Magazine Preview – Building a Better Teacher – NYTimes.com.
A long but worthwhile piece on improving education by improving teachers, rather than worrying about standardized test scores or charter schools or class size:
When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
Seems obvious from my perspective as a bit of through put in the educational system. The difficulty seems that it’s hard to nail down exactly what separates the good from the bad. How would a well intentioned administrator implement a program to improve teachers? We don’t seem to know what to measure.
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”
I share his curiosity about the subject. Our little one will be 3 this summer. Soon enough she’ll be headed off to a local pre-k program and become grist for mill of public education. Should concerned parents try private or charter education? The local elementary school is well rated, but is that enough?
