The Not So New Math: Better Teachers = Better Students

Arne Duncan is right to incent school boards and school districts to require more teacher accountability, but simply firing bad teachers won't lift schools to excellence. To begin with, that won't leave enough great teachers for all the students who need them. As Elizabeth Green points out  in the NY TImes, ("Building A Better Teacher" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1) once one strips away the politics and the union protectionism, teaching is ultimately a set of concrete skills that can be learned: "When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients [that make an effective teacher], he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. 'Stand still when you’re giving directions,' a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once." Simple, concrete and, most importantly, effective.

According to Doug Lemov, there's not a strong correlation between teaching success and "a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try." That may be true, but I still agree with the new head of Washington, D.C.'s school district who is trying to bring “a different caliber of person” into the teaching profession. Why? Partly based on my non-objective nor statistically valid personal impressions of both teachers and education majors in which the really magical ones that seem to truly inspire and educate students tend to be high IQ -- and rare. And partly based on observing the consistently higher performance of students in Finland and Norway, and then learning about how much more respected primary and secondary school teaching is as a profession in those countries versus the US. In Finland and Norway the education majors in the universities are typically drawn from the top quartile of students, whereas in the US education majors are frequently (but, of course, not always) drawn from the bottom half of the student population. Smarter and more capable people tend to have more options in life. If teaching in the US was valued and respected like it is in Finland and Norway there's no doubt in my mind that as a profession it would attract a higher concentration of high caliber talent.

Net, net: all we need to do to fix our schools is recruit more high caliber talent to the profession, teach them the most effective techniques that have been objectively proven in real world class room...oh, and strip out all the politics and dysfunctional union rules. Simple.

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Both schoolmates and teachers should respect and learn from each other.

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