education for education

What are the criteria when there are no criteria?
There were a couple nuggets in here that sounded interesting (if not surprising).

"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." This is a crucial understanding to make. It very probably explains why so many teachers have to begin a year with a segment of review. Because their predecessors are by general measures terrible by comparison and didn't get to several important steps. There is also a reverse effect that needs better accounting: students who would get through an extra year's work in a subject. Both are possibly good calls for more flexible understandings of grade levels.

"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." -- Of course, we don't know really what a teacher in the 85th percentile is just by looking, or even through testing standards. But Gladwell naturally went on to state that the cost of an average teacher is the same as that of a good one. I would propose that it shouldn't be. Under a market system, we would probably see the same sort of guesswork and investigative research that goes into evaluating future quarterbacks or starting pitchers in sports, but we would also see better teachers commanding better pay over time, and less of a demand for smaller classrooms.


"have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom." -- This doesn't surprise me at all. Education majoring isn't as useful as majoring in the subject material and then understanding how to communicate that subject to a given body (small children, teens, whatever).

The prospect is offered later in the article that raising the standards on who gets to teach is ridiculous. What instead is needed is a sort of training camp for teachers after they are admitted, to shake out the good ones from the bad. That makes sense, is probably cheaper than our alternatives (requiring degrees and so forth, which raises the pay scale). Of course, the reasons for the rising hiring standards are generally the license systems being controlled by the unions rather than the educational boards. But that's a side issue. Further included as options: getting rid of or curtailing tenured positions. The flexible pay that I proposed. The general trend of economic thinking and evaluation isn't necessarily a progress to society, but I offer that it will allow some advantages...and this is most definitely one of them if we can revamp our educational system into something that works.

"What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?" -- I think it says that one industry is allowed to operate under a market economy and the other is not. But then that's only my opinion. The financial industry has has decades to develop a system of sorts in evaluating the people who enter and succeed at it. Football or baseball drafts are similarly confused, in part because of the draft system. But mainly they are still new evaluational processes, conducted under duress. At least baseball has a minor league system which allows the development (potentially) of prospects. Football players would probably demand much, much higher salaries for professional players than they already do if they had a similar apprenticeship system. Teachers on the other hand can teach for decades, just like a good financial planner. The impact they have is (possibly) measurable, and ideally greater than that of a good planner. Yet we have a virtually impenetrable wall in front of this means of growing and harnessing the great teachers and culling them out from terrible ones. I'd say it says the society has a fundamental problem with how it has organized itself along these crucial lines.