star teachers
The December 15th issue of The New Yorker has a very interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell about difficulty of determining who will be a good teacher (or football quarterback).An excerpt from Most Likely to Succeed:
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.
Labels: education
posted by Ethan at
12:05 PM
2 Comments:
"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."
For an economist, this guy seems to me to be a bit naive about salaries. The biggest problem with teacher quality we have is that professions that manage to attract and retain folks in the 85th productivity percentile do so by paying them 100/15 = 7x salaries. In teaching, with its flat salary structure, many many of those folks just leave and go do something where they'll be better rewarded.
The 2x gain from a 2x reduction in class size sounds to me like a much better deal than a 2x gain from a 7x (or even 3x) increase in teacher salaries. Infrastructure costs are cited, but teacher salaries and expenses make up something like 80% of a typical school district's costs.
No silver bullets, no free lunches. We should halve class sizes, and pay double for higher-quality teachers. It would have an easy payoff. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
I guess it really depends on how hard it is to get folks in the 85 percentile. I certainly agree that if it costs 7 times average salary (i.e., about $280,000) per teacher it makes no sense. But I can image that increasing teaches salaries by 2 to 3 times might do it. Right now teachers are pretty much limited to people willing to make a financial sacrifice. If the average salary was in the $80-120k range, suddenly it becomes a career that is attractive due to its pay.
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