would convince you one way or the other and is the work currently being done? You seem to be arguing for some sort of experimental model. Do some of the charter school “experiments” fit?
I’m not being rhetorical in my questions. I disagree with you that the Rothstein work is “Stats101” level dreck. Much of the work (in education research, but also in epidemiology, immigrant effects, etc.) is based on regression models. Are you dismissing them in general? Or the specifics used in the education studies?
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Thanks Sandra, for pointing out some actual low hanging fruit — breakfast being the clearest one. One high school in our neck of the woods is trying to offer this, and is meeting difficulty in implementation, because people just don’t want to believe that an essentially non-educational intervention might be the most effective.
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I’m not about to go read somebody’s paper, but I have to say that using linear regression is hardly a reason to dismiss a paper by itself. It is pretty easy, for the researcher if not the reader, to tell if it is appropriate to use.
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Mamma said I should plot the residuals.
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Isn’t it fairly well known that not only breakfast programs, but also more nutritious school lunch options (leads to less behavioral problems), having recess before lunch (leads to better eating of healthy school lunch), and changing school start times (starting elementary school at 8:15 instead of 9:15 and highschool at 9:15 instead of 8, etc.) all of these reforms can help raise test scores? And I agree with Rothstein, to make test scores the sole measure by which success is charted is dicey.
But all of these programs could be implemented almost anywhere and they can be scaled up.
Now go try and convince America not to eat pizza and chicken nuggets and that football practice might have to be inconvenienced so that education is better served (or so that teenagers don’t die in car crashes, which is I believe one notable result from changing the start time of high school).
On some level, we get the schools we want (not the ones that you or I want, but the ones the majority of parents who don’t care about education and don’t want to be bothered want). This seems to be the major problem with politics in general today–if you care greatly about policy, it’s just not going to matter to enough other people to make a difference.
ps–I forgot to mention increasing SSR (sustained silent reading), which should boost reading skills but takes away time from teaching to the test.
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“ps–I forgot to mention increasing SSR (sustained silent reading), which should boost reading skills but takes away time from teaching to the test.”
I have a fuzzy recollection of Drop-Everything-And-Read being actually rather bad for struggling readers, but I can’t find the cite right now.
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If I could run the schools, I would:
* start classes for middle school and high school later
* serve more food, better food, free food
* allow more frequent recess/exercise breaks
* schedule longer school years or year-round schools
* more/better screening for autism spectrum and attention deficit disorders
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“Mamma said I should plot the residuals.”
Did she miss the verse that said don’t let your babies grow up to be stat-heads?
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Cowboys, Doug.
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My mamma did actually try to stop me from riding in old pick-ups.
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I vote for Wendy.
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The idea that the government should give a free lunch of everybody from 5 to 18 makes me want to join the Tea Party.
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Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be statheads
Don’t let ’em seek causes or run a regression
Make ’em be truckers and farmers and such
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be statheads
They’ll never leave home and they’re still in that zone
Thinking of numbers they love
Statheads ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold
And they’d rather give you a curve than diamonds or gold
Mandelbrot sets now and old unproved lemmas
And each graph begets a new way
And if you don’t understand him, and he don’t get tenure
He’ll probably scatter his plots
— one of Willie’s less-known duets, this one with Julia Set
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“The idea that the government should give a free lunch of everybody from 5 to 18 makes me want to join the Tea Party. ”
Yeah, that’s why people talk about firing teachers as though it would improve education, rather than something that actually works. It’s a viable position if you actually think it’s a good idea to dismantle public education in this country. And mind you, though I’m a great supporter of public education, there are conditions under which that would be my preferred choice. My tax dollars going to religious education would be one of them.
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Hey Doug. Did you just make that up? It’s not coming up on a google search.
If it’s an original, and you sing it and add guitar chords and post it to youtube, you’ll have my eternal admiration.
(and is there a genre of “Don’t Let your Babies Grow Up to Be . . . .” songs?
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“The idea that the government should give a free lunch of everybody from 5 to 18 makes me want to join the Tea Party. ”
Byt MH, if it would improve learning, why shouldn’t we do it? Kids who learn more can become more useful members of society and therefore will not need taxpayer-supported services.
