Thinking Citizen Blog — How Important Is Teacher Quality? Who Cares? Who Should? What Is To Be Done?
Thinking Citizen Blog — Friday is Education and Education Policy Day
Today’s Topic: How Important is Teacher Quality? Who cares? Who should? What is to be done?
The idea that teacher quality matters has long been established by economists such as Raj Chetty. But the clear implications have not sunk in. Compensation should be based on performance not seniority. It isn’t.
Today, excerpts from an article by Vivek Ramaswamy, “Some Teachers are Underpaid: Compensation based on Merit Could Help the US Close the international gap in student outcomes.” A related question: Is teacher tenure incompatible with the goal of equality of opportunity? Are the most incompetent teachers given the least desirable posts — where the students are the most difficult to teach and the environment physically dangerous?
This is called, “The Dance of the Lemons.” I have written about this before (see fourth link below).
But first a re-cap of recent posts for those new to the blog.
Last time (3/7) why anything worth teaching should be put to music, because without the music, it will not be remembered. Examples included: the Preamble to the Constitution, Amino Acids, Pi, and Chinese dynasties.
The week before (2/28) two questions: should school committees be elected? should cell phones be banned from classrooms? Three weeks ago (2/21) Rene Descartes’ Four Rules of the Scientific Method (be skeptical, break complex problems into parts, proceed from the simplest to the most complex, be thorough). Four weeks ago (2/14) “The Nation’s Report Card” and the dismal news that less than one third of US students in 4th and 8th grade are proficient at reading!!!!! Five weeks ago (2/7), Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. Six weeks ago (1/31) , two New York Times columnists taking different views of Trump’s campaign against DEI. Seven weeks ago (1/31) , my Orion Plan which makes the case for the necessity of thematic calendars and journals in homes and schools to maximize three things simultaneously on a weekly basis — continuity, thematic diversity, and completeness.
Whew! Time to the topic of the day — teacher quality.
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
TEACHER QUALITY IS THE NUMBER ONE SCHOOL-RELATED FACTOR AFFECTING STUDENT PROGRESS
1. “A 1992 study of low-income black students in Gary, Indiana public schools found that the least effective teachers imparted a half year’s worth of learning in a year, while the most effective teachers taught 1 and a half years worth.”
2. “Over time, these gains compound. According to a 2013 National Bureau of Economic Research estimate, eliminating the bottom 5% of teachers — as judged by their ability to improve students’ test scores — and replacing them with average teachers increases students’ lifetime earnings by $250,000 per classroom. Replacing them with great teachers would be even better.”
THE CASE OF DC’S MERIT-BASED PAY SYSTEM
1. “In 2009, District of Columbai schools revamped teacher pay to award the highest-performing teachers bonuses of up to $25,000 while letting low performers go.”
2. “Data from 2017–2019 showed that the district retained more than 93% of its best teachers, most “ineffective” teachers were dismissed and about half of “minimally effective” teachers were fired or voluntarily left.”
3. “Math and reading test scores soared far outpacing those of every large urban district that researchers tracked.”
NB: “Even after the pandemic, the district’s scores remained higher than they were at the start of the program, while most cities fell further behind.”
THE CASE OF THE DALLAS MERIT-BASED SYSTEM THAT ONLY APPLIED TO THE NEEDIEST SCHOOLS
1. “In 2016, top-performing teachers in these schools got $12,000 bonuses, and above average teachers received between $8000 and $10,000.”
2. “The bonuses created an incentive for highly rated teachers to move to disadvantaged schools, and within two years students were performing at close to the city’s average level.”
3. “These aren’t isolated examples. A 2021 analysis in the American Educational Research Journal found that merit pay has a statistically significant positive result on student test scores.”
NB: “A 2017 study from Vanderbilt University quantified students’ gains when their teachers were compensated on merit to be equal to approximately a month of additional learning per year. Research also shows that tying administrators’ pay to performance is correlated with better student outcomes.”
HOW BAD DO THE GLOBAL COMPARISONS LOOK? Check out the data for China and Singapore.
1. “Fifteen and 16-year-old Chinese students outperform Americans in math by more than four full academic years.”
2. ”Singaporean outperform Americans by more than five years.”
3. “Nearly 40% of (US) eighth graders can’t do basic division.”
NB: But how much of these differences are due to family-related or community-related rather than school-related issues?
https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/teachers_wp.pdf
https://www.hoover.org/research/dance-lemons
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IP5ATbqCWPv0WKC4dCDgAiidbFVOaqR_
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to education or education policy. Or the coolest thought however half-baked you had.
Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to education or education policy that the rest of us may have missed.
Or just some random education-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make someone’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something that is dear to your heart.
