What's Wrong with Education?

Here's the bottom line and it is exactly where you would expect it to be, the teacher. This bit is from a NY Times article by Elizabeth Green:

Around the country, education researchers were beginning to address similar questions. The testing mandates in No Child Left Behind had generated a sea of data, and researchers were now able to parse student achievement in ways they never had before. A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.

The article goes on to report how hard it is to turn this clear fact into better teaching. And the diagnosis is obvious: teachers need better teacher training.

But as somebody who went through "teacher training" and then flubbed in the field, I can attest that the training given is useless. I had courses in education history, in educational philosophy, in instructional methodology, in educational psychology, etc. But in the classroom all that stuff was junk. I had not instruction in basic techniques of teaching, i.e. classroom control, presentation techniques, tips on lesson planning, practical tips on getting feedback on student progress, guidance on dealing with parents and school administration. In short, I had no real preparation for the practical skills needed to teach, and that did me in. The problem with university-based "teacher training" is that professors end up teaching academic topics that are of interest to them, but nothing practical. What teaching needs is something more akin to an apprentice system. Or as Elizabeth Green puts it:

The most damning testimony comes from the graduates of education schools. No professional feels completely prepared on her first day of work, but while a new lawyer might work under the tutelage of a seasoned partner, a first-year teacher usually takes charge of her classroom from the very first day. One survivor of this trial by fire is Amy Treadwell, a teacher for 10 years who received her master’s degree in education from DePaul University, a small private university in Chicago. She took courses in children’s literature and on “Race, Culture and Class”; one on the history of education, another on research, several on teaching methods. She even spent one semester as a student teacher at a Chicago elementary school. But when she walked into her first job, teaching first graders on the city’s South Side, she discovered a major shortcoming: She had no idea how to teach children to read. “I was certified and stamped with a mark of approval, and I couldn’t teach them the one thing they most needed to know how to do,” she told me.

The mechanics of teaching were not always overlooked in education schools. Modern-day teacher-educators look back admiringly to Cyrus Peirce, creator of one of the first “normal” schools (as teacher training schools were called in the 1800s), who aimed to deduce “the true methods of teaching.” Another favorite model is the Cook County Normal School, run for years by John Dewey’s precursor Francis Parker. The school graduated future teachers only if they demonstrated an ability to control a classroom at an adjacent “practice school” attended by real children; faculty members, meanwhile, used the practice school as a laboratory to hone what Parker proudly called a new “science” of education. But Peirce and Parker’s ambitions were foiled by a race to prepare teachers en masse. Between 1870 and 1900, as the country’s population surged and school became compulsory, the number of public schoolteachers in America shot from 200,000 to 400,000. Normal schools had to turn out graduates quickly; teaching students how to teach was an afterthought to getting them out the door. Thirty years later, the number was almost 850,000.

In the 20th century, as normal schools were brought under the umbrella of the modern university, other imperatives took over. Measured against the glamorous fields of history, economics and psychology, classroom technique began to look downright mundane. Many education professors adopted the tools of social science and took on schools as their subject. Others flew the banner of progressivism or its contemporary cousin constructivism: a theory of learning that emphasizes the importance of students’ taking ownership of their own work above all else.

This article is full of insights and useful material. The one place I part company is when the Elizabeth Green starts touting Doug Lermov's taxonomy as "the solution". But this easy answer is overturned when she gives an example of "Wilma" a teacher with all the classroom management techniques down cold but a shaky grasp of her subject matter. The point is: you need skill and knowledge. (And you need charisma, but Elizabeth Green would claim otherwise. My experience is that you need that "something special" that attracts kids. It can be a discplinarian's demand for attention, an entertainer's ability to mesmerize, or a comforting personality that attracts kids. But you need something to attract and hold focus beyond simple classroom management techniques or a mastery of subject matter.)

The article is worth reading. It will raise a number of issues worth thinking about.