I'll agree quite readily to the notion that there are bad teachers, but before we jump on the "Let's fire 'em!" train, there are some things to consider:
1) A teacher whose students consistently perform below grade level, but who jump 2 or 3 grade levels under her teaching (in the course of a year) is probably not a bad teacher. I know several teachers, particularly those who work with students for whom English is not a native language or who work with students with communiications barriers, where this is the case.
(My father is on the board of trustees of a school for the deaf and blind; this school consistently is one of the worst performing schools in the state, but at least part of that is because the vast majority of its students enter the school between 3 and 8 years behind grade level. I know the English teacher there, and she's responsible for some phenomenal gains, but even then it's rare that students will be reading and writing at grade level).
2) While we have a discussion of what bad teaching is, we also need to discuss what good teaching entails. "Sufficient progress on standardized tests" does not describe the teacher, but rather the students, and even then only on a single day. I'm willing to buy that there's some correlation between those tests and overall achievement, but would suggest that 3 hours is probably an insufficient amount of time to fully demonstrate one's learning over the previous 9 months.
Let's have a vibrant discussion of the how's and why's of teaching excellently, both in terms of what it looks like in action and what it accomplishes.
3) Finally, let's take a good look at what useful, worthwhile learning entails, and what it looks like. It may be that the system of bells and periods is more destructive than it is productive (I suspect this to be true, given my knowledge of my own workflow, as well as how I had to drastically alter my workflow when I taught), and it may be that we spend too much time on low-level skills (like rote memorization solely for the purpose of taking a test) and not enough time on internalization and contextualization of meaningful knowledge and skills (how many students have you known who could only solve a math problem when they knew ahead of time, by way of reading the chapter heading, what that problem would entail, but would not be able to solve that problem if they saw it mixed in with other types of problems?)
It's easy to say "Oh, let's fire the bottom 10% of teachers and replace them with excellent teachers", but such a statement falls flat on its face pretty quickly (for one, do we have a hidden reserve of these "excellent teachers", and if so, can we convince them to leave their more lucrative jobs elsewhere?).
It's much more difficult, but also much more worthwhile, to say "Let's figure out what excellent teaching and learning look like, in all their dimensions, and then let's see if we can figure out how to make it happen more often."
As far as education reform discussion topics go, I'd rather have the latter than the former.
The LA times had an interesting series (http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/22/local/la-me-schools-...) on value added metrics in education that was interesting. The basic idea is that you look at the median achievement scores for students the year before they enter a teacher's classroom and the year after and see how they compare (of course this is vulnerable to schools with students who transfer frequently). Then, you can say for example, on average does a student who was below grade level, stay below grade level, or improve? This allows one to get some handle on what the impact is of the teacher--for good or worse--the LAtimes study found that the differences in teacher impact were rather high--within the same school. Also, some teachers were happy to learn about the results--for example, some teachers were enthusiastic, but were not aware that their overall impact was not so high and wanted to know how they could improve. Now, I wouldn't use this as the only metric because it might not be linear--for example, perhaps it's harder to get a large improvement for say a group of gifted kids (relative to their previous scores), compared to moving students who are somewhat below grade level to slightly above grade level--but at least it indicates the direction that the teacher is (on average) sending students. I should stress that the method looks at the same student before and after and then averages the results afterwards.
I'm okay with value-added metrics, so long as it is not the only tool used to evaluate and assess.
1) Not all things taught appear on a test, or can be easily measured, and
2) Teachers are not the only entities responsible for student growth. There is also the curriculum, the social environment, the home life, and so on.
3) The natural reaction to such metrics, particularly in the current educational climate, is "Holy crap. If I don't do well on this, I'll get fired." Rather than jumping on the "Let's fire 'em" wagon, I feel that comprehensive professional development plans, based around highlighting strengths and excellent patterns, would accomplish just as much. Instead, though, the current professional development plan seems to be "Fire 'em".
Most of what you describe is not a problem, due to the law of large numbers.
Regarding (1), it's very true that a test is just a sample of the material taught. Say you teach 90% of the material well, 10% poorly. The probability of the test being comprised primarily of the 10% you taught poorly is highly improbable.
Regarding (2), this is irrelevant as well. VAM compares your group of 30 low income students in district A being taught curriculum X to the overall average of low income students in district A being taught curriculum X. While it's possible that all your 90-150 students (depending on how many classes you teach) have a worse home life than the average low income student in district A, the probability of that is very low.
