Bill Gates says "send our best teachers to our worst schools"- Does this make sense?

Great Debates
1

Objectively the usual intent of politicians, education reformers and activists who voice this often heard opinion is so that the most disadvantaged students have access the the best teachers.

In practical terms how much of a difference is this really going to make? In the real world are the “best teachers” really going to want to take on some dangerous educational hell hole? Short of paying them 6 figure salaries how are you going to 'deploy" them go into these scholastic cess pits? Beyond this, even with the most fantastic teachers in the world, aren’t a lot of these kids products of their dysfunctional home environments? If kids are walking in the door with sub-grade intellectual skills across the board, how far are you really going to get even with a motivated teacher?

2

I think his point is more that me need an overall higher ratio of good teachers to students, not to actually send all the best ones to the ghetto to teach.

As to how effective this will be, I’d personally venture to guess that the level of teaching that you’ve received is the most important factor in what level of financial success you’ll have within a capitalist society, so overall it would act to move the US to the top of the heap (per capita).

3

I’ve always thought the intent behind statements like that is to raise the overall quality of the schools, not to send the best teachers to the worst schools and then have those schools stay the worst. But I’ve also always thought that the better solution would be to send the best administrators to the worst schools.

4

It also ignores the fact that teaching performance probably depends on context. Teachers at the worst schools have to teach in the face of many discipline and other problems. I’d be in favor of sending the teachers who are best at teaching under those conditions to those schools, and of giving those schools the money to retain such teachers. But I don’t think my outstanding suburban AP English teachers would necessarily have been as effective in that environment. No need to send them to poorer schools, I think that would have been lose-lose. On the other hand, I suspect they made more money teaching us than equally competent teachers made teaching in poorer schools, and that doesn’t necessarily make sense.

5

Beyond the practical aspects (and I agree that the administration probably would make a bigger impact than the teachers, for the most part)…

Why should my (or any other) smart, middle or upper class child be stuck with a bad teacher? If we ship all the “good” teachers off to the “bad” schools, where does that leave everyone else?

6

The best way to raise the quality of teachers would be to fire the bad ones, and then start allowing smart & capable people to teach, regardless of their educational certifications.

No degree in the world tells me who a good teacher is. No credentials in the world tell me what a good teacher is. No union membership tells me who a good teacher is. Yet, you can’t become a teacher without the degree, without the credentials, and without fealty to the unions.

People, in ignorance, keep contending year after year that the reason we don’t have good teachers is because we don’t pay them enough. Yet, time and time again, evidence is plainly available that teacher pay has no correlation whatsoever on student perfomance. The best paid teachers are those that stuck around in massively-subsidized and union-protected billets. These are not necessarily the best teachers-- just the best survivors.

We live in a society where we expect our doctors to not only know medicine, but to safely and effectively practice it. We expect our engineers to not only have professional licenses, they must safely and effectively construct their designs.

Yet, we largely feel that teachers shouldn’t be held to similar standards, for fear of dumbing down education, or-- horrors!-- making school boring. We expect our ideal teachers to be inspirational, outside-the-box thinkers who motivate students through unconventional means to a love of learning. We idealize our teachers in TV and movies-- it’s always the noble teacher arguing how math, or poetry, or dance, or music, or whatever can set children’s minds free. If only our teachers were Mr. Holland, our children would never hate learning again.

This is a fiction, of course, as fictional as the romantic comedies that tell me tubby unshaven guys get the hot lithe girls.

Anyway. . . I’m ranting here, but really, my solution is simple: teaching should be open to everyone who has a modicum of skill and desire to be a teacher-- professionals out of work, retirees, veterans, whomever. Smart people are out of work right now, why not get them a job teaching? Why tell a professional with a master’s degree that he/she can’t be anything more than a substitute high school teacher only because they never took the time to get a two-year master’s in education?

And teaching should be evaluated rigorously, not just based on credentialling and routine benchmarks.

For more on this, I strongly suggest this Malcom Gladwell’s New Yorker article on identifying talented teachers-- and just how hard it is to do.

7

It makes sense if you think the teaching is the only important factor in the learning equation. Unfortunately, that’s just not so. It doesn’t matter how great a teacher is if the student is incapable or unwilling, because no matter how much skill you use in bringing the horse to the fountain of knowledge, you still can’t make the damn thing drink.

