An affirmative answer to this question is becoming a cliché. And you probably expect a guy whose career is in teacher education to give an enthusiastic “Yes!” But it is not so simple. On one hand, current research has overcome simplistic assertions of past decades that teachers don’t matter. When we used crude proxies to measure teacher effectiveness (such as years of service, education level, or size of paychecks), teachers did not seem to matter. Once we started to use more sophisticated ways of looking into what teachers actually do in classroom, it became clear that the quality of teaching really matters a lot, and directly influences students’ performance.
On the other hand, education cannot be significantly improved by better recruitment and better training of teachers. Of course, by saying this, I go against… well almost everyone who writes about education, both on the Left and on the Right, and those in the middle. I may even appear insane, but just hear me out.
Teacher performance is partly talent, partly training, and partly a function of their environment. Each of these three factors is a limited resource, with some natural limits of availability.
1. Talent. For the money we are paying teachers, we have all the talent we can get. Dramatically increasing salaries will not dramatically increase the quality of teaching. Besides, it is impossible economically. Education is already incredibly expensive, and will bankrupt public finances if it becomes any more expensive. A mass profession cannot depend on supply of extraordinary talent. A person with average charisma and dedication should be able to succeed in it.
2. Training. There is definitely some room to grow here, especially in the in-service professional support and development. Yet I just fail to see any revolutionary development in this area. We do almost as good of a job as can be expected for the amount of time and money allocated to teacher education. No super-teacher is about to graduate from teacher education programs in the foreseeable future.
3. Environment. The conventional wisdom is that good teachers make good schools; I suspect the opposite is true. The best schools support, encourage, train, and cherish their teachers, who in turn tend to perform well. The same teachers can be a complete failure if placed in failing schools. And as I have argued before, the number of good schools is limited.
The key to education reform is not the teacher, but the student. That is where we have huge underused resources. Kids in general and American kids in particular, are just not trying hard enough to learn. They are not motivated to learn, do not actively seek knowledge, and do not have much say in what kind of teaching they need. To improve educational outcomes, we must change the economic motivation for learning, reduce amount of teaching needed, increase amount of learning, and harness the currents of the revolution in communication. If we have fewer teachers, we can hope to have better (which really means more productive) teachers.
Comments
You've got it nearly right. From my teaching experience, the school environment is one of the most significant inputs to students' success. However, it is not the students who set the environment, but the administration (unless they fail to, then the students are more than happy to take over).
Would it help me, in my classroom, if my students were being paid to be there? Yes.
Would students find a way to game the system to their advantage, if it weren't well run? They do already.
Does it help more to have an administration that deals consistently and effectively with students, and sets and enforces a positive tone schoolwide, both behaviorally and academically? Absolutely.
Maybe we can't afford to pay all teachers high salaries. But if we pay good teachers higher salaries, and if we put good leaders in charge of our schools, and incentivize success for all involved (which can include, but should absolutely not be limited to, the students), our money will be well spent.
Paying students would simply add to the materialism in our society. Why do homescooling parents and private schools succeed without paying student? It is absolutely not necessary to pay students in order to movitate them. I do agree with you on the limits of teacher talent and pay.
Motivating students is only part of the answer to education reform. We also need supportive parents who get involved with their children’s educations and develop successful partnerships with their children’s teachers. I interviewed more than 50 teachers for my book, "The Teacher Chronicles: Confronting the Demands of Students, Parents, Administrators and Society," and I learned one of the biggest impediments to a child’s academic progress is a lack of positive parental involvement. Children benefit the most when parents respect their child’s teacher as a professional, value the teacher’s recommendations, and support the teacher’s efforts to foster their child’s academic success. Parents should also instill the value of education in their children, and insist that they respect their teachers, conduct themselves properly in school, and put forth their best effort.
Donna:
Paying students to learn will add no more materialism to our society than paying adults to do their work. Even charities now are all into social entrepreneurship. Unpaid labor of students is unsustainable. e-mail me at alexander.sidorkin@unco.edu, and I will send you a free copy of my last book with a longer argument about that.
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