A teacher whose students consistently perform below grade level, but who jump 2 or 3 grade levels under her teaching (in the course of a year) is probably not a bad teacher.
Easy, reward the improvement in test results, not the test results. This could also encourage good teachers to go to lower performing schools (since they might see the largest gain (and hence pay rise) there).
for one, do we have a hidden reserve of these "excellent teachers", and if so, can we convince them to leave their more lucrative jobs elsewhere?
Yes, pay them more. If you are very skilled at mathematics or engineering, you might be a good maths teacher. However you can get much better money working in Google, than working as a teacher. So pay maths teachers Google level salaries. You would have to pay teachers different amounts depending on what they teach.
Merit-based pay will never work as long as the unions and clueless administrators are in control.
In early 2002, I was working with a local high school's theatre group. Since I wasn't a parent, the rules said I had to get "hired" as a teachers' aide even though I was doing it for free.
I did the fingerprinting for the background check, provided a college transcript, and filled out the form. A month later I was rejected.
When I looked into it, I was told that I couldn't be a teachers' aide since I didn't take a college-level algebra class. In fact, I was asked "how did you get through college without taking any math?"
I pointed out that I had taken Calc 1-3, Diff Eq 1 & 2, Stats, Physics, and oh yeah had a BS in Electrical Engineering. But since I didn't have a college-level class with "algebra" in the name, I was rejected.
I didn't expect the administrators to know how to do Calc, but I did expect them to realize it was an advanced math class.
That's hilarious if true, I would assume that the majority of math teachers would have also skipped college algebra to go straight for Calc since this is pretty common today.
More appalling than hilarious. Putting even the algebra aside, by this logic the following would be forbid in this school:
-Thomas Edison assisting in a science lesson
-Bill Gates helping kids learn to program
-John Rockefeller teaching a business seminar
-Michael Dell talking about supply chain
-Walt Disney teaching an art lesson
All never obtained a college degree (save honorary ones). It would be one thing if primary education had a basis for its elitism. But instead they're failing at an increasing rate.
However, if we maintain the standardized testing, I would say also reward teachers who improve students from say 95% to 99% or keep them scoring 99%.
When I was in school, I would consistently score 98-99% on standardized tests. One of my teachers was forced by the principal of the school to apologize to my parents for not improving my scores.
Yes most of these are just tweaks. "How much reward for a X% increase?" "How much reward for an increase from Y% to Z%" etc. This can easily be adapted as time goes.
Easy, reward the improvement in test results, not the test results.
This happens now. The problem that can arise, and I remember reading that it does, is that you end up rewarding poor performing schools and teachers that only marginally improve much more than consistently well performing ones.
Certainly not before we know on what to act. What I gathered from reading his comment was that we have significant deficiencies in even how to classify good teaching, let alone measure it, let alone promote it. Skipping straight to the promotion part, which is what you seem to be insisting, would merely involve guessing and inconsistency at best. At worst, we would promote the wrong qualities and make teachers worse.
I'm not suggesting that we simply talk and talk and never take action, but it's hard to make the case that we know how to improve teaching given the state of education in this country. It makes good sense to fix our ignorance before acting.
There's definitely a time for action. Just not until we decide when that action should be taken.
As for forced attrition:
1) I would want to see a comprehensive professional development program put in place for all teachers. Teaching well is difficult, and teachers generally don't get any useful feedback from anyone (when I taught, the biggest piece of useful feedback I got from my principal was "Make 'em afraid of you. Today, 3 kids didn't turn in their homework. If they're afraid of you, they'll do your homework").
It's entirely possible that plenty of our "bad" teachers simply need some support and guidance and a more concrete direction.
2) While this is happening, a comprehensive discussion of the goals of education needs to occur. Right now, as near as I can tell, our primary purpose is American competitiveness on an international scale (how dare those children from Shanghai score better than our children?!), which will somehow translate into economic competitiveness.
I'm not talking national goals, at least not yet. I'm talking a comprehensive building of the things that an adult need to be able to do in order to choose and set the course of his own life to the greatest extent possible. Obviously, not everyone gets to be an astronaut, but it'd be nice if we took a few steps toward the American ideal of "With enough gumption and hard work, anyone can be reasonably accomplished".
3) Finally, I'd be okay with forced attrition if it were shown to me that the replacements would be better. Others on this board have said things like "pay them more", but the fact is, teaching is not a glamorous position, and is becoming less, rather than more, so as either a direct or indirect result of articles like the one posted. Additionally, most schools nation-wide are struggling with the budget (between California and Illinois, 40,000 jobs were cut last summer. Even in Omaha, where I live, the wealthiest districts are freezing their hiring if they haven't done so already).