If you take a teacher with huge test scores, which is how they determine how good a teacher someone is, out of a school full of motivated students with new textbooks and lots of extra hands to help them and plop that person down in a school full of kids who are only there because the law requires them to show up, with outdated teaching materials and a much higher student:teacher ratio, do you know what will happen? Their test scores will plunge, and suddenly, they won’t be considered nearly as good a teacher.

The kids are a vital part of the equation here, and that tends to get ignored. Until we somehow address the issues that lead to kids not being motivated to learn–primarily the culture of poverty–I don’t know that we can fix the truly bad schools.

8

It would make a bigger impact if you sent the best parents to parent the worst kids. But I don’t see that happening.

9

Yeah, it’s not money, it’s not facilities, it’s not teachers. It’s parents, end of story. Everything else is nothing but politics and cliche. The teachers unions have, however, done a fine job of straining our resources and protecting incompetent teachers who couldn’t give a rats ass. Sounds like the Auto Industry!!!
I don’t think the idea of having teachers who have taught for 35 years is a good thing. You can’t maintain the same level of knowledge and motivation for that many years. There have been ideas floated that offer benefits for professionals who take a short term hiatus to teach, essentially as a public service similar to being in the National Guard or GI Bill, which could be a good one. Whatever the case, we need a new plan and a way to get more kids motivated and parents accountable. We need better people and more new ideas in our classrooms.

10

It really doesn’t make a difference unless you have parents who are involved in their kids’ lives, who fundamentally value education and send their kids the message that they are expected to succeed.

And even then you have to balance that against each kid’s specific personality and motivation level.

11

:confused:
Yeah, and I don’t think having doctors, engineers or cops with more than 10 years experience is a good thing either. Really, everything important in our society should be done by amateurs who’ve barely learned where the supply room is, let alone gotten any real experience.

(What do you do for a living Omniscient, and how long have you done it for?)

12

Oh goody! It looks like we’re warming up for another round of “What’s wrong with public education?”
Only a few posts in and we’ve already bashed teachers and teacher’s unions.
All I’m going to say is that it required a whole lot more preparation, oversight, and evaluation for me to become legally qualified to teach your kid, than there was for you to have that kid.

13

This makes as much sense as when I won a grant for my boss who then said, “Well you wrote the idea that got funded, so why don’t you do the work along with your regular proposal writing duties?” In other words, their reward for being great teachers is that their jobs become harder and less enjoyable. Guess what? I’m less inclined to win future grants now, just like the best teachers will suddenly be less inclined to try as hard at their teaching for fear of being penalized for it. Dumb idea…

14

Did Bill Gates NOT finish school either?

Just asking, because I see another plan he could promote…

15

Most of the best teachers I’ve known are ones who’ve been teaching for a long time - though, of course, that’s partly because the bad teachers don’t last that long. They either get sacked or leave because they can’t cope with the stress that being a bad teacher brings along with it. Those long-term teachers certainly do keep up-to-date with new methods, resources and knowledge - it’s even a requirement of their job, at least it is in the UK.

I hate, hate hate it when people suggest taking clever ‘professionals’ and sending them in to teach, as if knowing the subject well is enough to be able to teach it well. Knowing the subject well actually has very little to do with being a good teacher. It helps, of course, but it’s, say, 5% of effective teaching. The rest is classroom management and people management - and it’s a very different kind of people management to what goes on in offices.

Of course, that’s pretty much what the first part of the quoted article section says too. So it’s a bit contradictory to then say to send the best teachers to the worst schools, when they’ve just said that the ways of identifying the ‘best teachers’ are inadequate.

Mind you, it would be quite amusing to see a teacher from a wealthy area come to one of the schools I’ve taught in, where over 35% of the kids already had a criminal conviction, 90% came from homes that did not have English as a first language, 10% were recent arrivals to England (including many from war zones), almost 10% were in state care, and 70% of the parents were either unemployed or on a very low income.

16

Actually, studies reveal that while family background matters more than school facilities and teachers (at least in developed countries; the opposite seems to be true in developing countries), school quality *does *have an impact on education achievement, family socioeconomic status aside.

17

Yup.