I think you’re being short-sighted.
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Brockton HS made a point of having every teacher use the words “When you go to college” every day, or something like that. Another easy fix.
More controversially, I would do intensively student-directed and/or project-based learning in middle schools.
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I should note that it is tricky to separate school factors from non-school factors, because a wealthier community that has a commitment to education will also have parents who have the time to get involved with school practices will also demand better teacher quality. They will march into a principal’s office and complain about practices. They will attend school meetings. They will be active members of the school board.
I think I would have agreed with you, six years ago. Nowadays, I’d say that active, engaged parents may try all those things you list, but the system is built to delay and dissipate parental energy. We’ve put our time in complaining about practices, etc, and it paid off–four years later.
The only thing which made our school district sit up and take notice, was the departure from the public school of some 16 percent of enrolled students in one grade–all boys. Up until that point, polite complaints by engaged parents did not change anything. The loss of a third of enrolled boys in one grade was impossible to downplay.
We did learn that there are often reasons for even the most unexplainable school practices. It often had something to do with personalities. There is also a fair amount of face-saving going on; it’s better not to admit in an open meeting that this or that policy is fatally flawed.
Parents make the greatest difference when they have the resources to keep their children on, or above, grade level. Parents who know that a child should learn long division in fourth grade–and can teach them the standard algorithm–make a huge difference.
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re: firing bad teachers. Just because external factors are huge, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fire bad teachers. I was reading Eric Hanushek’s research on teacher quality over the weekend. (Yeah, you can mock me later.) There’s no question that teacher quality makes a difference, even it’s slight compared to other social and economic conditions. I’m not sure why anyone would fight to protect bad teachers. Sure, some good teachers might get lost in the process. But, let’s be honest, there are a lot of good teachers out there right now who can’t find a job, because the bad teachers have their slots. And, yes, it’s unfair to the good teachers if they lose their jobs, because of the stupidity of administrators, but it’s also unfair that kids have to be stuck in a class with a bad teacher. If you give me a choice of being unfair to an adult v. being unfair to a kid, the kid wins.
Hanushek points out in his research that it’s impossible to predict which person will be a good teacher or a bad teacher based on their education or experience, studies show that parents and administrators can quickly identify who’s good and who isn’t. I know which teachers are good in my school and who are duds. I can see which teachers rely on canned exams and which ones challenge my kid. But, you know, when there’s a choice of teachers, my kid gets put with the good teachers, because the administrators know me. The bad teachers have the biggest impact on kids who don’t have involved parents.
re: low hanging fruit reforms. Some school districts are mandating parenting education classes as a condition for participation in sports. As part of these classes, it would be really great if they could dispel misperceptions about the availability of sports scholarships.
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I think it should be possible for teachers who are feeling stressed, or burned out, to take sabbaticals. I grant that there are good teachers, and bad teachers, but I also think there are the teachers who are good, but not when their mothers are dying of cancer, or they’re getting divorced, or their adult children are falling apart, etc. They have been good in the past, and they will be good teachers at some time in the future, but they aren’t able to give their best right now.
I would suggest that schools stop awarding higher pay to teachers who complete further degrees. As far as I know, more credentials haven’t been shown to improve teachers. I am certain that going to night school during the school year distracts and exhausts teachers who might otherwise be very good. (This proposal wouldn’t be very popular in ed schools.)
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“If you give me a choice of being unfair to an adult v. being unfair to a kid, the kid wins.”
But being unfair to an adult by firing a good teacher is unfair to the kid who might have had that teacher.
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“I think it should be possible for teachers who are feeling stressed, or burned out, to take sabbaticals.”
Or who broke their ankles. I guess I thought I was doing everyone a favor by teaching last fall instead of taking a leave of absence, but my student evals sucked.
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Byt MH, if it would improve learning, why shouldn’t we do it? Kids who learn more can become more useful members of society and therefore will not need taxpayer-supported services.