You might point to programs such as Teach for America, but even they have a pretty high attrition rate, and that's only a 2-year committment (also: do you really want someone who will teach for 2 years and then go do something else?).
Finally, the points I outlined in my original comment still stand.
I'm not unilaterally opposed to forced attrition, and in fact I'm not even strongly opposed. I just want it to be conscientious, deliberate, and well-thought out, with concrete steps taken to make sure that the new crop coming in has a really good chance to do better than the old crop leaving.
> Additionally, most schools nation-wide are struggling with the budget (between California and Illinois, 40,000 jobs were cut last summer.
The problem with that number is that the vast majority were rehired later that summer/in early fall. That "fire/hire" dance is part of the "we need funding" theater.
However, the real problem with the "struggling with budget" argument is that a lot of the spending in those budgets is for "not classroom". (Yes, I'm including school facilities in classroom.)
The folks who set up public school budgets do not act as if public education is a priority, so it's absurd to give them more money to improve public education.
I think a few districts are trying to figure out what makes a teacher good/excellent and figure out how to get all their teachers up to that point. Shortly before my mother had to retire due to early-onset Alzheimer's, she spent 3 years as a mentor to new teachers and helped them cope with the stress, taught them how to plan lessons properly, and made sure that they could maintain order in a classroom. The result was better teachers and lower turnover.
you mean they didn't get taught that when they got their masters in education.
I have to wonder too how many times lessons need to be planned. Do math and English go through radical changes every year? Do good teachers each need to teach multiplication in their own special way?
Did your degree teach you exactly how to work in your profession? Do you know any that does? Degrees teach you mostly theory, but applying theory to the real world takes experience, and that doesn't come overnight.
Obviously the concepts in math, English, or other subjects may not change much over the years, but the environment certainly does. Teachers have to learn how to tailor their methods to meet the needs of the whole class. That means being able to understand where children are in their development cycle, recognizing what learning methods work best for each student, and striking a balance so that the needs of all students are met. The good teachers are the ones that learn how to do this, and have developed the confidence to maintain order and discipline. --Providing support and mentoring can make a huge difference between having a new teacher succeed or fail.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, you've never taught a class before, have you? Good teaching is not something you can package up, and lesson plans are very idiosyncratic creative works. They are not readily transferable between teachers.
No matter how good the teaching materials you get, from the school/textbook/other teachers, that's just the start of a good lesson. You have to review the material yourself, and tailor it to your own style and preferences, and then revise it based on how well it actually worked. I can still spend hours revising lessons I've delivered several times before.
It is possible to deliver a pre-packaged lesson from another teacher or the textbook company. But if you haven't put your own effort into customizing it, the students will recognize it as a sub-standard effort. And they'll treat you accordingly.
Good teaching is not something you can package up, and lesson plans are very idiosyncratic creative works. They are not readily transferable between teachers.
This simply isn't true. Direct Instruction (pre-scripted lesson plans given to all teachers) is well known to produce excellent results.
It's just fought against tooth and nail by teachers unions because a) it's boring to the teacher and b) it makes teachers easily replacable. But it works.
(Incidentally, I taught math for 5 years at the university level. I was flying blind - I probably would have done better if I had a script to follow.)
Direct instruction works great for mechanical skills, because there is a 1:1 correspondence between that which is tested and that which is assessed, and because the goals are clear and discrete. If we're talking something like multiplication by two-digit numbers, or properly using semi-colons, those skills are mechanical enough that direct-instruction will work, and will probably work at least somewhat well, assuming that it does not become a slog for the students.
Personally, I'm willing to put up with scripted lessons, so long as the script works the way it should most of the time and so long as I've got the ability to modify if it needs modification. There is a distinct difference between a strong script and an incredibly constrictive script.
I'll still argue that teaching is as much an art as it is a science, but you're right that lesson plans can be transferred between teachers. I have no compunctions about stealing good ideas and good methodology, and have had success doing so.
Here are some broader concepts we can appropriate, which should be palatable to most good teachers:
1) Have a concrete goal, and reinforce it consistently until students are able to meet it.
2) Group students by ability (within a class, if necessary), so that everyone is constantly moving forward.
