required: we've got a major quarterback problem
This post is a response to a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell titled Most Likely to Succeed. It examines the difficulties in predicting who might make a "good" teacher before they actually begin teaching, and how we have a critical shortage of these "good" teachers, with no way to determine how to find them...
I thought this article was fantastic, and totally on point. I liked the way the author so nicely blended the frustrations of a quarterback coach with the educational establishment's own "quarterback problem" -- an inability to predict an indvidual's success on the field, or in the classroom, until they are already there.
In an ideal world, aspiring teachers would enter into an extended student-teaching component for their education degree. Not only would these trainees learn from a veteran teacher in the classroom, they would also undergo a battery of tests to determine their overall effectiveness in any number of ares.
These tests would be developed along a nationalized scale --a sort of SAT, or GRE of evaluating teacher performance. Each teacher would be assigned a ranged percentile in each tested area. Public school would then require access to these scores when hiring, and schools could base hiring decisions on effectiveness in their preferred areas.
Of course, like most good ideas in education, it would never work.
There wouldn't be the money.
Schools of education would resist wholesale overhaul.
Teacher's unions would scream injustice and use their powerful lobby to end it.
And schools would be forced to hire low-scoring teachers anyway -- because it would do nothing to help our nation's shortage of QUALIFIED, DEDICATED educators.
Really, the only way to improve teacher quality is for our nation to actually invest in it. Teaching needs to become a desired profession of the elite -- if the job carried any prestige, or a decent salary, it could attract worthwhile candidates, rather than the bottom of the barrel. Thomas Friedman puts it wonderfully in this morning's New York Times -- if we want a real stimulus, we better start with "Tax Cuts for Teachers".
