How to get a good teacher: the sink or swim model, Part 2

(Continued from the previous post.)

The nature of teacher education and of the teaching profession

In his column, Gladwell goes on to make some policy recommendations based on the contention that we can’t predict who will be a good teacher and who won’t (“good” defined by student gains as measured by standardized tests):

. . . we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. [I can’t resist interpolating a comment–is everyone comfortable with the idea that standardized tests measure “what we care about”? I’m not–not even in terms of academics, let alone the other things we care about in education.] Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

There are several components to this proposal: entry into the teaching profession ought to be based on an apprenticeship (with no details provided as to how the apprenticeship would work); rigorous evaluation during the apprenticeship (presumably, given the previous discussion, based on their students’ scores on standardized tests); tenure would either be eliminated altogether or based on surviving this apprenticeship stage; pay teachers who survive this process “a lot”, so enough people would be attracted to trying teaching to make this sink-or-swim model work (four people trying for every one who succeeds).

Entry into the teaching profession is already based on an apprenticeship model. It begins with the teacher education program, all of which use an apprenticeship model to one degree or another: it’s called “student teaching”. Some programs do it very effectively, some less so; some combine it with a fair amount of coursework, some with less, little, or nearly none (also to varying degrees of effectiveness). In the past decade or so, a teacher’s apprenticeship has been extended into an “induction phase” in many states; here in California it’s the first two years of credentialed teaching. Tenure depends on surviving all stages of apprenticeship.

So it’s not “apprenticeship” that would be the “new idea”; it’s eliminating all requirements for entering the apprenticeship other than a college degree, and then applying “sink-or-swim” based on the apprentice teacher’s students’ standardized test scores.

In other words, take anyone with “a pulse and a college degree”, put ’em in a classroom, and let ’em go. Details of the model are not discussed; perhaps there will be some supervision?, maybe some coaching? (since NFL quarterbacks do get coaching, I’m assuming this could be part of the model) but no education courses (since they’ve decided that teacher education is ineffective across the board). Then measure how much the students learn after, what, a year or so? 3-5 years?, and weed out the bottom what, 15%? (I’m basing this guess on the figure cited elsewhere in Gladwell’s column).

I’ll just point out a few problems with this:

1) Would you want your kids in a new teacher’s class under this model, with new teachers not screened or trained at all? Just tossed in with a classroom full of kids to see what they can do? And those attracted into trying it out motivated largely by money? Given the growth we routinely see in our student teachers from the time they enter our program until they do their solo student teaching, I’ll tell you this: I wouldn’t. We may not succeed in turning out only effective teachers, but we do succeed in giving people a better shot at being effective, and screen out people with no chance at all before they ever get their own classroom.

It would be both foolish and dangerous to stop screening prospective teachers beyond mere possession of a college degree. Perhaps the most obvious example of screening that is routine now that no one would want to dispense with is what’s known in the biz as a fingerprint clearance. In California, before any credential candidate is allowed in a classroom even as a student teacher who will be closely supervised by a master teacher, s/he is fingerprinted and both FBI and state databases are searched to see if any kind of criminal record exists on that person.

And surely the kind of degree should matter. Should someone be teaching high school English who has a degree in economics or business? Or teaching math or science with a degree in English lit or psychology? Maybe some could—but I bet you’d like to see some kind of screening in place for subject matter knowledge, too.

In short—no one in their right mind who thinks about it for a few minutes would seriously consider reducing the screening to mere possession of a pulse and a college degree.

2) How fair is it to prospective teachers to put them into a classroom in front of 20-40 students with no preparation of any kind? Here’s a hint: not fair at all. Believe it or not, watching teachers for 16 years does not prepare you to teach. We know from experience with programs like Teach for America that at least some kind of preparation is needed to give the average person a fighting chance. Without it, the kids will eat you alive, metaphorically speaking.

Points one and two lead to this: There’s more to teaching than meets the eye. Especially, there’s more to good teaching than meets the eye. One of the roles those of us in teacher ed play is opening the eyes of our credential candidates to aspects of teaching and learning that aren’t obvious to them. (This claim is hardly unique or original to me; here’s an article by Linda Darling-Hammond, who’s way more eminent than I am and knows her stuff, to back me up. ) If no one does this, there’s a real chance that even those who do survive sink-or-swim, who learn to handle the kids, will remain mediocre at best, because they simply aren’t seeing beyond the surface of what’s going on.

3) As a rule of thumb, it takes beginning teachers 3-5 years to hit their first learning plateau–they continue learning long past their credential year(s). [FYI: our objective, in a credential program, is to get them to a minimal level of competency while they are closely supervised and supported, so that by the time they are turned loose with their own classes, they are at least somewhat effective, their students will have a good shot at learning in their classrooms, they will do no harm, and they have a basis for continuing to learn more or less on their own.] After 3-5 years, it might be fair to do the kind of weeding based on measures of student learning that these people are proposing, (might, I say), but before that, the likelihood is that you’ll be eliminating many of your potentially most effective teachers before they have the chance to hit their stride.