3) Make sure that there is a deliberate progression, or at least as close to one as possible. Not everything has a deliberate progression (writing, for example, is a pretty non-linear process once you get past a certain ability level).
4) Judge classroom progress by student achievement, rather than by the calendar.
The one reservation I have about Direct Instruction is that it removes some the ability of a lesson to go useful places. If I am teaching a lesson on metaphors while my class reads "The Great Gatsby" (which has impeccable metaphors), and a student says "Hey, when it describes Gatsby as 'dispensing starlight to casual moths', that's a metaphor, and it's parallel in theme to this poem we read two weeks ago"; this is exactly the type of thinking I want my students to be able to do, because it is the type of thinking that will be important later.
That said, if they do not know how to write grammatically complete sentences or how to multiply without a calculator, then I guess all the metaphors in the world can't save them.
(TL;DR: I generally agree in principle, but have reservations regarding practice)
I don't think there is any problem with a highly constrictive script if it works. Again, the teacher might be bored, but the purpose of school is educating the students, not entertaining teachers [1].
As for students advanced enough to make connections between metaphors in various literary works, go ahead and get off script. In fact, the few examples of DI scripts that I've seen do allow this - they tend to be flow charts, not screenplays. They instruct the teacher to skip/redo sections based on student performance on standardized diagnostic quizzes (i.e., go ahead and teach metaphors if they understand the use of commas.)
[1] Side note. I believe that "entertaining teachers" is why we tend to have so many literature classes, and a dearth of classes on factual writing. Teaching students to distill a spreadsheet+employee status reports into a department status report using only simple language is boring, but incredibly useful. I developed a lots of bad writing habits while an undergrad, which increased page count and obscured the vacuousness of my literary opinions. It took my PhD advisers about 2 years to beat those habits out of me.
I went to school to become an English teacher, but English courses at the collegiate level were intensely frustrating for the reasons you describe: vacuousness, self-aggrandizement, and a deliberate shift away from clarity and understandability.
Were it in my power, I'd have all students take courses in applied rhetoric. It's amazing how quickly all the bull goes away when everyone is able to see through it.
Again, I mostly agree with you, and would be okay with DI, by and large, if it were largely in flow-chart format.
The scripts I've seen (non-DI) are screenplays, and the schools that use these assess the teachers on their ability to memorize them. These scripts are blocked out down to 30-second intervals, which is ridiculous.
I work in a tutoring center which uses DI (in practice, if not in name), and I've seen great gains come from it. But every so often, it's necessary to break the script due to a larger issue at hand, one that the standardized diagnostic quizzes don't catch.
As an example, I had a student break down and start crying because she didn't understand how to multiply polynomials (and was in danger of failing her math course). After consoling her, we went all the way back to multiplying multi-digit numbers together, at which point I showed her how the multiplication algorithm works in expanded form (e.g. 123 * 256 = (100 + 20 + 3) * (200 + 50 + 6)), at which point she was able to see the parallel, and very quickly figured out multiplication of polynomials.
All the diagnostic quiz tested, though, was whether or not she could multiply, not whether or not she understood the algorithm. You could point to this and say "That's a failure of the diagnostic quiz", but I think it's probably more indicative of the impossibility of standards (whatever they may be) being completely and totally comprehensive and complete.
I can see the advantage of that approach to 'hard skills' like reading, phonetics, computation. On the other hand, I'm not sure I can envision it being applied to complex issues in biology, english or social studies.
I'm starting my fourth semester teaching undergraduate biology, hopefully a little less blind each semester. So far I've never seen a lesson plan from any source that I could just read over and then deliver to a class, but maybe they do in fact exist? Wouldn't that be nice!
the class is always filled with people that learn at different rates. does the teacher present the information at many different rates to deal with that? Wouldn't they need to do that every year?
The non BS answer is while math might not change, the standardized tests do. Every year the state will change what teachers are required to cover for each subject. Add in some new textbooks and shifting holidays and a good teacher will reorder their schedule each year, and then fine tune things around snow days etc.
PS: And let's not forget a little experimentation, keep what works and try out new ideas to replace what failed.
There's so much to be done in the presentation of material, and so much of that needs to be at least somewhat tailored to classes.
Even though I only substitute teach now (and teach writing workshops), I still do the same lesson a few times per day, and so will re-work lesson plans based on what is working with this particular group of students.
I've had classes where I can be pretty relaxed, and we can have useful discussions, and I've had classes where I had to keep them busy lest they get into fistfights (no joke).
