Education as Business
Malcolm Gladwell — the freaky-haired author of smart, nonfiction bestsellers — tackles the challenge of identifying good teachers. (Don’t be fooled by the first part of the article, where Gladwell focuses on football and quarterbacks; it’s only a set up for the rest of the article.)
In examining the good-teacher question, Gladwell offers this:
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.
Yet more proof that, if we want good schools, we must have good teachers. And to have good teachers, we must not only institute tough but fair teacher-performance standards, we must handsomely pay those who “make the grade.”
Teachers’ unions are often blamed for resisting efforts to link teacher pay to performance. That criticism may or may not be entirely fair. I’m not qualified to judge. What I am qualified to judge is what happens in highly competitive business settings, where I’ve worked and/or consulted for nearly 20 years. In these settings, the most successful companies do the best (and often most brutal) job of finding, training, promoting, and rewarding the best managers. While many will resist the notion, I tend to agree with the (indirect) suggestion in Gladwell’s article that we start treating schools like businesses and teachers like managers — including comparable pay for the best of the best.
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I wish you had not said “….. like business.” The NCLB is a corporate factory model that just does not work. There is no factory extant that can handle the variety of inputs that schools do. A better metaphor would be a county fair. Peter Drucker points out that, “teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed the tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching, we rely on the naturals; the ones who somehow know how to teach.” You are correct; teachers are at the core. There are other problems; poverty and health are huge, but teachers can sometimes overcome even these. The roadblock to improved education is the search for simple answers. The classroom is a very, very complex system requiring nuanced solutions. There is a book out there, Master Teachers making a difference on the edge of chaos, that discusses the role of teachers in education. I admit I wrote it, but still it has been very well reviewed.
The one issue where I break with the teachers unions is merit pay. Teachers do make the difference, and to attract better teachers you need to have salaries that are competitive with more lucrative careers. Now, in the geographic areas I'm familiar with, that means paying people a lot more than they're currently paid. The question then is, who pays that extra money? (It sounds nice, but making substantial cuts in other areas may not be feasible.)
I agree; merit pay would solve a great many problems. The issue is how to measure merit. Does it mean a class of silent students bent over books? Is it a noisy, boisterous class excited but not always on task? Show me ten excellent teachers, and I'll show you ten very different classrooms. Who judges? On what criteria? Please do not say test scores. That is like IBM judging folks on white shirts and blue ties while other companies ate them alive.
I suppose it's so easy as to be unsporting, to point out that in these closing days of 2008, even running business as business has lost just a bit of its cachet. So let's try this angle instead: to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail – “Business is ruthlessly efficient, (whack!) and here's something that's not working like it should (whack!), it's called education (whack!), let's hammer away!” Except that sometimes what looked like a particularly large nailhead, warranting extra oomph during the downswing, turned out to be the back of a Swiss watch, perhaps with some grit in the works that needs to be cleaned out, but a Swiss watch nevertheless. Over the past two decades even as I questioned the business model being pursued by Detroit automakers, I never presumed that they should adopt the management model of my educational institution. Would that the would be Hank Paulson's of the world reciprocate.
Adexterc — Thanks for the comments and book suggestion. Found a copy of the book at B&N online: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Master-Teacher…. Will consider picking up and reading a copy. Again, thank you.