It’s the teachers, stupid!
Malcolm Gladwell’s story on teachers in the New Yorker is right on. It is very difficult to predict a person’s success in many fields. The key is to put together a process that will assess, support, and review new folks in a given job. The downside to this uncertainty are the stakes:
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.The stakes are great. Most towns, Amherst included, will be facing incredible budget deficits over at least the next few years. Budgets will be slashed. Historically, our town has taken a “no-decision” approach to budget cutting - slash everyone by x%. This is nothing less than a lack of leadership. Hopefully the town’s Budget Choices Committee report will bring back a core set of priorities that must be preserved at the expense of lesser priorities so that we can keep our infrastructure strong.
What is the core priority in our schools? It’s the teachers, stupid. We need to increase investment in our teachers at exactly the time we will be cutting our budgets. Teachers are our leverage to ensure our kids’ education. We need to cut programs that are not core so that we can invest more fully in our our teachers. Increased development & training. Increased compensation. Improved work processes. Improved feedback on who is good and who is not. Improved status in our town for our teachers. We need to build a culture of excellence in our schools around the teachers themselves. Build Amherst schools as a destination for the best teachers around the country.
The fact that it is difficult to predict whether a newly hired teacher will be a good teacher or a bad teacher means that the feedback mechanisms once they are in the job are all important.
Our kids have had both great teachers, ok teachers, and bad teachers in the years they have spent in the Amherst schools. Our kids know who the good and bad teachers are. Now that my daughter is at Amherst High, she and her friends talk amongst themselves about which teachers are good and bad - and I mean academically, not who is mean or nice, who will teach them so they can be successful. As an involved parent and volunteer in the elementary and middle school, I had an idea who the good and bad teachers were. Talking with teachers in the elementary, middle, and high schools - they knew who the good and bad teachers were.
My question is - is this feedback getting to the administrators, whose job it is to do something about it. If we are to make it about great teachers, then our administrators need to set the bar, put development in place to support teachers who need the training, and help those that cannot effectively teach our kids find new jobs.
If the feedback mechanisms are not in place, then our administrators will be missing valid information about the performance of their teams. Peer reviews are very important in an organization. Customer reviews are very important in an organization (and if you think businesses are the only organizations with customers, then we have a problem already).
Last week the School Committee voted NO when asked by the community to have an online feedback mechanism for the principals of their schools. The top reasons given for not wanting feedback:
- Who would answer them?
- We are over-worked already?
- The suggestions would be useless.
- The suggestions would all be mean/criticisms.
- People can already give suggestions in boxes at the schools.
We need to build a culture where our schools invite feedback, cherish feedback, enable anyone to submit ideas, criticism, praise about their work. We need to move away from a beseiged culture to a culture of working together to forge stronger schools.
School Committee chair and friend Andy Churchill laid out the leadership argument here, “I guess I’m going to vote against it, even though I support it, even though that’s lame.”
We need leadership from the top if we are going to create a culture that will attract the best teachers from around the country. Or we can create a culture of lame.