Because institutional food either sucks or is unhealthy or both. Because a school that is solving the problem of “parents too poor/disorganized/whatever to feed the kids” is a school that isn’t focused on teaching the other kids to learn. Because, while ensuring that the needy are fed is good, feeding everybody means taking money from the middle class, spending 25% of it on administration, and then giving the rest back through a political process is hugely wasteful and cuts choice. Because paperwork designed by assholes comes with every government benefit. Because eating at a community mess means eating what other people want to eat. Because I threw away at least 75% of the school lunches I was served.
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I mean, I’m fine with them going into Newark or Possum Hollow, WV, and feeding all the kids. But, if feeding every kid at lunch actually helps, you may as well write “This Town Does Not Function” in big letters on the sign into town.
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Weekly Standard has an article about charter schools (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/what-johnny-learns_501152.html?page=1)
“When it comes to picking a school many parents care most about the kinds with whom their own children associate. Not the curriculum, not the teachers, but the other kids. … It was what they thought mattered most in providing the best education for their child.” This insight, perhaps more than any other here, will surprise and unnerve liberal elites in the education establishment, and not without reason. As Brand admits, it was precisely these sorts of parental concerns that fueled some of our most explosive education controversies, including busing and property tax relief. Yet for parents it will come as no surprise, for they intuitively understand what recent research suggests: A child’s peer group–which will largely if not exclusively be formed in school–can equal or exceed all other influencing pressure. Indeed, a child’s personality can be more powerfully and frequently shaped by their peer group than by their siblings and other close relatives.”
Laura, you said “wealth of a community is the primary determinant of school outcomes.
….I should note that it is tricky to separate school factors from non-school factors, because a wealthier community that has a commitment to education will also have parents who have the time to get involved with school practices will also demand better teacher quality. They will march into a principal’s office and complain about practices. They will attend school meetings. They will be active members of the school board.”
On causation: well, the wealthy parents show their kids by example what it takes to do well. And they go to school with other kids whose parents have shown them the same.
My kids seem to me to be picking up far more of their ideas of how to live in the world and be successful from their friends than from us. Maybe the biggest thing we have done for them is to get them into a context where values and habits we support are those of the other children’s parents.
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“Because, while ensuring that the needy are fed is good, feeding everybody means taking money from the middle class, spending 25% of it on administration, and then giving the rest back through a political process is hugely wasteful and cuts choice.”
Don’t forget that it would ideally need to be peanut-free, nut-free, dairy-free, meat-free, egg-free, gluten-free, etc.
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“I would suggest that schools stop awarding higher pay to teachers who complete further degrees.”
I’m all for this one. Teachers unions should really negotiate this one away. Are there teachers who actually like going to night school classes in order to earn more money? I think they’ve fought for it because it’s a path to more pay, a problem with a flat profession where advancement is limited. But, as Cranberry points out, it probably actually reduces teacher quality, when it’s done on top of a full-time job.
And, yes, the ed schools would hate it. I recently heard the debate about “professional days” and introduced to the role of the ed lobby in supporting those (because they then get to provide teacher workshops and earn some bucks).
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I would be satisfied if they had a choice of tuna fish or egg salad sandwiches. There’s no need for all the breaded, fried (oh, sorry, baked! but greasy) square food.
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bj, I did just make that up, though if you’d heard me sing, “eternal admiration” is not the phrase that would spring to mind. Hm. Have to think who among the guitar-pickin friends might do such a thing.
“(and is there a genre of ‘Don’t Let your Babies Grow Up to Be . . . .’ songs?)”
Not as far as I know, but why not?
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Terrible school food are better than no food at all. A lot of kids come to school hungry.
FYI. Diane Ravitch’s review of Waiting for Superman. She echoes a lot of what was said here. But I can’t help but be annoyed with her, because she sent her own kids to a private school. How can she defend the status quo, when the status quo wasn’t good enough for her own kids?
Getting rid of bad teachers isn’t enough to turn about failing schools. Charter schools help some kids, some of the time. That’s all true. But refusal to change, to look at new ways of doing things, to take a defeatist approach to schools isn’t going to help anyone. What is going on in the charter schools that are wildly successful? Can those reforms be scaled up?
re: low hanging fruit. I would love to give every kid in my school district a free book at the end of fourth grade with no strings attached. I would like every family to be offered a free IKEA Billy bookcase. I would like there to be more involvement of the dads in the schools, beyond just coaching sports. I would like all parents to have more involvement in schools, beyond bake sales.