There are two schools near me which consistently perform well above average in exam results, and are in the top ten in the country when it comes to ‘value added’ scores (final exam results compared to the results of the exams that the kids take at age 10/11, before they start secondary school). There are also a couple of schools which consistently perform well below average in both respects (plus other schools in between). They’re all within a half-hour walk of each other, all non-selective state schools, in the same borough, with pretty much identical intakes in terms of grades and backgrounds. Obviously, the children’s home lives are not the only factor there.

18

When I talk to teachers, it’s remarkable how often they mention that the attitude and involvement of the parents is the single most important factor in the quality of a child’s education.

19

I’m not buying this. Do home environments make kids mentally retarded? No, they don’t change learning capacity at all. The kids from dysfunctional homes can learn just as well as kids from normal homes.

The difference is that upper class families have higher expectations. Most schools generally have your attitude and don’t expect the “dysfunctional” kids to do good at all, but this is clearly a misconception. There is overwhelming evidence that if schools start demanding poor kids to study longer hours and participate more in school, that their grades will improve.

Here is a story about a superintendent in Colorado. This guy’s brilliant idea was to find the kids who weren’t going to school and ask them to start going. Guess what? The kids started going to school.

KIPP is a program Malcolm Gladwell writes about and Bill Gates mentions as a good example of teaching. 80% of their kids are low income and 80% of their kids go to college. Their secret according to Gladwell is to make the kids study more. They expect everyone to put in long hours of work and these low income kids actually pull it off.

The plan is not just to send the smartest teachers into cess pools. It’s to send the teachers that can improve test scores the most. These will almost always be the ones that don’t dismiss the kids with behavior or motivation problems as lost causes.

The reason low income schools do so bad is because the crappy teachers are ready to dismiss anyone who isn’t learning as a lost cause. “Their parents never taught them to behave so there is no way I can teach them!” The truth is that the kids don’t learn because the teacher sucks, and no one wants to admit that. Instead of the school administration owning up to their own inadequacies, they blame the kids.

It’s all bullshit. There are examples all over the country of schools teaching kids from dysfunctional families. It can be done and it doesn’t take much. All we need is a teacher that will keep asking why a kid doesn’t do his homework instead of just throwing his hands up in the air.

In Colorado all the superintendent did was take over the role of middle class parents for these low income kids. No one in their family cared if they went to school? Well now the school will care. That doesn’t take a masters degree to accomplish and it yields vast results.

I second this article. It highlights the fact that the good teachers won’t quickly dismiss the kids with behavioral problems. Sometimes “bad behavior” is what upsets only the teacher, and wouldn’t harm anyone if the teacher would just ignore it. It takes a good teacher to be patient with kids that don’t behave normally and teach them despite their social shortcomings.

It’s toxic for school officials to believe that poor behaving students can’t be taught. The only explanation I have for this is that people will highlight anything that might make others think they’re smart. “Look at me I’m wearing a suit to class! You know I’m smart because look! Suit!” No one wants their suit wearing skills to go to waste so everyone pretends that wearing a suit to class means something. They think that the kids who wear suits care about school and so they don’t easily give up on them. The kids that dress like gangsters? They obviously don’t care, so we are not going to care. I probably earned most of my grades by wearing non-threatening polos to school.

This nonsense has to stop. Anyone claiming that low income kids can’t be taught is ignoring all the schools where low incomes kids are actually being taught.

20

Not a apples to apples comparison. Engineers and doctors are in fields that require a lot of advanced study and have modern innovations happening all the time. And most importantly, they deal with the immediate health and safety of individuals. They need a lot of time to learn their craft.

Cops are actually a pretty apt comparison though, and for both cops and teachers my experience has been that extremely long tenured folks have been extraordinarily bad at their jobs. They are jaded and careless and are essentially trying to live out the string with as little effort and paperwork as possible. Without exception the newer teachers were the memorable ones and the ones who went above and beyond the call of duty to improve the students education where ever possible. The old teachers saw every kid as a number, there’d be 35 new ones in 12 months and they’d never have to deal with these kids again. They either ignored disruptive kids or they over reacted with such frustration and anger that it became comical.

I’m not saying that everyone can teach. Many of the new recruits fail and lack the skills. Few of the old people are abject failures because they’ve lasted as long as they have, however very, very few of the old timers had survived their time teaching with anything resembling eagerness and vigor.