That was my point throughout this thread. I’m saying that most of the things your Grandmother did was evidence of her navigating the educational world correctly, and not just valuing education. She valued education and knew exactly what to do about it. Many people don’t.
Thanks for the clarification. Looks like I was getting all worked up over nothing.
I’ve listed several examples–knowing the value of getting into and staying in advanced courses; knowing how to talk to administrators about misbehavior in a way that maximizes a child’s education while still maintaining the school’s authority; knowing to show up at PTA meetings; knowing teachers are interested in heaing insights about your child that will make teaching more effective; knowing to get your child involved in extracurricular activities that open up many opportunities; knowing the importance of completing homework.
We have many students whose parents had no formal education at all, or none past the third grade. None of these things are obvious.
So here’s an idea - MERIT PAY. If colleges are going to graduate the morons, and the schools can’t fire them easily and can’t pay the good teachers more than the bad ones, we have a real problem.
So have teacher reviews. Let parents send in evaluation forms. Have the principal use judgement in looking at the teachers to decide which ones are the most dedicated, who go the extra mile, whose kids improve in test scores, etc. Then give raises to the good ones, and no raises for the mediocre ones. The bad ones get shown the door.
Maybe if the opportunity was there for a great teacher to make $100K per year, you’d get more motivated people entering teaching.
Frankly, from my experience what often separates teachers from people working out in industry or research isn’t intelligence - it’s lack of motivation and a desire for security. I have a friend who could easily work in software development, but instead teaches at a college, making maybe $20K less than he could elsewhere. Why? It’s less stressful. He doesn’t have to worry about producing stuff on demand. He’s under no risk of his company failing and firing him, or of having better, younger, smarter developers overtake him. He goes to class, does his lectures, helps his students, and goes home. It’s an easy life. I’m tempted by it myself sometimes.
And maybe that’s because there’s no real opportunity to excel in teaching. There are no million-dollar earning superstar teachers to look up to and try to emulate. Teaching is like any other union job. Once you get in, you’re set. You don’t have to perform particularly well, you just have to avoid major mistakes, and you can coast.
If we want better teachers, force them to be better. Weed out the good from the bad.
No we don’t. What we need in teachers at the elementary school level is not academic brilliance - people with minds like that will be bored out of their skulls. Focusing on high education is exactly the wrong way to improve teaching. What you need is a minimum level of education - A B.ED is fine. After that, the prime criteria should be things like dedication, ability to work with children, ability to communicate well, patience, and a love for teaching.
In my experience, your average unemployed postdoc lacks most of these skills, and the skills he does have are almost irrelevant to teaching grade 9 science.
Thereby making education more expensive, making it harder to find good teachers within the pool of people with Masters degrees, and ensuring that the people who go into teaching are those who, while qualified for other work, couldn’t get it. No thanks.
This I agree with. The key here is to make sure that people understand the material they are teaching. You don’t need a Masters in Physics to teach Newton’s laws of motion to kids. But you should know Newtons laws before you teach them.
But here’s something to think about - you think the solution is to require more academic qualifications for teachers. Yet who is teaching them? People with Ph.D’s, that’s who. If a Ph.D can’t get across high school math to education students, why do you think higher education somehow makes a person a better teacher?
Frankly, the worst ‘teachers’ I ever had in my life were college professors. For every Richard Feynman that’s out there, there are a hundred self-absorbed professors who would rather be doing research or pretty much anything else than be lecturing to a bunch of freshmen. I’ve had professors who lectured by reading from the textook verbatim. I’ve had professors with social skills so bad they wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone and spoke in whispers. I’ve had professors who would scrawl crap on the board no one could read, and then insult people who asked what it said.
Sure. Easy to say. Hard to accomplish, at least as long as you treat all teachers the same and have to work with the lowest common denominator. And again, if teachers really have nothing to gain by being all creative and working extra hard to produce innovative lesson plans, why would they? It’s much easier to just grab the approved curriculum complete with teacher’s guide, teach from it, and hand out exams for marks.
Maybe if that kind of innovation were rewarded, you might see more of it.
And not pay them a salary they aren’t worth, right? Or do you think everyone who manages to claw their way into a school system deserves $80K a year?
Despite evidence that class size is a very poor measure of educational performance.
Here’s a thought - how about funding education on an individual parent basis, and letting them choose the school? Good schools attract more parents, and get more funding. Good teachers therefore become a desired commodity, and everyone in the school system from the parent up to the principle has a vested interest in seeing every kid reach the maximum of their ability.
The problem as I see it is that Education is run from the top town like an old Soviet collective. There are no price signals. No real market. We have decisions about what’s ‘right’ for students being made by fiat, and no real feedback coming back the other way.
Let me give you a personal example of the kinds of unintended consequences this kind of stuff has. Our day care system used to require not that much in the way of training - I think there was a six-month certificate program (this is not kindergarten, which had different requirements, but day care for younger kids and after-schoool care).
The kind of workers our day cares had were typically older ladies who had raised kids and liked doing it, and now the kids were out of the house and they were working in day cares to make extra money. The other kind were younger mothers whose own children were in the daycare, and working there gave them an opportunity to be with them, and allowed them to save the day care fees and make an income at the same time. Win/win for everyone.
