(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Regular JBGB readers may recall the series of posts about Rock Star Pay for Rock Star Teachers based the Goldwater Institute report New Millenium Schools: Delivering Six-Figure Teacher Salaries in Return for Outstanding Student Learning Gains.
You may also remember Super Chart! from the Brookings Institution:
Super Chart! basically shows that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between traditionally certified, alternatively certified and uncertified teachers. The logical conclusion: shut down the education schools, let the schools hire who they think best, and allow them to reward success and remove failures.
Of course, this would be even better if we had an effective screen to help keep ineffective teachers out of the profession in the first place. In researching the $100k study, it became apparent to me that some of the high-quality foreign systems seemed to have figured this out, but I had never learned the secret. Statistical efforts to predict effective teaching in America have generally proven unsatisfying.
The Atlantic weighs in with an important article revealing the results of 20 years of Teach for America data answering the question: what makes an effective teacher? Read it now and watch the videos.
Really, go read it now. I’ll be here when you get back.
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Okay, so now tell me what you think in the comments section. It’s really not so complicated after all, and it screams out against our entire system of K-12 human resource development, doesn’t it?
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Wait – no child psychology classes? No student teaching for 6 months? How could they be great teachers with just a strong will, solid preparation, grit and high expectations for students?
We continue to see the same things here. Holding people out of the profession because they had a lower GPA 25 years ago just doesn’t make sense. Forcing people to take hours of course work does not make any sense when great teachers are coming through other programs all the time.
It is great to see TFA coming out with great data like this.
I like the part about the 23 year veteran earning $83,000 who has lost hope for the children and blames parents while her students fall from 66% at grade level to just 44% by the end of the school year.
Yeah, makes you wonder why people want to get rid of tenure, doesn’t it?
It’s a fascinating article. What I’d like to see next, though, is application of these findings to the larger mass of prospective teachers: master’s students in education schools, seniors in “regular” state university teacher education programs, people making career changes, etc. Do these sets of characteristics help sort out a group much more heterogenous than TFA applicants? Districts like DC and the RTT states may be doing good work relating student outcomes to individual teacher quality, but they’re working at the back end of the process – after the teachers are already in the system. We need to quickly move to the front end and make sure we’re getting the right people into the system.
“The logical conclusion: shut down the education schools, let the schools hire who they think best, and allow them to reward success and remove failures.”
What about: waive any requirement for Ed Schools, let K-12 schools hire who they think best, allow them to reward success and remove failures……and then let Ed Schools live or die in a market where customers (rookie teachers) would only choose them if they believed the Ed School would make them a coveted, high-performing teacher?
Sounds good to me GGW.
Ed schools are funny – in the President’s Educate to Innovate pitch this week they committed to producing 10,000 new STEM teachers a year by 2015! So admirable. But they already produce 7,500 and 75 universities committed – so their big announcement was that in 5 years they could maybe each recruit 33 new teachers a year. Funny.
http://www.abcte.org/blog/2010/01/insanity-is-not-innovation
People and organizations like your local NEA local would find ways to game any formal teacher evaluation mechanism. Consider: “an applicant’s college GPA alone is not as good a predictor as the GPA in the final two years of college”; simply switch majors from Geophysics to Communications. Consider: “This year, D.C. public schools have begun using a new evaluation system for all faculty and staff, from teachers to custodians. Each will receive a score, just like the students, at the end of the year. For teachers whose students take standardized tests, like Mr. Taylor, half their score will be based on how much their students improved. The rest will be based largely on five observation sessions conducted throughout the year by their principal, assistant principal, and a group of master educators.” In the unionized bureaucracy, insiders will shmooze the registrar before the term begins to shunt the disruptive students onto the newcomer or dissident teacher. The union will determine who is the “master educator” and “master educator” will come to mean “union thug”.
I do not intend to suggest that teacher evaluation is impossible, but that the US State-monopoly school system lacks incentives to develop and maintain effective evaluation mechanisms. Currently, financial incentivces strongly incline the system away from deploying effective evaluation mechanisms.
By far the best teacher evaluation system is parental choice. Hard to game *that* system!
Mr. Forster, I agree with you. Let the parents request teachers for their students, and have the option to say “No, not Mr/Mrs. X.”
Works at the university. The best professors have waiting lists, the new or untested ones, have to prove their salt, and the jerks, well, often times, their classrooms are sparse.