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How can she defend the status quo, when the status quo wasn’t good enough for her own kids?
For completely unrelated reasons, the head of PPS left to take a post-secondary job during his child’s pre-K year.
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I’m surprised by all the people who are opposed to firing 10 “bad” teachers because the decision process may not be perfect and 1 or 2 good teachers may get fired with them. Isn’t that still a huge improvement?
“Not the curriculum, not the teachers, but the other kids. … It was what they thought mattered most in providing the best education for their child.”
I think this is most likely a sort of shorthand heuristic. I can’t really judge who is a “good teacher” or if the curriculum should be stressing phonics or whole language, but I can tell that the school’s got a lot of rich, white kids with successful parents and a good work ethic, so they’ve figured it all out for me.
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Sam’s low-hanging fruit proposal:
Make sure that in-school suspension is supervised very tightly, and that no one who has been in in-school suspension that day can participate in sports practice.
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So not fair.
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Re: Laura’s desire for more parent involvement in schools…
To achieve that we need to rethink how we involve them. I have the luxury at present to be a SAHM and be involved (I live 2 blocks from the school). The parents who do paid work/dads are traditionally excluded due to time constraints. Parceling out the volunteer opportunities into chunks that are one-off or short term or flexible can increase parent participation. More dads, more working parents can participate.
And on the providing breakfast idea – there’s a lot of wiggle room between providing nothing and providing it from 5-18 years of age. The schools that I have seen do this provide a simple breakfast for those kids who come to school hungry. We’re talking a bowl of cereal and a banana.
It has made a world of difference in behaviour/concentration – and no kid who arrives hungry passes it up.
Here’s another idea – reduce the amount of homework. For those parents who both work fulltime or for whom English is a second language, homework is a huge strain on family time between school and bedtime.
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Ravitch’s kids went to private schools in the 60s and 70s, no? It’s not like she’s rejecting current public schools for her own children. And besides, weren’t public schools “good” back then?
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“We’re talking a bowl of cereal and a banana.”
It’s hard to argue with that. DC had a free breakfast available for everybody, which we never made it on time for. As I recall, the breakfast menu involved a lot of syrup.
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Much of the work (in education research, but also in epidemiology, immigrant effects, etc.) is based on regression models. Are you dismissing them in general? Or the specifics used in the education studies?
Certainly they are sometimes appropriate, but that is about, depending on the underlying stochastic mechanisms of the field, 10-15% of the time (the probabilists can even prove this under mild assumptions). So we can easily indict any field that is using them 95%+ of the time.
Mamma said I should plot the residuals.
As someone whose most lucrative work is cleaning up other people’s messes, I can attest that many people even bungle their attempts at being good and doing model validation. (Three weeks ago a giant in his field showed me a plot of residuals, where he plotted residual versus observation — as the observations were ordered in the database. OMFG. When did it correctly, the linear model was totally inappropriate.)
But more generally, my point is that a prediction model says nothing about a counter-factual world. And Rothstein, while chastizing people for not bowing to the “decades of social science research[sic]” — is too inept at basic quantitative reasoning to realize this.
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bj, help me work “underlying stochastic mechanisms” into the next verse!
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Ragtime — the issue is collateral effects. I really doubt the firing 10 very bad teachers (even if you had a pool of better teachers to replace them with ) would have much effect on other very bad, or not quite so bad teachers. But firing 2 good teachers (even just ok ones) would have massive morale effects on others, including driving some teachers out of the profession (the best 10% or so of teachers could be earning more money for less work and stress elsewhere, and they know it). Partly because it would confirm the obvious truth that the administrators actually don’t know whom to fire.