Then some bureaucrats, pressured by parents who only want the ‘best’ for their kids (and by special interests), decided that our day care workers just didn’t have enough education. It was ‘scandalous’ that someone could be looking after children with only a certificate! Why, we should require a b.Ed for that! Or something close to it.
So the regulations were changed to ‘improve’ day care. And guess what happened? First, we lost all those dedicated workers, the kind of ladies who might stick around for years. And since it was a fairly competitive field, the day care owners could let go of the ones that didn’t work out, and try others. Eventually, the best ones would stay, and the bad ones would go.
But no more. Now, you have to have the equivalent of three years of a four year teaching degree to get hired. So who do we get applying for the jobs? Almost univerally, young women working on education degrees. They have no experience raising children, they don’t want to be there, and none of them last for more than a year or so, because once they have their education degree they’re gone. And, we have a severe shortage of workers - so severe that the government is now issuing waivers to day cares to allow them to exceed the mandated worker/child ratio.
So far, our great plan for improving day care has resulted in poorer workers, a transitory work force, and less supervision for the kids. That’s awful.
The next plan? Well, we’ll have to raise salaries to attract more people. But that drives up the cost of day care. So the government had to increase the subsidy cap. Before, you could get subsidized day care if you had a family income below about $35K. But people who made, say, 40K were really hurt by the fee increases required for the new salaries. So the government has now increased the cap to a whopping $74,000. That’s right, you can now get subsidized day care if you make $73,000 a year.
So now what happens? It shouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to see it - now there is a huge incentive for families with one income earner and a spouse who stayed home to look after the kid, to put their kid in day care and go to work. Before, a median salary for a single earner in this city might have been $45K. The spouse, not having had a career or an education, might be able to get a job paying $25K. But then day care fees would eat up $7500 of that, so it didn’t really pay to go to work. Now it does.
So now there’s even more demand on an already over-stressed day care system, making the problem worse. And the new salaries still aren’t high enough to attract people away from real teaching jobs, so the problem of a constant young, migratory workforce and understaffing remains.
In the meantime, all those women who had the REAL qualifications for looking after small children (plenty of experience at doing it, and a love of it), are unemployed.
Way to improve the system, guys.
That’s what top-down control does. It creates unintended consequences. That’s the main problem in education. The real ‘fix’ is to figure out ways to let the market work as much as possible. Tie teacher salaries to performance. Tie school funding to performance. Allow prices to convey information about the best schools and the best teachers to everyone who needs to know.
You can do this within a ‘public’ system. Provide funding to the parents, privatize the schools, regulate them only to the extent of having a minimum curriculum and standardized tests, and let the market work. You’ll see an explosion of innovation, and we’ll rapidly learn what works and what doesn’t.
And if private schools are free to kick out problem kids, parents who live in their neighborhood now have a strong incentive to make sure their kids get good marks.
As I understand it, education was the one part of the Soviet system that worked.
Nonsense, Sam. One of the most irritating things about going into teaching is how everyone thinks they know best how to do it, despite having no experience with the field. There are brilliant teachers who stay in the field for decades, because there are so many challenges. It’s not an easy profession to excel at, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply ignorant.
Having gone through grade school does not make you an expert on education, any more than having gone to a doctor makes you an expert on medicine.
That said, I’m cautiously in favor of merit pay. I’m not cautious because I think it’sa bad idea: frankly, I’m arrogant enough to believe that a significant merit pay system will make me significantly wealthy once I become a teacher. I’m cautious because past merit pay systems have been easily corruptible, in which principals use the system to reward their cronies. And although I expect to be a very good teacher, I’m not a very good schmoozer: bosses keep me around for the job I do, but they don’t invite me out to lunch. I’m okay with that, but a merit pay system that rewards cronyism won’t work for me.
THere are merit-pay proposals that track the improvement of individual students; those look promising to me. I could definitely get behind those.
But please don’t pontificate about the intellectual challenges of pedagogy if you’ve not made a study of the issue. A good teacher can exploit findings from developmental psychology, formal rhetoric, linguistics, behavioral science, and aesthetics in addition to findings from the disciplines he’s teaching. The academic challenges are more than a single person can ever hope to master.
Daniel
And France and Germany and Japan – all those countries whose students supposedly are leaving ours in the shade – don’t they have centralized, top-down educational systems?
Excellent post, Sam Stone. The whole thing. I nominate you for Secretary of Education.
Sam Stone, I’m almost ready to subscribe to your newsletter, and you have given me pause in my thoughts about privatizing schools (Democrat speaking here).
The problem I have still is how to tie teacher performance to salary. What is the measure of a good teacher? You mention parent evaluations, but I see that more rewarding teachers who don’t piss off parents. Give all the kids good grades, regardless of achievement, and you have happy parents. Principal evaluations? Try getting teachers into a school with a principal who has the gall to give poor teacher reviews.
More ideas:
Standardized testing?
The pro is that its measureable, but the cons are teaching to the test, which I’m not sure isn’t an improvement. Also, teachers starting with poorer students might be fantastic teachers, but their student’s scores might never reflect that.
