Coaches get to pick who is on their team. They have tryouts and some even get paid for it. But this only applies to high performing athletic schools (the ones you read about in the local paper that win county/state/regional titles). Other schools are purely volunteer efforts. The coach may be a teacher willing to give up free time everyday before and during the sports schedule.
For example, my history teacher was also the soccer coach. He wasn't great at it but someone had to wrangle a bunch of wiry teenagers and make them practice. He got nothing from it except the respect of his players.
The only teachers that get to chose their students are in governor's or magnet schools. Here students have to apply every year to be considered for the rigorous programs. Many teachers also apply for the job because of better pay, better students, and better curriculum. Teachers that don't perform can be fired. With a school full of motivated and talented students its entirely the responsibility of the teachers, they can't hide behind the excuse of lazy students and parents because, here, there are none.
The teacher in a poor school district doesn't have much of a choice. Some things don't work no matter how hard you try and the blame can't rest entirely on the teachers. But having poor students shouldn't be a fireable offense.
People don't really care about whether students learn anything, the resultant catastrophes not being visible for years and then being hard to blame on anyone in particular. But they care about sports teams losing, which they see right away and makes them feel like losers right now, and it's easy to blame the coach.
I clicked on the link to this article expecting some thoughtful questions on why poor teaching is a contributing factor to poor education overall in America, and how the system is doing much about it, but I feel like I read an entire article that can be summarized as "A lot of teachers are doing good work, sometimes under tough conditions, but plenty of them need firing too. We need a way to figure out the ones that need to be fired, somehow. Possibly involving test scores."
In my opinion, the question we need to be asking is not "how do we find bad apples" but "how do we improve the quality of the apple tree." Good education is hard to come by regardless of what teacher, or indeed, school district you come from. The problem may not be how good is teacher performance, or even how good is student performance, but what is the quality of the teaching goals and design of lessons. Once we've successfully answered that question, then we can focus on the teachers who consistently have "losing seasons."
One word for you: "cut". Turn out for the basketball team short, slow, and unable to shoot, and you will not be suiting up. Hell, turn up as a "project" and you may be cut. A kid at my high school did not make the team until his junior year (as I recall). He got an athletic scholarship to college, was in the running for NBA rookie of the year, and eventually picked up a championship ring, not as a star but as a respected bit player. When he was 14 he could be cut from the team. I doubt his Algebra I teacher had any such option.
Another word: "recruit". Even the public high schools end up with a lot of athletes who do not live within the nominal boundaries. The high school a co-worker's son once attended is now a power in football. Why? The parents of a star athlete concluded they liked the program and found an apartment in town. A city high school is a power in girls' basketball, with players from all over the city. And then there are the Catholic high schools, the private schools, etc.
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."
Mlodinow in "The Drunkard's Walk" makes the very good point that the 'losing streaks' that lead to coach firings (and Hollywood studio boss sackings) are almost entirely explainable by perfectly normal random variation.
> what is the difference between coaching football or basketball and teaching history or English?
1. A sports coach can force a player out of the games or out of the team if that player doesn't attend the practices. Teachers have no such power: students can't be forced to practice the material out of school, and they can't be removed from class for not practicing.
1. Standardized testing reflects, at best, decently the purpose and aims of general education.
A competitive game of fotball, on the other hand, reflects perfectly the purpose and aims of football training. Simply said, the purpose of sports is to train a player to win the game. The purpose of general education is not to write a test successfully. Rather -- it shouldn't be the purpose of general education.
The purpose of education is to disseminate knowledge and critical thinking skills. That purpose needs to be measured in a correct fashion.
Think how silly it would be, instead of a competitive game of football, that each team was given a set of drills to perform, on their own, on an empty field, to prove their worth in football. It'd be absurd. It doesn't fit the purpose of their training.
The purpose of education shouldn't be to pass some tests.
A more constructive conversation, I believe, would be to find places, distinct disconnects if you will, where the method used to measure progress and achievement in education does not reflect the purpose and aims of education.
Some football coaches do well because they have good players, not because they coach them to do their absolute best. Other coaches do well because they get lucky and win games by 1 or 2 points even though they don't coach very good football teams (Michigan State springs to mind). I wonder whether student test scores give a more or less accurate impression of performance than on-field performance. The existence of the tool is surely better than nothing, however.
