Seems Like a Good Idea

It's hard to tell whether this is big news or not. On the one hand, the city seems to be moving away (at least slightly) from their position that bad schools must be closed at once. On the other hand, the whole thing seems awfully limited in scope, so we should exercise a little caution before hailing it as the wave of the future.

For those of you who don't like following links, the New York Times is reporting that the city and UFT have come to an agreement on following a transformation model for 11 of the lowest-performing schools in the city. As the name suggests, it's about turning schools around rather than closing them. The schools will hire master teachers who will train other staff at the school to try to develop the teachers there, student data will be used as a factor in rating teacher effectiveness, and ineffective teachers will face an expedited hiring process.

Now, with the caveat that all my information on this comes from a pretty short article in the newspaper, I'm going to go out on a limb to say that this makes sense to me. I've long been a proponent of working to better develop the teachers we have rather than fire everyone and tap into the imaginary pool of master teachers who just can't find a job as replacements. So I'm a big fan of that. I also broadly agree with the idea of stricter methods for evaluating teachers. Using student data as one of several factors for evaluating teachers makes sense to me too.

I'm impressed that the city and the union seem to have found a middle way forward here. Too often both sides dig into their bunkers and lob grenades back and forth. That's unhelpful to everyone. Let's hope the spirit of collaboration continues.

Anyone Can Do It

Other than teaching, is there a profession anywhere else in the world where the movement is toward less training and preparation? Are there any programs that will give you a medical license for doing work in a hospital without going to medical school? Is there a movement to make people lawyers who've never been to law school? What about teaching makes it so different?

Here in New York, the Board of Regents has approved a program that will allow programs like Teach for America to create their own masters programs so that participants can get their masters without going to an actual education school.

Not to be flip, but would we allow Doctors for America (if such a program exists) to grant medical degrees based on work done in poor hospitals around the country? Would we allow them to set up non-accredited programs to grant those degrees and then accept them as valid?

A few things seem pretty clear to me when I read a story like this. First, traditional education schools have messed up. Either they've screwed up the way they prepare teachers or they've screwed up their own PR because people seem not to think that they're preparing teachers well. It's a problem no matter which way you cut it.

Second, people think that because they've been in school, they're an expert on school policies and how schools should be run and that everyone can just do it. That's why we have lawyers running school systems and masters degrees being given by non-accredited institutions. We wouldn't put up with this in the medical profession, but teaching is seen as somehow less.

I do have to say that while I have major misgivings about what this actually means and what it indicates, I do strongly believe that an education program should have a strong focus on practical, inside the classroom elements. I don't think that should totally replace theory (which helps inform those inside the classroom elements), but they do need to be a strong component of any program.

What I oppose is the de-professionalization of teaching. I can't help but think that this is a step down that road.

Experience, Inexperience, and Success

I was just reading yesterday another ringing endorsement for alternative teacher certification routes in a study that found that kids with alternatively certified teachers perform just as well on standardized testing as kids with traditionally certified teachers. As if often the case when we discuss these studies, let's assume that standardized test scores are an appropriate measure for student learning. The bottom line on this, then, would seem to be that being a teacher doesn't necessarily mean having a traditional background in education. Rather, anyone with the right disposition and the appropriate content knowledge can be just as successful as someone who's spent years learning the ins and outs of pedagogy and child development.

But of course, things are never that simple.

I read a study maybe a week ago now (and which after 30 minutes of searching every source I could think of still can't find the link to) that compared the levels of student learning in various traditional public, charter, and for-profit schools. As is often the case in these studies, the traditional public schools came out at the bottom of the totem poll of success. But even among those charter and for-profit schools (the ultimate in market-based educational solutions), there was variation. According to the research, the deciding factor of success is the level of educational experience and expertise of the people running the schools. That is to say, the people who knew about education did a better job running schools than the people who knew about administration.

Take that idealocrats.

So now we're in an interesting situation. On the one hand, research says that knowing about education is helpful for running a school/school system. On the other hand, research says that this background isn't necessarily so important if you're actually in the classroom. Does that seem backwards to anyone else?

I have a few guesses as to why that might be the case and most of them involve which curricula get picked and the mandates for how lessons and days should go. That said, I think that I would always err on the side of going to the educational experts. Why wouldn't you go to the people who know what they're doing?

A Matter of Conclusions

One thing that never fails to amaze me is how two people can start with an almost identical premise and set of facts and then leap to two radically different conclusions. My case in point is Malcolm Gladwell's meditation on teacher recruitment in last week's New Yorker.

Gladwell starts from the position that teacher quality has huge impacts on student achievement. Great teachers produce great results and bad teachers produce bad results. I'm with him so far. He then goes on to compare the process of finding great teachers to the process of finding great NFL quarterbacks. That is to say, it's pretty much impossible to do in advance. The only way to really know if someone is going to be a great quarterback is by putting them into an NFL game and seeing how they do. That's because there's nothing really like being in the NFL. Similarly, there's no truly equivalent experience to teaching in a classroom. (I've been there. I know.)

So far, I'm totally with him. Good teachers are important and it's next to impossible to tell who they'll be in advance. Makes perfect sense. But it's also where things start to come off the rails.

Gladwell's solution to the problem is that we should forget about teacher training programs, forget about teacher tenure, and rework the salary structure for educators. In theory I'm in favor of a reworked salary structure and I can even go along with some changes to the practice of tenure. But ditching teacher training? Isn't that the exact wrong thing to do?

The mistake Gladwell seems to be making is in thinking that teaching ability (like NFL quarterbacking) is an immutable trait – either you've got it or you don't. This is patently absurd and disregards any notion that teachers (or quarterbacks) can improve. Just because a teacher has a bad first year doesn't mean they won't have a great second year. Or fourth year. Rather than focus our efforts on bouncing people from the system, let's focus on making sure the people we do have are best equipped to handle the job we're giving them.

When I see that teacher quality is important and that we don't know who great teachers are going to be ahead of time, the conclusion I come to is that we'd better be investing our energy and resources into helping ensure that all teachers can become great teachers. It just makes sense.

Confusion at the Times

In an editorial yesterday, the New York Times praised New York City's efforts to bring in a more qualified, higher achieving teaching corps. According to the Times the efforts have been a success and New York's kids are reaping the benefits (presumably in the way of higher test scores, which I'll address tomorrow).

While I'm all for having the best teachers possible and thought it was great for the editorial page of the paper of record to be addressing educational issues, I'm a little confused as to the reasoning employed here.

First, the paper praises the city for doing away with temporary licenses for uncertified teachers and increasing the standards for teacher preparation programs. Then, the editorial praises programs like the Teaching Fellows and Teach for America that operate on provisional teaching licenses with no more than a month of training before entering the classroom.

I think both approaches are shown to have merit. However, they are not the same approach and that needs to be recognized. Unless we start recognizing what actually works in the classroom, we're never going to be able to improve education as much as we'd like.