[You will have noticed that having your child in a new teacher’s class, even someone who has been through a really good credential program, is still a risk. Yeah, we know; it’s just that we can’t figure any way around it, since it’s true that teaching is something you really do learn by doing. You need to understand what you’re doing–but the rubber hits the road in the doing. The good news about beginning teachers is that they often have higher energy and are more innovative and ready to go the extra mile, relative to long-timers. And they do have some experience under their belts–not just any ole bachelor’s degree–because of those pesky teacher education requirements for getting that credential.]

Or let’s say the model allows for a 3-5 year apprenticeship period. And that they figure out that some coaching and even coursework helps people become more effective sooner. And that we can even screen out some people before they ever get into the classroom–we may not be able to predict success, but I betcha we can predict certain kinds of failure pretty reliably. (Kinda like high school and college football must do something to prepare people for NFL quarterbacking–I don’t see the NFL opening up tryouts to people who haven’t played football at all. Watching football-just like watching someone teach–doesn’t, by itself, prepare a person for doing it themselves.) Pretty soon we’re back to something very much like what’s in place now–except for using students’ standardized test scores as the sole? primary? screening tool for getting tenure. (I may have to enter the quagmire of discussing standardized testing after all–but not just yet.)

First let me point out one of the realities of the teaching profession, one that makes it unique, and that makes the comparison of teaching to select professions such as professional quarterbacking or financial advising (a particularly infelicitous comparison I think, given where the nation’s financial gurus have gotten us to these days, wouldn’t you say?) moot at best. It’s the sheer size of the profession, the huge numbers of teachers we need. Chew on that while you read the following excerpt from Gladwell’s column:

Is this solution to teaching’s quarterback problem politically possible? Taxpayers might well balk at the costs of trying out four teachers to find one good one. Teachers’ unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement. But all the reformers want is for the teaching profession to copy what firms like North Star have been doing for years. Deutschlander interviews a thousand people to find ten advisers. He spends large amounts of money to figure out who has the particular mixture of abilities to do the job. “Between hard and soft costs,” he says, “most firms sink between a hundred thousand dollars and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on someone in their first three or four years,” and in most cases, of course, that investment comes to naught. But, if you were willing to make that kind of investment and show that kind of patience, you wound up with a truly high-performing financial adviser. “We have a hundred and twenty-five full-time advisers,” Deutschlander says. “Last year, we had seventy-one of them qualify for the Million Dollar Round Table”—the industry’s association of its most successful practitioners. “We’re seventy-one out of a hundred and twenty-five in that élite group.”

I don’t know how many financial advisors there are (fewer than a couple of months ago, though, I imagine), but there can’t be as many as 200 NFL quarterbacks at any given time. In comparison, a few stats taken from the National Center for Education Statistics:

There are about 3.3 million teachers in public schools and another .5 million in private schools.

To see numbers comparable to these, you have to look at entire categories of occupations, such as “sales and service”, not single professions such as NFL quarterback or financial advisor–or even doctor or lawyer.

More stats, taken from this NCES report:

About 20% of new teachers leave the profession after their first year; about 40% leave within the first five years.

Of the 3,214,900 public school teachers who were teaching during the 2003–04 school year, . . . 8 percent left the profession (“leavers”) during the following year. Among private school teachers, . . . 14 percent were leavers.

(I’m fascinated by the fact that more private school teachers leave the profession than public school teachers. I can’t help but think this has implications for the sink-or-swim model, but I’m not sure what they’d be.)

Based on the above, let’s estimate that we need somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000-335,000 new teachers each year. We already have a teacher recruitment-and-retention issue in education (for more depth of discussion, here’s an article by Susanna Loeb, Linda darling-Hammond, and John Luzcak); seems to me the sink-or-swim model under discussion would only exacerbate this. But suppose the proposed high salaries succeed in recruiting enough people to fill the slots. According to the model, we need to check out four teachers to identify one effective teacher. So to fill one year’s open slots with good teachers, we have to hire and assess 1,200,000-1,340,000 teachers. But how would this work? Let’s stick with the lower figure for simplicity. We recruit and hire 300,000 new teachers, asking only that they have some kind of college degree (apparently, we don’t care even for high school if the degree is related to what they will be teaching. All part of the “lowering standards” strategy.) At the end of the year, 75% of these have students who score below some cutoff point on standardized tests (actually, it would be below a certain level of gain from beginning of the year to the end), so we fire the bunch. About 8% of the rest (8% of 3,800,000, let’s say, keeping the total constant) leave for the usual reasons. So now we need .75 X 300,000 + .08 X 3,300,000 or 225,000 + 304,000, which is now well over 500,000 new people we have to attract into the profession for the second year of the model. You can see where this is going. There would be a limit–at some point, the number of new teachers the system would have to recruit each year would settle down, but it would be at a far larger figure than the current figure.

