View 592 October 12 - 18, 2009 (original) (raw)

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Some Notes on Education

I found this article in Today's LA Times very interesting:

Fierce battle a preview of U.S. debate on education

Finding a way to link to it is another matter: it used to be I would Google the article title with the authors, and get a link to the LA Times itself, but today I am getting a link to http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx which in fact shows me the article (with red tinted key words, which you can get rid of by clicking on help, then back), but which isn't really a link without the key words. It's probably because I am still under the weather -- my visit to Kaiser yesterday served to reassure me that I'll get over this, but not just yet -- but I am not sure I understand what is happening with the links.

Googling "Method disputes long-held notions" gets a different link to press display and a sidebar by Jason Felch and Jason Song, but this time I wasn't able to figure out how to get the red highliter out of it. That article gives a number of long-held notions that now seem to be falsified, including the notion that class-size makes much difference to results, and that credentials have any predictive value in predicting teacher performance. The evidence is that the evaluation systems we use to determine how good or bad teachers are simply have no relevance.

The method in question is called "value added" education, and it's described in the article. The important point here is that a major main stream newspaper is running articles that at least challenge the usual presumptions -- and at least some teacher unions are paying attention.

The problem in US education is that it's pretty clear that one of the most important factors in education is teacher quality. Good teachers can have effects far beyond those of socio-economic background, and even culture. This has been demonstrated over and over. The effect goes beyond the startling achievements of some really good teachers. It reaches down in to the average and below average teachers, to the point where it is now estimated that if we could eliminate the worst 10% of teachers and replace them with "just average" the US education system would have a startling effect:

�Allowing ineffective teachers to remain in the classroom is literally dragging down the nation,� said education researcher Eric Hanushek of Stanford University�s Hoover Institution.

In a forthcoming paper, Hanushek estimates that replacing the nation�s worst 6% to 10% of instructors with merely average teachers would propel the United States from its below-average level into the ranks of the world�s top five educational systems.

So far, nobody is proposing even that. Most proponents hope to use value-added scores as one of several measures to identify teachers who need help. (Felch and Song, "Fierce Battle a preview..." )

Note that given union opposition to merit pay for good teachers, and of course even fiercer opposition to firing incompetent teachers, that kind of improvement is unlikely; but it's noteworthy that the evidence shows this would be one of the best things we could do for the country.

My modest proposal: every year the Principal ranks the teachers in the school into two categories, top 80% and bottom 20%. Out of the bottom 20% in a district, 10% have to leave each year: early retirement, quit, we don't care, but out. Choose the ones who go at random in a big drawing. Replace those. That would mean that 2% of the worst 20% would have to leave each year. They'd be replaced with teachers who have an 80% chance (statistically) of being better than the ones who left. It would take a while to improve the schools this way, but at least there would be steady improvement. We could couple that with another lottery: Principals rank the top 20% of teachers, and those are entered into a district wide lottery for a bonus.

I realize this will never be done, but it would almost certainly improve the schools.

At least idea like this are beginning to penetrate into the culture. Google Bill Gates Teacher Quality and you'll get some interesting links, including:

Teacher Quality: What Bill Gates and President
Obama Have in Common

and

http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/26/
bill-gates-letter-tech-enter-cz_vb_0126billgates.html

"Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school." Gates

Improving teacher quality is pretty simple just now: get rid of the worst 10% and replace them with average. Even better, find better ways of finding the best potential teachers and have them actually learn something instead of the incredibly dull Mickey Mouse junk taught in most education classes. Have the good teachers learn what it is they are to teach. They already know how to teach it. The best teachers generally hate the required education classes; they'd rather be spending their time learning substantive material. A good math teacher needs to learn more math, not more "math education", and there are plenty of studies showing this. It's pretty true for just about every other subject. There's little improvement in performance from getting advanced degrees in education.

If improving teacher quality is the best way to improve the education system, at least we know the goal -- and we can identify the enemy, which is the teacher unions and the professors of education whose livelihood depends on keeping the awful status quo. It will not be an easy fight. Meanwhile, for those with children to educate, it's something to think about.

I pointed all this out last spring after Gates's report. If you have not heard Gates on "the next big thing" there's more in the New York Times interview:
http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/01/25/opinion/25kristof.html

Of course actual falsification of the current assumptions isn't going to persuade the teacher unions, but it may begin to affect public understanding.

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Silicon Valley Lives Barney Frank spares venture capital.

In a rare bit of good news from Washington, the investment model that created Intel, Apple and Google will be allowed to exist. According to his draft legislation, Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank has rejected a Treasury plan to subject venture capital firms to "systemic risk" regulation. Now he has to ignore the whining from hedge funds and private equity firms that want venture investors to suffer under the same regulation that Washington has in mind for them.

Good news in this land of the free...

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