Huh?

We’re constantly told that teachers are more dedicated than the rest of us, that they sacrifice to be teachers, that teaching is a calling. (It’s unclear how that implies that they shouldn’t be questioned, which is the context in which it is usually offered, but I digress.) If that’s true, teachers would be more proficient than graduates earning comparable salaries.

So, which is it? Do teachers sacrifice or are they typical (given salary)?

Sponsored by Oynklent Green, where energy is people!

So there at least claims that different teaching methods can produce significant results. I came across a teaching technique that is called “Direct Instruction”. The advocates of this method at least argue that it can achieve the stated goal: achieve systematic improvement without having to hire the “best” people. They also argue that this was proven statistically and that the results have been mostly ignored since the 1970′s. This caught my attention because I had used this method to teach my son to read, although at the time I taught my son to read I did not know it was a general technique for all areas of learning. So I’d love to know if anyone vouch for or discredit the claims made by the “Direct Instruction” advocates.

I’m not sure about the use of technology in the school, but I do believe that I’ve used technology successfully for teaching in the home. The most dramatic example being the difference between how my two sons learned the alphabet — by which I mean the ability to identify the letters and produce the sounds of the letters. I sent my first son to a private pre-K program for $6,000. It was one of the more prestigious ones in our area. My wife and I mostly counted on the program to teach him the alphabet . This worked some, but my wife and I found we needed to put in a separate effort to help him learn the alphabet solidly. For our second son, we bought an alphabet learning DCD for $7. We played this DVD every morning after breakfast for 3 months. He liked the DVD so much he also requested to watch it at other times during the day. At the end of three months he knew the alphabet solidly. So in summary I’d say this technique was astoundingly cheaper, faster, and more effective than hiring a shared teacher. So it seems to me that technology is very effective at least in helping to learn basic skills.

I probably should have phrased that as college graduates earning comparable salaries. If we paid teachers better and they had better working conditions, we would get a better calibre of aoplicant. But there are about 3 million teachers, so there will be reversion to the mean in a population that large and it will be difficult to move.

Is there the slightest possibility that Fort Bend district has a secret pipeline to the place were uber-teachers are stamped out? Or is it far more likely that Fort Bend has, for reasons which have, as yet, excited zero interest, discovered a means of making average teachers vastly more effective then their Detroit counterparts?

What’s really telling about public education is that were this any other field of endeavor there’d be flocks of experts trying to figure out Fort Bend’s trick.

If it were Fort Bend Hospital and their post-surgical infection rate were 25% of the Mayo Clinic’s you can bet your last dollar that the Mayo Clinic would have bunches of experts performing organizational sigmoidoscopies on poor, little Fort Bend Hospital to determine how they manage the trick. But since it’s merely education no gives a hearty damn.

The cold fact of the matter is that a lousy administrator can obviate the best efforts of lots of good, even great teachers and won’t break a sweat destroying the efforts of hundreds or even thousands of average teachers.

Until administrators are provided with a reason to care desperately about every child’s education the ed schools can turn teachers with the ability leap tall buildings in a single bound for all the good teaching skill will matter.

That assumes that either teachers are random or dominate the numbers. The latter clearly isn’t true and the former unlikely.

Fortunately, we don’t have to “think”, we can actually look.

We find that hard science and engineering graduates tend to be signficantly better at math than social science graduates. Where do teachers fall and when is this relevant?

My best friend from high school was bright but came from a family of modest means. She got accepted to Tufts, Brandeis, and Holy Cross but ended up commuting to a non-flagship branch of UMass for financial reasons. One day I was visiting her and sat in on her freshman English class. It was an absolute joke- way less academically rigorous than the honors English classes we had both taken at our high school. The professor was having the students in the class read paragraphs and underline the thesis statement. I couldn’t believe this exercise was necessary in a college-level class! The contrast with the freshman English course I’d taken at an elite university was striking.

I have never heard of a district in which there was a pay disparity between elementary and high school. Every single one I’ve ever seen had pay simply based on seniority, with allowances for extra education or extra-curriculars.

As far as urban vs. suburban, there are completely different sets of skills required in each setting. In my urban district, you basically see two types of teachers. There are the missionary types who thrive in the urban environment – people who look at the kids in their class and realize that, between the idiots around them and the idiots above them, they are the only thing standing to protect them.

There are also, however, people who can’t get jobs anywhere else. Urban districts require a lot more teachers, and have a much rougher environment. It is akin to what the Catholic church in America is facing right now. When you have a difficult time getting staff, you’re much more likely to let mediocre ones stay around. It’s not that the mediocre ones are so numerous. They just stick out a lot more.

Urban districts also, with their very large budgets, tend to be top heavy with administrators and million-dollar programs that change as fast as the wind. The result is that teachers who know how to teach are so overburdened with mandates that they lack the authority to actually teach. Combine that with a centralized discipline system that coddles thugs with loud parents, and you have a recipe for a nightmare.

Wait, remind me again why I do this?