Student evaluations?
Same problem as parent evaluations.
How about each school gets a pool of money (based on what, I don’t know) for bonuses. Every teacher gets to anonymously rank the best ten (or the top 10%, or 25%. The numbers don’t really matter for now) teachers in the school. Those teachers get a substantial bonus; a bonus worth working for. The others get their base salary. The principal and parents can weigh in as well to keep the teachers from forming Survivor like cliques.
But, other than that, I just can’t come up with a way to truly measure a good teacher, no less give a grade to all teachers in the country.
Not to mention the fact that ALL of this is pie in the sky because of the teacher’s lobby.
Incorrect. Read this article for details.
In other words, people who are familiar with the issues are very cautious about plans for merit pay for exactly the reasons I mentioned above. Very few people (nobody that I’ve ever heard of) opposes merit pay based on National Certification, and that’s a type of merit pay that’s currently in place in lots of areas of the US.
The system that I’m most intrigued by, as I mentioned before, tracks the progress of individual students and provides incentives for those teachers that on average achieve significant improvement within a student’s range of scores. It’s still not perfect (if a child’s family goes through a divorce, the teacher’s paycheck suffers), but it’s better than any other system that I’ve seen, as far as systems that track scores goes.
Note that when I talk about improving salaries, I don’t talk about doing it without improving training. I want teachers to be as well-paid, as autonomous, and as highly trained as attorneys are.
Daniel
Yeah, and they can join just about every other union on the planet, who oppose merit pay for equally dubious reasons.
All the reasons you mention should equally apply to lawyers, computer programmers, accountants, secretaries, and pretty much every other profession. Somehow they manage to get along just fine with merit pay.
The fact is, in any organizaton there are about 10-20% of the people who are high achievers, and do the lion’s share of the creative work. The middle 60% are your average employees, who are reasonably productive but need some guidance and supervision, and who are not nearly as productive as the top few. Then you have the bottom 10-20% who are useless tits and are a detriment to the organization.
Any effective company will figure out how to reward the top few with promotions, bonuses, perks, or whatever they can, to encourage them to stick around and stretch themselves even further. They keep the middle bunch happy, and the bottom 10-20% are eased out over time.
Unions work differently. They act as a collective. This works okay in blue collar environments, where it’s a lot easier to spot the slackers, and where physical labor is the main productive output of the employee. There, the range between the best and worst is not so bad.
But in white-collar occupations where performance is often measured in fairly intangible ways like creativity, risk-taking, intelligence, and initiative, a union mindset is deadly. When success means taking risks, you HAVE to reward risk, or people will soon learn to just keep their heads down. When success means putting in extra effort that can’t be shown on a time clock because it involves things like thinking about school problems at home at night rather than zpning out in front of the tube, you have to have a way to reward this.
Look at the education system today. What do you see? Teachers going through the motions. Educational degrees that aren’t very good. ‘Zero tolerance’ policies designed to protect staff at the students’ expense. A gray, bureaucratic environment where the bad teachers can’t be fired and the good ones can no longer be bothered.
That’s the real problem. You want to fix it by making the standards higher and raising salaries across the board. But the problem isn’t the standards. The problem is the system. The problem is that the teachers associations and school boards have become barriers to good education. The fact that they recoil in horror at the concept of merit pay should trigger alarm bells in any parent’s head.
That would help. BUt the problem is deeper. As long as the school itself doesn’t have to compete with other schools, then at the school level there’s no incentive for principals to find and retain good teachers.
If you want to fix the problem, turn the school board into a for-profit enterprise. Let them find and hire the best principals. Let them tie the principal’s salary to overall school performance. Then leave the principal alone to figure out how to do that, just like any other manager. That principal will find that good teachers are worth their weight in gold, and the bad ones are worse than nothing at all. In fact, they mind find that rather than worshipping at the alter of student-teacher ratios, it would be better to have a school with 10 excellent teachers and a student-teacher ratio of 40, rather than a school with 10 excellent teachers and 10 lousy teachers, with a ratio of 20 but half the kids getting a crappy education.
Then there will be experiments in pedagogy. Not the idiotic ones we have now, where teachers glom on to the fad of the week and try it out for yucks, but REAL innovation, with a careful eye on performance. Companies providing better educational tools will be able to command higher prices, because the schools will actually profit from them. When an area has a bad school, a new one might open to take advantage of the opportunity. A little competition is a good thing. And perhaps that new school has been scouting the teachers in the old one, and offers the best of the bunch higher salaries.
Fund the whole thing with lump payments to parents, and then keep the government the hell out of it. Abolish the teacher’s unions, and stop focusing on credentials and focus more on performance.
By the way, if you dig into it deeply, you might find that the teacher’s associations push higher credentials for the same reason every other professional society does - to limit entry into the field and prop up their own wages. Not for the good of the kids.
Are you going to pay them what attorneys get? Even the bad ones?
I wonder what our legal system would be like if attorneys were all hired by the government, all made the same salary no matter how good or bad they were, and it was almost impossible to fire the bad ones?