students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school

[NYC_SKP]

"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...."

I would tend to agree with this observation from what I've seen in my 11 years in public education.

Most Likely to Succeed
How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?
by Malcolm Gladwell December 15, 2008

(The New Yorker Magazine)

~snip~

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.

It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

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 school system has a quarterback problem.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true#ixzz0g9OQf42E


~snip~

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true#ixzz0g9O2Zmgq

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true

[tonysam]

1. The problem is how do you define a "bad" teacher?

And how does one decide what constitutes learning a "half-year's worth of material" and a "year-and-a-half's"?

And how does special education fit into it? No way do sped kids learn a "year-and-a-half's" worth of material in a year.

And what in the hell does an economist know?

Of course, at bottom this is a principal problem and an administrator problem. Anymore, districts don't even give teachers a chance to be great teachers, a process that can take up to ten years. Now they are being thrown out if they have too many years in, or they are denied tenure to begin with.

[NYC_SKP]

2. Good teachers do great things despite what admins would have them do...

More often than not, admins are not supportive, they're more interested in bureaucratic issues and school politics.

It's not often a healthy learning or working environment, and good teachers often get sick of it an leave.

Sadly, the awful workplace is more suited to the careless teacher who just doesn't care about conditions or about student achievement.

Still, there are a lot of great teachers.

The thrust of the article, as I saw it, was that great teachers in shitty schools are doing great things, suggesting that administrations are ineffective determinants of student achievement.

As for sped students, teachers, departments- one would have to use different criteria to measure growth and what constitutes a year's worth of learning, but I gather the same is true about teachers vs administration of these programs.

I worked almost exclusively with at-risk youth, always with a contingent of sped students, and some of the RSP staff were great and others were not.

In juvenile hall, my last four years and a self contained classroom, we had almost no RSP support (despite studies that suggest that as much as 90% of that population are LD, unidentified in most cases).

[LWolf]

3. The article, and your observation, leave out a crucial point.

The article compares students from 2 classes in the same year. Instead, if you want to look at student growth, you should be looking at longitudinal growth; how much each student has grown each year.

The idea that enough students start at the same place to have two different classes scoring the same on standardized tests at the beginning of the year is laughable, in my experience.

The whole concept of using student test scores to evaluate teachers is WRONG. Standardized test scores evaluate and rank the students who took them, not other people.

I agree that students make more progress with good teaching than with poor; that's a no-brainer, and has been obvious in my 27 years of public education. I didn't need to analyze standardized test scores to figure that out, and I don't need to over- and mis-use standardized tests to address the issue.

The goal should not be an authoritarian, punitive one: to "hunt down" "bad" teachers and get rid of them. That's a politician's goal. It scores political points, but doesn't help improve teaching. That's an agenda of revenge for anyone who has ever disliked a teacher, regardless of whether or not that teacher was "bad."

In my 27 years in public education, I've seen this phenomenon too often to count: Teacher A has parents who love her and who request her for all of their children when they get to ____ grade; she has parents who have no problem with her and are satisfied with the year/s their child spends with her; she has some parents who think she's the devil and who would love to see her fired; most often because they challenged her on something and lost. Does that make her "bad?"

Interestingly enough, the parents who hate Teacher A might love Teacher B, while the parents who loved Teacher A might not be too thrilled with Teacher B. That happens all the time.

The fact is that not all students and parents will like every teacher, regardless of the competence of the teaching. There are personal and political agendas there, too.

The propaganda bashing public education and teachers is fed by using student scores to evaluate teachers.

Why not use a better model? A positive model that supports all teachers and improves all teaching? If the agenda truly is to improve classroom instruction, then everyone should agree that improving ALL teaching, regardless of where individual teachers stand on a continuum, should be the goal. Great teachers can improve, too.

Here is just one supportive model that does not use student test scores to scapegoat teachers; there are more:


http://www.danielsongroup.org/index.htm

I'm not going to support a "value-added" model that uses someone else's test scores to judge me. I'm not going to support firing the bottom 6 - 10% of teachers and replacing them with "average."

In that scenario, there is always a bell curve, and there will always be some at the bottom of the curve. Are we going to "replace" the bottom 10% every year? Every 5 years?

And what is the point of replacing them with "average?" Where do those "average" come from? They can't be "average" until they've taught in the system and been wrongly rated with student test scores, so they can't come from outside the system. This whole premise is illogical as well as unethical.

Why not, instead, adopt a supportive model that works to improve the professional practice of EVERY teacher, reserving the firing process for misconduct, and counseling out those that are obviously not working to grow professionally?

[Reader Rabbit]

4. This post should have its own thread.

Great analysis and explanation, LWolf.

[LWolf]

5. Thanks.

I know I'm not the only one really, really tired of serving as scapegoat for the nation's dysfunctions.