From what I can tell and what I have read, the quality of the teacher is the single most important factor in a child’s education. To successfully educate a child to adulthood and citizenship the child must have a continual series of good teachers throughout their school life.
You cannot improve teacher quality without having the ability to fire bad teachers. You can’t fire bad teachers with teacher’s unions in place. There is literally no way to improve education without eliminating or drastically changing teachers unions, at least here in the US.
I would be heartily in favor of paying teachers more money if we could fire bad and improve mediocre teachers. We can’t. To me, all discussion about education ends until we can. Writers like Gary Thomas, full of nebulous ideas, plans and missions, avoid the elephant in the room. Teachers need to have 3 things; a knowledge of the subject, a love of the subject and a connection with the student. Instead we have teachers who know nothing, teachers who see the subject matter as a distraction and the student as an abstraction. And we can do nothing about it.
And now, to add to the insanity, we hear that the actual child belongs to the teacher and not the parents.
Difficult to back that up in the research findings, or to agree what makes a good teacher very often, as it is bound up with the method used. But yes it's a critical component. Thomas does acknowledge that when he says progressive education can work with good teachers.
Sometimes research can be a distraction from reality and the answer can better be derived by common sense. Parents and children know a good teacher when they see one. The problem is that they rarely see one. If you don’t find a way to improve the quality of the teacher, nothing else really matters. And you can’t improve the quality of the teacher unless you can eliminate bad teachers.
An old statistic for example- in 2014 in CA, out of 300,000 permanent teachers, only 91 were dismissed. Is it conceivable that 99.997% of any profession is competent?
I completely agree with this -- people can argue educational policy all day, but what really matters is the teacher's competence, motivation, and infectious love of learning.
I think it's illuminating to try this formulation of the claim in other contexts:
"It's common sense that coaching quality is what really matters in athletic outcomes."
Well, I think most people acknowledge the importance and influence of great coaches; no one seriously believes that Belichik is the reason Tom Brady was a physical genius on the football field.
"It's common sense that managerial quality is responsible for most job performance outcomes." I believe that the Pareto distribution holds for many jobs like sales, where 20% of salespeople are responsible for 80% of new business (and I think it holds up in other domains as well, though certainly not *all*). A bad manager is of course exponentially worse than a mediocre one, while a "good" manager might not be *exponentially* better than a mediocre one.
There is a deep discomfort, at least in American culture, with acknowledging that abstract, academic thinking is a talent like anything else. Obviously this discomfort is bound up in the country's racial history. No doubt the dismal achievement among certain cohorts of American children could be significantly improved, but it will not come from "super teachers." The metric I would be obsessed with as an educational apparatchik would be two-parent homes.
From what I can tell and what I have read, the quality of the teacher is the single most important factor in a child’s education. To successfully educate a child to adulthood and citizenship the child must have a continual series of good teachers throughout their school life.
You cannot improve teacher quality without having the ability to fire bad teachers. You can’t fire bad teachers with teacher’s unions in place. There is literally no way to improve education without eliminating or drastically changing teachers unions, at least here in the US.
I would be heartily in favor of paying teachers more money if we could fire bad and improve mediocre teachers. We can’t. To me, all discussion about education ends until we can. Writers like Gary Thomas, full of nebulous ideas, plans and missions, avoid the elephant in the room. Teachers need to have 3 things; a knowledge of the subject, a love of the subject and a connection with the student. Instead we have teachers who know nothing, teachers who see the subject matter as a distraction and the student as an abstraction. And we can do nothing about it.
And now, to add to the insanity, we hear that the actual child belongs to the teacher and not the parents.
Difficult to back that up in the research findings, or to agree what makes a good teacher very often, as it is bound up with the method used. But yes it's a critical component. Thomas does acknowledge that when he says progressive education can work with good teachers.
Sometimes research can be a distraction from reality and the answer can better be derived by common sense. Parents and children know a good teacher when they see one. The problem is that they rarely see one. If you don’t find a way to improve the quality of the teacher, nothing else really matters. And you can’t improve the quality of the teacher unless you can eliminate bad teachers.
An old statistic for example- in 2014 in CA, out of 300,000 permanent teachers, only 91 were dismissed. Is it conceivable that 99.997% of any profession is competent?
If you want to use data about firing teachers I'd be inclined also to look at data on what changes outcomes for children...
I completely agree with this -- people can argue educational policy all day, but what really matters is the teacher's competence, motivation, and infectious love of learning.
Studies repeatedly find teachers account for 10% in the variation of student outcomes
Really? I did not know that.
It is hard to find low hanging fruit https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-teacher-effectiveness-initiative-fell-short-study-finds
I think it's illuminating to try this formulation of the claim in other contexts:
"It's common sense that coaching quality is what really matters in athletic outcomes."
Well, I think most people acknowledge the importance and influence of great coaches; no one seriously believes that Belichik is the reason Tom Brady was a physical genius on the football field.
"It's common sense that managerial quality is responsible for most job performance outcomes." I believe that the Pareto distribution holds for many jobs like sales, where 20% of salespeople are responsible for 80% of new business (and I think it holds up in other domains as well, though certainly not *all*). A bad manager is of course exponentially worse than a mediocre one, while a "good" manager might not be *exponentially* better than a mediocre one.
There is a deep discomfort, at least in American culture, with acknowledging that abstract, academic thinking is a talent like anything else. Obviously this discomfort is bound up in the country's racial history. No doubt the dismal achievement among certain cohorts of American children could be significantly improved, but it will not come from "super teachers." The metric I would be obsessed with as an educational apparatchik would be two-parent homes.
Education does work though...
You make a very good point.