Education Secretary Arne Duncan has referred to schools of education as a ‘Bermuda Triangle – students sail in, no one knows what happens to them, then some succeed as teachers (sail out) while many do not (drown). Others refer to classroom teaching as a ‘black box’ within which we have little knowledge of what is actually happening. Per author Elizabeth Green (‘Building a Better Teacher’), both proponents of increased teacher accountability and teacher autonomy assume that good teachers know what to do to help their students learn. That’s just not the case.
Most everyone has heard teachers complain of how poorly their college of education training prepared them for the classroom. Harry Judge, an Oxford professor, toured American colleges of education and then concluded that their typical approach covered ‘anything but pedagogy.’ Green adds that in 1984 Harvard’s Graduate School of Education listed only one seemingly pedagogical course with the word ‘teaching’ in its title – today it’s still only 19 out of 231 courses. The esteemed Jerome Bruner (Harvard, Oxford, New York University) also emphasized the problem in his 1996 ‘The Culture of Education:’ “It is somewhat surprising and discouraging how little attention has been paid to the intimate nature of teaching and school learning in the past decades.” Francesca Forzani, associate director of TeachingWorks, is more acerbic and specific – university courses on ‘how to teach’ consist of e.g. ‘learning how to help children dress for recess.’
Many Americans believe that ‘practice teaching’ provides teacher trainees with the opportunity to apply education theory under the watchful eye of an experienced teacher. Green, however, reports that these ‘learning’ efforts are often led by a district’s weakest staffers – those needing help to simply maintain order. Regardless – one should not expect valuable lessons to be learned in practice teaching either. Thanks to the pervasive freedom of teachers to 1)utilize their own approaches to teaching, 2)avoid sustained observation by others (principals, peers), and 3)the extreme rarity of credible value-added measures of individual teachers’ effectiveness, very little is actually known about ‘What works’ in the classroom. It’s a ‘black box.’
‘Unbelievable!’ – you say? Actually, that conclusion is supported by decades of competent research – dating as far back as the early 1960s (‘The Coleman Report’). Researchers have repeatedly found that a)certified teachers perform no better than non-certified teachers, b)additional post-graduate courses/degrees do not improve teacher effectiveness, and c)additional years of experience (beyond the first 1-2 years) do not improve teacher effectiveness. The preceding conclusion is also consistent with 50 years’ of research and experience that have shown that more money does not, and has not (a 240% increase in per-pupil inflation-adjusted funding since the early 1970s), brought improvement in pupil outcomes.
So, why don’t we identify those teachers who consistently produce outstanding results (eg? Jaime Escalante in L.A., the 3rd-grade teacher in rural Arlington, AZ. whose pupils regularly topped the rest of the state in 1980s reading results, those identified by Eric Hanushek and Thomas Kane as ‘outstanding’ educators using value-added measures), and emulate their approaches? Per Green, education faculty themselves voice strong doubts that there is any way to identify best teachers, much less discern what made them succeed. On top of that, the teachers’ unions strongly oppose any effort to compare and evaluate teachers – ‘would undermine cooperation,’ ‘too difficult,’ etc., etc.
It’s now apparent that most public school educators have ‘clothed’ themselves in abstruse knowledge woven from years of study and experience. Turns out that this garb can only be seen (appreciated) by (wise) men and fellow educators. Not wanting to appear stupid, we’ve mostly played along with this nonsense – especially rubber-stamp school board members and other ‘pillars of society.’ Fortunately, thanks to Jerome Bruner, James Coleman, Arne Duncan, Francesco Forzani, Elizabeth Green, Eric Hanushek, Harry Judge, Thomas Kane and many others, we now realize that the abstruse knowledge most public school educators wear around them does not exist! The profession’s foundation is little more than a pompous fraud!
Another important implication – American education lacks a systematic approach to improvement. Simply having teachers take more courses and accumulate more experience, reducing class size, renovating buildings, adding support staff, etc. does not and has not worked – per research and the last 50+ years. Education improvement requires goal-setting, establishing accountability for results (eg. principals, curriculum experts/leaders), timely feedback and follow-up, and linking rewards to results. America didn’t place men on the moon, help win WWII, build the world’s most successful economy, etc. by simply assuming that spending more money and placing those with the most education and seniority in charge would likely succeed – neither will it, nor has it, improve education.
Third, it makes America’s public schools extremely vulnerable to attack by outsiders (charters, private schools) who believe that some teachers have developed techniques that are far more effective than those of others, that those more effective teachers can be reliably identified via value-added outcomes measures, and seek to maximize school effectiveness through careful recruitment, frequent monitoring and helpful suggestions, use of objective evaluations and rewards, and when necessary, quickly removing poor performers.
Significantly improving American education outcomes especially demands the latter. Dr. Thomas Kane (Harvard Professor of Education, and former member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, found that students assigned to bottom-5% teachers in California are deprived of 9+ months of learning every year compared with students assigned to average teachers. Similar, though less dramatic differences, have been found by other researchers – eg. Eric Hanushek. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how a rigorous program of recruiting, assisting, and retaining the best could dramatically improve outcomes for American pupils.
Fourth, it invalidates the use of disadvantageous pupil backgrounds as an excuse for educators’ inability to improve pupil outcomes. Improving the practice of teaching can make enormous differences and could be done at little/no additional cost.
Fifth, it raises a new key question – ‘What teacher behaviors/techniques are the most effective and should be emulated?’ We already have some tentative answers – provided by Doug Lemov’s video documenting the specific actions of highly effective teachers. (‘Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College’) Don’t like Lemov’s work – then use the lessons learned from research by Kane, Hanushek et al. What makes Kane and Hanushek different, and especially valuable is that both first obtained a very strong background in economics and research methods, and then applied those skills to evaluating K-12 education.
Sixth, it invalidates any rationale for education’s strong protections for non-performing teachers, rewarding teachers for experience and additional coursework beyond a B.A., and barring those lacking certification from the classroom.
Seventh, and last, it provides additional rationale for envisioning computerized adaptive learning (CAL) as the future of education. Well-designed CAL systems revise their presentations in response to pupil answers, as well as providing immediate assessments to teachers etc.
The good news in all this is that, after 50+ years of nearly non-stop ineffectual fads, we now have a data-driven, structured approach that can substantially improve pupil performance. All that’s required is to replace education’s half-a-century’s worth of failed ‘black-box magic’ with data-driven training and decision-making.
Loyd Eskildson
8/5/2014
loydeskildson 