I have no interest in defending ineffective teachers, but we also have to talk honestly about what schools can and can’t do to help students. I don’t doubt that the effectiveness of a teacher is the single largest factor in determining a student’s success, but this is only in terms of the factors schools can actually control. If we include all the relevant factors, the data seems clear that socio-economic status dwarfs every other factor. Until policy-makers acknowledge this fact, educational policy will continue in its teacher-punitive path to the detriment of all.

No research says how much of what’s recalled at test time remains permanently in memory, nor to what practical use, if any, that information is later put, but that’s of no concern … Their interest in performance ends when the scores are posted.

The other theory isn’t very popular and, frankly, is just a lot harder.

4,500 Teach for America recruits placed in public schools this year after five weeks of summer preparation

If that sounds like progress to you, then I suspect your concern has more to do with budgets than with students.

Pupils show greater motivation, are better behaved and are more likely to be independent and strategic thinkers when teachers are not obsessed by grades.

Suddenly, the entire test-and-punish crowd is explaining to us how test scores dont mean anything and how test scores are tied much more to out-of-school conditions.

Fire D.C. Rhee and her entire staff–or at least cut their pay

Matthew Yglesias » Spending on Sports vs Spending on Teaching.

There’s not much need to say anything here, is there?

Pet dogs failed basic intelligence tests that wolves and wild dogs passed with ease but proved more adept at social interaction, according to the research … Dogs are great at social tasks … wolves are much, much better at general problem solving.

Are we training dogs or raising wolves? Wolf pups need freedom to explore and learn the environment and to practice the skills they’ll need as adults. They also need plenty of play in which they can safely make mistakes.

There’s a balance, of course, like the one that exists between shepherds and coyote teachers, but the current system is shepherding our students into helpless domestic dogs, to mix the metaphors.

Experienced journalist Michael Gerson enthusiastically supports the idea that a teacher in a troubled DC school, just “fresh out of college, with five weeks of training, was thrown into the deep end of the teaching profession in a low-income school.” Thus I propose a similar solution for the terrible state of newspaper journalism, which is losing readers in droves:

• Bring in a bold, visionary leader who has three years reporting experience, during which time the person, like Michelle Rhee, claims to have increased circulation from 13% to over 90% (but has no data to support that claim).
• Support this leader’s plan to fire a significant share of reporters and replace them with energetic recent college grads from elite schools who become reporters for a few years before moving on to other, more lucrative careers. (No journalism majors need apply. Smart people already know how to write and they’ll be taught everything they need to know about reporting in a five week intensive summer course.)
• Chastise current reporters for recoiling when the new leader goes around the country blaming journalists for the shameful decline in circulation.
• Consider it perfectly reasonable when the leader says things like [borrowing from DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee], “As a newspaper reporter, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for ensuring citizens read the newspaper daily, despite obstacles. You can’t say, ‘My readers are spending more time on the internet,’ or ‘Young people today aren’t in the habit of reading the newspaper,’ or ‘Their checks bounce, so their subscriptions are cut off.”
• Expect that the good reporters that print journalism needs to attract in order to remain solvent to come rushing to its doors upon hearing the leader’s claims of success with her readers during her own brief reporting stint [again borrowing from Rhee]: “Their reading habits did not change, their interests did not change, their commute did not change, their occupational demands did not change. What changed were the reporters writing articles for them every single day. And that made every bit of difference.”

If journalists discount this as a simplistic, misguided approach of someone who doesn’t understand the news business, please consider that Michael Gerson’s Teach-for-America approach to improving education is just as simplistic and even more misguided.

This comment was written by “efavorite.”

Some principles I start with:

• Evaluations of teacher performance should not be based on standardized tests taken by students. Instead, evaluations should match the primary work of the discipline. For example, English teachers should be evaluated on their students’ interest and confidence in reading and writing, their ability to read and write increasingly complex texts of a wide variety, their ability to present their ideas verbally, etc. This is messy.
• Certainly, students’ abilities should guide a teacher’s evaluation, but this should be based on a comparison between students’ abilities when they entered the class and their abilities when they left it. Extenuating factors should be taken into consideration where appropriate. This is also messy.
• Teachers should not earn pay increases due merely to perseverance. There may certainly be an expected yearly increase to match cost-of-living, etc., but this need not be required and teachers should have the opportunity for greater increases based on performance.
• Schools should continue to encourage teachers to be well-educated, which means keeping pay increases for degrees while providing additional monetary support in attaining those degrees.

Given these principles, it should be clear that any effective evaluation of teachers will be more complicated, nuanced, and time-consuming than a standardized test and will require more expertise in teaching and the subject area than most principals or assistant principals can reasonably be expected to have.

This is why I think we need to restructure “administration” in public education. A school will always need a principal: someone with a guiding vision for the school who can speak for it, be its public face, and be the deciding voice in difficult decisions. However, beneath this guiding position, the administration should split into two branches: operations and academics. The operations branch would handle concerns like budget, scheduling, school food, discipline, etc. The academics branch would be focused solely on training and evaluating teachers. The two branches would have to come to agreement on decisions that would impact both (such as scheduling, for example), but otherwise they would function independently.

The academics branch would be staffed only by teachers with proven expertise: a board of educators, if you will. These members would continue to teach in the school (perhaps one or two courses), but the majority of their time would be focused on working with and evaluating teachers. In schools with distinct subject areas, each subject area should be represented by at least one experienced teacher on the board.

This board would be able to pay close attention to teachers, offer guidance, and make substantive and informed decisions about teachers’ effectiveness and development. Effectiveness would be measured against the general collective wisdom of the board and the standards defined by the board for specific disciplines. This may or may not reflect larger district, state, or national standards, depending on the winds of the current political climate. At any rate, this board would decide on the pay increases of each teacher, whether or not remediation should be given to a teacher, and whether or not to recommend that a teacher be released.

This system would also benefit the operations side of the school because they would now be able to focus purely on operations.

As for costs, the division of these priorities would mean that fewer administrative staff would be needed for operations, which would free up some funds for the academic branch. Also, since each member of the academic branch would also continue to teach at least one course, it’s not a net loss for the school. The bottom line is that schools will not become more effective unless we are willing to invest in that effectiveness: better pay more wisely distributed for teachers, reasonable class sizes, sufficient resources, etc.

I realize the gap between thinking about this idea and enacting this idea is massive, but so are the problems facing education.

I would love to see others critique, expand, or refine this idea (besides just telling me I’m a foolish dreamer). Is this a good idea? Has it been tried somewhere already? What new problems does it raise? Is it worth the effort to try it? What would it take to make the experiment a reality?

5. In your professional opinion, the best way to improve public education is to…

A. Privatize it.

B. Siphon money away from it to strengthen teachers’ and students’ will to survive.

C. Reduce benefits for teachers.

D. Villanize unions & scapegoat teachers, while simultaneously pandering to big business lobbyists.

E. All of the above.