I’m all for removing the absurd “credits for advancement” rules, and, for those states that have them, the principal licensing requirements. I work partly in an Ed School (but they don’t pay me anything, so perhaps I’m biased). Most Ed school colleagues would advance what they believe are principled reasons for maintaining the status quo, but it is indefensible. (But, do I fight with them about it? No, I’ve got better ways to spend my time, especially because the prospects of succcess are very low indeed.)
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But keeping around the bad teachers, even if there are only ten or so, is also very demoralizing. It’s demoralizing on the other teachers, who are doing a good job. It’s demoralizing on the kids, who get stuck with those teachers. It’s demoralizing on parents, who are forced to kiss the ass of administrators, so their kids don’t get put in those classes. It’s demoralizing on everyone in the community who has to pay taxes to support the salaries and life-long benefits to these incompetent workers. It’s demoralizing for administrators who know that they are stuck between the parents and union rules.
I’m not sure that administrators don’t know who to fire, Harry. I think that it’s pretty damn obvious who’s working hard and who isn’t. In something I read over the weekend, Hanushek mentioned cited a paper that found that bad teachers were easily identified by parents and administrators, but I didn’t look it up.
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My sister’s teacher, who told the middle schoolers about her divorce and ran off to the lady’s room to weep, was a bad teacher. Unfortunately for the teacher, middle schoolers (like dogs) can smell fear.
As a general rule, any teacher who feels the need to share details of their divorce with students is a bad teacher (the advisor for one of the clubs I was in in high school made the exact same mistake).
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“I’m surprised by all the people who are opposed to firing 10 “bad” teachers because the decision process may not be perfect and 1 or 2 good teachers may get fired with them. Isn’t that still a huge improvement?”
Well, I don’t support this because I don’t think the ration is even 5:1, at least not for the number-crunching test-score based models of performance, and especially if we mean “bad” rather than a tail of a distribution.
I’m for removing the 10 teachers that people who monitor, work with, and watch them think are “bad” (as opposed to just not better than average). For those of you who say that parents just know which the good and bad teachers are — what percent (and n) of teachers you feel you can evaluate are bad? Say your kids have had 10 teachers. How many of them are bad? And what does bad mean? (incapable of classroom management? poor mastery of the subject material? unenthusiastic and boring? . . . .).
I had two teachers I could classify as bad during the 10 years I spent in public schools (out of, say 22, including specialists in junior high school). One was Cranberry’s example of someone who was temporarily bad while having some kind of mental breakdown. She was a good teacher before and afterward and it would have been a shame to fire her for her bad month in which she did nothing more than barely supervise her. The other lost control of his class when the student population changed drastically in the school district. He needed some form of class management training for the new student population — it might not have helped, but it might have, and he had been a good teacher.
In the same period of time, I probably had two excellent teachers, who I remember and still think about in what they taught. The others were average to good.
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Dan Willingham thinks that teacher quality shouldn’t be so important.
I’m rushing off and I wasn’t able to read more than the quotes that Joanne Jacobs pulled out, but here it is:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/daniel-willingham/willingham-should-teachers-be.html#more
“Teacher quality is the most important in-school factor that influences kids’ schooling. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.”
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I assume many schools have a few teachers whom every parent dreads. As an old parent, though, my feelings have changed over the years. Some of the “bad” teachers in my children’s public school were actually quite good teachers–if they were permitted to teach their original grade level. Moving an early elementary teacher to middle school rarely ended well, particularly if the teachers had spent years teaching K, 1, or 2.
The union rules on seniority and tenure have unfortunate effects when a system must adapt to shrinking enrollment. The older teachers are able to “bump” younger teachers. The older teachers have tenure and more seniority, so they have a right to a job until retirement. Unfortunately, the openings for teachers don’t necessarily match with the skill sets of the available staff.
I would suggest that smaller districts regionalize with each other for the purpose of sharing teaching assignments, allowing teachers to continue teaching the same subject or grade level without losing seniority or current salary. If town A has an experienced 3rd grade teacher, it makes more sense for town D, which needs a 3rd grade teacher, to offer her a position, than for town A to force the 3rd grade teacher to teach 7th grade science, or for town D to require a new teacher trained in 7th grade science to take over a 3rd grade classroom.
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cranberry,
Those are very good points about grade level and subject area.
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