Additionally, lesson plans need to be differentiated based on ability. The way I present participles to a class full of kids who stink at grammar is different from how I present participles to a group of honors kids who mostly get it.
One could try to argue that "If the teachers before you had done their jobs, all of these students would be at the same level", but even that isn't true, as students are at different levels by dint of different innate ability levels.
I went to a Montessori school for elementary school. It ruled. I was estimating cube roots and square roots using the binomial theorem in third grade (not that I knew I was doing that). Of course, I switched schools in fifth grade, and back to addition it was. sigh
Yep, I also saw a significant dip in the quality of my education when I began going to public school (moved and enrolled at in the 5th grade after moving). I always felt too many steps ahead of the rest of the class and was forced to slow down and wait for them. Luckily I have realized in the last year or so to take my education into my own hands and have learned to study topics on my own for my own sake.
Will you please clarify your response? It seems like you're conflating 2 different things. The two things that I see here are:
1) How do we determine who is a good teacher versus a bad teacher?
2) Should we fire "bad" teachers, or should we just fire teachers who underperform to some standard?
#1 is a very difficult question. Malcolm Gladwell has a great essay on how teachers are like NFL quarterbacks: we can't really tell ahead of time who will succeed. (http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_12_15_a_teacher.html)
#2, are you against firing teachers who are "bad", assuming we had some decent way to separate the bad from the good (not just based on test scores, or even the improvement in scores)? Because the teachers union (at least here in California), is adamantly against even firing the bad teachers. Granted, it's a moot point until we can come up with a good teacher evaluation heuristic (and I personally do not believe it will put much weight on test scores...)
Also, WRT to evaluating teachers through students' test scores: have you ever seen The Wire? One of the main characters (Bunny Colvin) moves from being a cop to an educator. At the end of the year, he is forced to "teach to the test" (e.g., only cover test material) rather than helping his students learn (which he was doing before). I believe this to be an accurate criticism of why we shouldn't use student test scores to eval teachers: it screws up the incentives, and makes the goal for students to beat a test, rather than to get educated.
"The futility of attempting to upgrade the teaching profession by paying higher salaries is obvious, so long as legal barriers keep out all those who refuse to take education courses. Theses courses are negative barriers, in the sense that they keep out the competent. It is Darwinism stood on its head, with the unfittest being most likely to survive as public school teachers."
1) A teacher whose students consistently perform below grade level, but who jump 2 or 3 grade levels under her teaching (in the course of a year) is probably not a bad teacher. I know several teachers, particularly those who work with students for whom English is not a native language or who work with students with communiications barriers, where this is the case.
(My father is on the board of trustees of a school for the deaf and blind; this school consistently is one of the worst performing schools in the state, but at least part of that is because the vast majority of its students enter the school between 3 and 8 years behind grade level. I know the English teacher there, and she's responsible for some phenomenal gains, but even then it's rare that students will be reading and writing at grade level).
2) While we have a discussion of what bad teaching is, we also need to discuss what good teaching entails. "Sufficient progress on standardized tests" does not describe the teacher, but rather the students, and even then only on a single day. I'm willing to buy that there's some correlation between those tests and overall achievement, but would suggest that 3 hours is probably an insufficient amount of time to fully demonstrate one's learning over the previous 9 months.
Let's have a vibrant discussion of the how's and why's of teaching excellently, both in terms of what it looks like in action and what it accomplishes.
3) Finally, let's take a good look at what useful, worthwhile learning entails, and what it looks like. It may be that the system of bells and periods is more destructive than it is productive (I suspect this to be true, given my knowledge of my own workflow, as well as how I had to drastically alter my workflow when I taught), and it may be that we spend too much time on low-level skills (like rote memorization solely for the purpose of taking a test) and not enough time on internalization and contextualization of meaningful knowledge and skills (how many students have you known who could only solve a math problem when they knew ahead of time, by way of reading the chapter heading, what that problem would entail, but would not be able to solve that problem if they saw it mixed in with other types of problems?)
It's easy to say "Oh, let's fire the bottom 10% of teachers and replace them with excellent teachers", but such a statement falls flat on its face pretty quickly (for one, do we have a hidden reserve of these "excellent teachers", and if so, can we convince them to leave their more lucrative jobs elsewhere?).
It's much more difficult, but also much more worthwhile, to say "Let's figure out what excellent teaching and learning look like, in all their dimensions, and then let's see if we can figure out how to make it happen more often."
As far as education reform discussion topics go, I'd rather have the latter than the former.