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Are teachers the key to improving our education?
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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.
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