Teacher lottery

Interesting summary on Kane's Work on teacher effectiveness in the Harvard Review. I think the most interesting evidence found in the article is that:

• Kane and his coauthors found that schools can gain a fairly clear picture of a teacher’s effectiveness in the first two or three years. Beyond that point, the returns on experience—as teachers improve with practice—begin to diminish. “You’d expect the distribution of teacher effectiveness to get tighter as the years pass,” Kane says. “But we see the opposite. There’s a tendency for the more effective teachers to get better faster, while the weaker teachers don’t catch up.”

I am fascinated with this incredibly wide variation in teacher performance. The reason for the phenomenon above is that no one gets fired and everyone gets the same raise each year. So poor performers really have no incentive to improve. They can just continue to muddle through in their permanent state of in-house retirement.
Meanwhile, the many teachers who care continue to improve their teaching and continue to look for ways to reach more students and create more student success.

So the system will continue to harbor this wide division of teacher performance and education becomes a lottery – if you get the great, caring teachers you win – if not, you lose……for life.

Fluff no more

Multiple posts today because there is just so much going on in education. The first concerns a great blog post and subsequent comments by Joanne Jacobs on New York City’s teacher and student requirements. The blog post is definitely worth a read as are the comments that people have left about the post.

One of the things that absolutely drives me crazy in education is the fluff that gets passed off as critical elements of the teaching practice or learning process. Joanne’s article calling out New York for excessive fluff is dead on. For me, the two most annoying terms to me are ‘reflection’ and ‘portfolio’. Only in education can going home and thinking about what you did right and wrong during the day can have a fancy term and be held in such high esteem. And only in education could you submit a collection of your best work and have it be the determination as to your ability to perform on a daily basis.

Now – both of these have a place in helping teachers become better teachers so I will end the extremist rhetoric with that thought. Yes teachers should take a good hard look at what they are doing right and wrong. And yes we should look at a portfolio of their work to ensure that we see signs of solid performance. But we should not talk about it as if this brings teaching into the highest levels of achievement. We need real performance evaluations to truly judge our teachers.

A very old house

Jay Matthew’s looks at staffing our schools. He uses DC KIPP as an example where the principal had to fire 2 teachers because they were disorganized and were not improving even after coaching. He is correct in imagining the nightmare that would result if the teachers were left in place. Students in those classes would suffer academically and it would be very difficult to get them back on track.

I don’t think DC KIPP is alone. In the education world, or in any other world, there is a good chance that 10% of your staff is not going to work out. The problem in education is that we are looking at 3.2 million teachers which means that 320,000 teachers need to be replaced right now. Even more depressing is that it means that 6.4 million students are being adversely affected because we cannot replace those teachers.

But education is like owning a very old house. When you go to do a seemingly simple repair, it ends up requiring a ton of work and a ton of money. When you go to fix a simple hole in the wall you find the insulation is gone, the wood is rotting and the plaster is cracked.

In the KIPP example there is a great principal who knows what to look for in a great teacher and is spending time in the classroom understanding the dynamics of that environment. Sadly, we cannot assume that every school has that same leadership. In order for us to be able to accomplish this wholesale replacement of 10% of the workforce, we have to have good tools to observe the teacher and we have to have principals trained on using those tools.

Looking at firing two teachers in order to ensure students have a great year seems like a great solution to take to scale. But in order to do that we have to fix the principals and we have to find a great tool to give them to help fix teaching. That would require a ton more work and probably a ton more money.