Would we be able to attract the numbers required? Apparently in 2007 a bit over 1,500,000 new bachelor’s degrees were conferred, so teaching would have to be attracting somewhere around a third of all new college graduates to supply the need. Or say, a fourth, and get the rest from older people. Think we could pay enough to attract a full quarter of the graduates into teaching? With them knowing it’s a risky proposition–they’ll take low pay for one or more years with only a 25% chance of getting to the big bucks? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

But wait! Maybe we don’t need to recruit that many new teachers, if we can just retain more of the good, experienced teachers. Let’s take a quick look at that.

More stats from NCES:

• Twenty-five percent of public and 30 percent of private school leavers rated pursuing a position other than that of a K–12 teacher as very important or extremely important in their decision to leave K–12 teaching.

• Twenty-nine percent of public school teacher leavers were working in a position in the field of education, but not as a regular K–12 classroom teacher, while 12 percent of public school teacher leavers were working in an occupation outside the field of education.

• Fifty-five percent of public school teachers who left teaching but continued to work in the field of education reported that they had more control over their own work in their new position than in teaching, while 65 percent of public school leavers who worked outside the field of education felt that their workload in their new position was more manageable and that they were better able to balance their personal and work life.

• Of the private school teacher leavers who were either working in the field of education (but not teaching) or were working outside the field of education, 51 percent reported that the workload in their new position was more manageable than in teaching.

Reading between the lines–a lot of people leave teaching because of the working conditions. Many also leave because they discover that teaching isn’t for them after all–they get out of the biz altogether. (For anyone who chances on this post–and has read this far down–who thinks teaching is a cushy job, with only 6 hours/day of work and summers off, allow me to refer you to the numbers above regarding workload and balancing one’s life in teaching vs. other occupations.) Now, if the people who leave were only the least effective teachers, we’d have virtually the situation put forth in Gladwell’s column (apprenticeship entry system with elimination of the ineffective teachers based on on-the-job performance). But often it’s the best teachers who leave, and they often leave because of the working conditions.

My point is that more than just pay would have to be addressed to attract enough people into the profession to make the “sink-or-swim” model have a prayer of working. Working conditions such as workload (mostly determined by class size), degree of autonomy and professionalism allowed, resources provided, and in many inner-city schools safety, would have to be improved as well. Now we’re talking seriously big bucks–that’s why the working conditions are as bad as they are now, people won’t vote the taxes to pay for improving them.

To summarize my points in this post:

1) Entry into the teaching profession is already based on an apprenticeship system. We may–heck, we do–want to improve it, but we don’t need to invent one.

2) The model Gladwell proposes would be incredibly expensive, because of the sheer numbers of teachers required, even if we only consider the increased pay required to motivate enough people to try it out.

3) Teacher attrition is a huge issue–arguably, the country has more than enough trained, competent teachers to staff every classroom twice over, it’s just that most of them have left teaching. His model would, by definition, increase the attrition rate, both because it’s based on washing out three of every four who attempt teaching, and because a lot of the best leave because of working conditions his model ignores. These facts would up the ante even further on recruitment and cost.

I’ll add two more points here, and save the rest for yet another post.

1) His “motivate ’em with big bucks” strategy concerns me for more than just economic reasons. While I do think teachers are often underpaid for the amount of work they do and the importance of what they do, I frankly don’t want the field flooded with a bunch of people who are in it for the money. As things are now, people go into teaching because they love children/young people, they love the work, having tried professions like banking they want more meaningful work, they love the subject they teach, and/or to serve their community. While we need to pay teachers enough that they can afford to stay in it, can support a family on the salary– and a lot do leave because they don’t feel they can–working with children and youth is too important to leave to people who are in it for the money. Let them go to Wall Street or the NFL or Hollywood–that’s fine with me.

2) People often compare teaching to other professions without considering the effects of scale, as Gladwell has done. Indeed, one of the hazards of drawing policy implications from educational research in general is failure to consider the sheer size of the ed biz. It’s known as the “scaling up problem”. Trying to draw lessons from small-scale professions such as quarterbacking in the NFL or being a financial advisor on Wall Street, even metaphorically, is particularly likely to mislead us unless the scale effects are directly considered in our comparison.

The open questions, it seems to me, are first how to “measure” teachers, and then how to get the bad teachers out of the system and keep the good ones in. The new possibility, the only really new point from Gladwell’s column left for me to address, is using students’ test scores to evaluate their teachers, and to do this in a high-stakes way (you’re fired automatically if you don’t measure up.) These questions are worth an entire post all to themselves, so I’ll tackle them another day. Stay tuned for Part 3.