The 'Before' and 'After' system can work well for coaching. But good teaching is not necessarily coaching students to produce better results in tests. According to me, a good teacher will help students gain an interest in the subject, appreciate the subject better which in-turn helps you perform better. A student is capable of flunking in-spite of being taught well.
In my opinion teachers should be assessed by parents and the management by having a system where every now and then parents are allowed to be part of the class.
A student is capable of flunking in-spite of being taught well.
Absolutely. This is why you don't evaluate teacher performance based on a sample size of 1.
If only teachers had a statistically significant number of students (e.g., 40+) every year! Then this process of evaluating them based on student performance wouldn't be so hopeless!
Good results don't necessarily imply good teaching either. If it's a class of 40 reasonably motivated and intelligent students they would all perform well irrespective of how they were taught.
What about the effect of bad students? Isn't education a two-way process involving a supplier and a consumer?
I got my highest grades in subjects I enjoyed (Business and Mathematics) and my lowest grades in those I didn't (English). Was my English teacher not as good because I got a D yet the Business and Maths teachers got an A or B out of me? Does the fact that other students got A in English and a D or E in Business or Maths show that actually the English teacher is 'better'? Or was it just an anomaly?
Sure, there are no doubt a tiny minority of teachers who (in the UK at least) have paid thousands for a degree, gone through some form of postgraduate training and accreditation (years in total) only to land a job and then throw it all away. However, my own opinion is that 'bad teachers' are an excuse for bad students and (anecdotally and just in my experience) poor parental/primary caregiver role models. I saw the same 'my son/daughter is performing poorly because of bad teachers' come from parents whose children were more adept at petty crime and drug dealing.
Visibility and Value. Athletics are far more visible, and thus on the community's mind to a greater degree; plus athletics has a higher value than education for most of our parents here.
In our community, the football team is number one. The team (and coach) receive far more media coverage for their wins and losses than classroom students get for test scores. Parents of football players value the victory more than academics as well. Parents will purchase hundreds of dollars in gear, shoes, summer camps, etc. but those same kids have no internet access, no notebooks, no highlighters, no basic computers or software.
Losing 10% of football games in a season gets the coach fired because everyone hears about it every day and because it is important to the school board and parents. 50% of our students drop out before graduation and it gets a paragraph on page 6 of the local paper, and no one cares because we have a great school: the football team won the conference again.
There was a very interesting study done of the Shaker Heights school system in Cleveland that found parental involvement was the main determining factor of student success.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't good and bad teachers out there and that we shouldn't find ways to reward the good and drive out the bad, but I think it's focusing too much of the attention on the wrong problem.
That was sort of the point of the study. That even in a very affluent school district that different populations views of parental vs school involvement were primarily responsible for the large gap in student achievement.
I like the way they handle this at the Sudbury Valley School (http://sudval.org). They essentially have realized that there is no objective way to measure a good teacher, so instead they take the darwinian approach. Every year all students (and staff) vote on which teachers thay want to keep, culling out the bad ones and just keeping the good ones.
They actually have had teachers so good that they have been re-elected every year for more than 40 years.
I'm glad they have good results with this system. I recall a teacher in my high school who was very unpopular with many students. He was an ex military man and what I am about to tell you will sound like a cliché: He believed in strict discipline, penalized students heavily for being slightly late or having corrections on submitted work, and so on. He actually invented a new form of punishment at the school involving hard physical labour. I don't recall anyone having a Hollywood epiphany when subjected to his brutal style, no wonderful breakthroughs or students discovering their hidden depths.
He would never have been re-elected by students. But was he a bad teacher? I don't know! I entered the school interested in the material he taught and left it still interested. Was he a bad teacher? Honestly, I have no idea. All I can say is that he was an unpopular teacher amongst many students.
I hear lots of smart people arguing that education can be improved by fired low performing teachers, breaking unions, enforcing discipline, raising test scores, etc. What I don't hear is lots of smart people saying, "Hey. I'm smart. I care about education. I think I'll become a teacher."
Not a single critic of education has come forward to say, I want to help by becoming a really great teacher.
You can't fix a broken system by becoming part of the system. Many critics of public education have set up their own systems, of course--the whole charter school, Montessori, and homeschooling movements for example--but right now the best bet is to rescue children from the public school system and put them into something better.
Even if you can fix the public school system, becoming a teacher is not the way to do it.
The one difference that stands out to me is that sports coaches are allowed to pick their students for the teams and punish those who do not work. As opposed to most teachers which have limited control over who is in their classes and how to punish them if they are slacking ( besides bad grades ).
a) Coaches can pick and choose their players.
b) They get paid for the risk. Many schools pay more for a football coach than they do for the school principle.
Imagine if each class had to have academic try outs? Now imagine that teachers got massive wages and bonuses for winning academic competitions? Now reflect on the number of deadshits in your classes that never, ever, would have passed an academic try out for anything.
That's right, it's a stupid comparison.
The only good thing is that most people would know they have a second or third rate education. Because they never met the cut to get into schools who used such a stupid system.
That's the reason you can't compare charter to regular schools in a lot of cases. In all 3 of the states that I've lived in, charter schools have competitive entry, or at least an opt-in lottery.
If you took only the students who can pass a test or whose family cares enough about their education to enter a lottery for a charter school and put them in one room, and of coruse they are going to do better than a group of randomly selected kids.
Charter schools really only count when the student population is equivalent to the school it is being compared to, which is a lot less common.
> b) They get paid for the risk. Many schools pay more for a football coach than they do for the school principle.
Some good points in your comment, but this one is off - coaches aren't getting paid for the risk. They're getting paid because talented ones bring in immense amounts of revenue and are in short supply - thus, the wages/price of coaches sets in at a high equilibrium.
There's not the same scarcity of organizational administrators as there are sports coaches, which requires an extremely specialized skillset that's in high demand. Thus the, hmm, "increased revenue over alternative candidates" number is lower for principles than coaches. A lot lower. Thus, they get paid less.
Excuse my ignorance and lack of better knowledge with regard to American school system but what is the thing with high-paid coaches in school? What is the connection between a school and (semi?)professional sports?
A lot of schools charge admission to watch the sporting event, so even though the kids don't earn any money (and many times have to pay to play) the school makes a fair amount of money from the sports. The better the coach, the better the team. The better the team, the more people will come and watch. The more people that watch, the more money for the school.
The kids are not paid directly[1], but the kids that go to the schools that you see on TV are paid indirectly in the form of scholarships and other perqs.
Depending on the school, a full ride scholarship has a value in the range of $10,000 to $50,000 and up.
[1] "Gifts" do happen, but there are severe penalties for both the kids and the schools when caught.
Why do wealthy corporations fire poorly performing employees but not bad corporate officers?
That question is probably more important and relevant than trying to find yet another rationalization for attacking the middle class. That articles like this appear on HN at all is an embarrassment.
At most Silicon Valley companys I've worked at, anything less than excellent performance resulted in executives losing their position - the equivalent of being "fired" (In some rare cases those executives stayed with the company in a reduced role, but that was rarely the case - who wants to go from Senior VP of marketing to manager of technical publications - and the requisite $500K+ year of compensation to $125K)
On the flip side, as long as the line employee was performing reasonably adequately - they were rarely fired. Only those who were performing abysmally were part of the typical 10% annual churn.
Your experience may be different, but, that was mine.
I've seen the opposite far more than what you are implying.
It is a lot easier for the board to fire the execs, once you get to C-level it is practically a revolving door (and why a lot of them have contracts).
Let me tell you right now, the CEO of BP was not the one making bad decisions on the oil rig. He probably didn't have a clue about what was happening on any given day on any given rig considering they own thousands. But he was gone a heck of a lot faster than whoever it was that made the decisions that blew the place up and killed 11 people.
That question is probably more important and relevant than trying to find yet another rationalization for attacking the middle class.
The middle class doesn't consist completely of schoolteachers. In fact, it largely consists of families who are getting screwed over by a shitty public school system.
For example, my history teacher was also the soccer coach. He wasn't great at it but someone had to wrangle a bunch of wiry teenagers and make them practice. He got nothing from it except the respect of his players.
The only teachers that get to chose their students are in governor's or magnet schools. Here students have to apply every year to be considered for the rigorous programs. Many teachers also apply for the job because of better pay, better students, and better curriculum. Teachers that don't perform can be fired. With a school full of motivated and talented students its entirely the responsibility of the teachers, they can't hide behind the excuse of lazy students and parents because, here, there are none.
The teacher in a poor school district doesn't have much of a choice. Some things don't work no matter how hard you try and the blame can't rest entirely on the teachers. But having poor students shouldn't be a fireable offense.