PERSPECTIVE: WHAT DOES OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM NEED?

When you listen to our politicians speak about what is needed to produce jobs, you will hear a lot about improving our ‘Infrastructure”. By this they mean improving our roads, bridges, and our K-12 educational system. Lately, especially because of the teachers strike in Chicago, the emphasis is on education. President Obama recently stated that what is needed to upgrade school quality is to add teachers and reduce class size.

To determine what our education system really needs, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a multi-million dollar study to “Learn about Teaching”, and their first report has been published.

Prior to reading this report, I had the chance to hear Melinda Gates being interviewed by Brian Williams of NBC News, and Williams asked her whether there was one single issue that rose above all others with regard to improving education. She responded, “Yes, it is a good teacher”. Then Williams asked if there was a second. Again, she responded, “Yes, a supporting parent”. And as the report mentions: “For four decades, educational researchers have confirmed what many parents know: children’s academic progress depends heavily on the talent and skills of the teacher leading their classroom. Although parents may fret over their choice of school and class room size, research suggests that their child’s teacher assignment in that school matters a lot”

Well, I just about fell out of my chair in shock. I KNEW THAT, AND YOU KNEW THAT! What is fascinating is that any, and I mean any, graduate of the K-12 public education system can tell you who was the best teacher and who made the biggest impact on their life. Now as the report shows, every student knows, as well. It turns out nearly everyone knows it, EXCEPT PRESIDENT OBAMA AND THE TEACHER’S UNION.

It is to the credit of Bill and Melinda Gates that they are providing the wherewithal to probe deeply into what makes a good teacher. Their findings from their Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET) are found in a research paper that can be downloaded from the Internet. It is quite erudite in its detail and analysis, and qualifies as excellent research.

The three premises of the MET Project were:

• Whenever possible, a teacher’s evaluation should include his or her student’s achievement gains.

• Any additional components of the evaluation (e.g., classroom observations, student feedback) should be demonstrably related to student achievement gains.

• The measure should include feedback on specific aspects of how a teacher teaches to support the teacher’s growth and development in teaching skills.

The MET project measured teaching of mathematics and English in grades 4-8 and then added three courses that serve as gateways to high school, namely, Algebra I, grade 9 English and biology. The following data were collected from the classrooms.


• Student achievement gains on different assessments

• Classroom observations and teacher reflections

• Teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge (knowledge of how to teach, not just their content knowledge)

• Student perceptions of the classroom instructional environment



The MET student perception survey gathered information from the students under seven headings called the Seven C’s which are:

Care: How the teacher treats students

Control: How the teacher maintains discipline

Clarify: How well the teacher explains things

Challenge: How the teacher pushes students to work hard

Captivate: How the teacher keeps school work interesting

Confer: How the teacher determines whether the student understands

Consolidate: How the teacher summarizes what has been learned



What has Been Learned So Far:

• In every grade and subject, a teacher’s past track record of value added (what a teacher contributes to what a student could learn on its own) is among the strongest predictors of their students’ achievement gains in other classes and academic years. In other words, teachers who lead students to achievement gains in one year or in one class tend to do so in other years and other classes.

• Teachers with high value-added tend to promote deeper conceptual understanding on state tests as well. Many are concerned that high value-added teachers are simply coaching children to do well on state tests. However, in the MET analysis so far, that does not seem to be the case.

• Teachers as measured on state assessments, have larger effects on math achievement than on achievement in reading or English Language Arts. It is believed that this finding may be due to limitations of the current state tests which typically consist of multiple-choice questions of reading comprehension, because when using a test that requires written responses, a teacher’s impact is comparable to that found in mathematics.


• Student perceptions of a given teacher’s strengths and weaknesses are consistent across the different groups of students they teach. Moreover, students seem to know effective teaching when they experience it. It turns out that student perceptions in one class are related to the achievement gains in other classes taught by the same teacher. Most important are students’ perceptions of a teacher’s ability to control a classroom and to challenge students with rigorous work.


Conclusions From the Study:
• Children’s academic progress depends heavily on the talent and skills of the teacher leading the class room.

• Individual teachers receive little feedback on the work that they do because teacher evaluation is a perfunctory exercise. Principals go trough the motions of visiting classrooms with checklists in hand only to give the same satisfactory rating to all teachers. This makes it easy for school administers because all they have to do is find out who is good enough to have tenure and seniority.



So Why is it So Difficult to Solve This Problem?



President Obama and his kind believe there should be equal outcomes in all endeavors including teaching. They can’t stand rewarding exceptional performance. That is what all this class warfare is about. Unfortunately for the country and especially for our children, when equal outcomes are applied to teachers, the quality of teachers as a whole sinks to the lowest denominator. The idea of tenure and seniority in any endeavor is not only non-productive, it runs counter to nature. This philosophy is what is causing our schools to fail. It is as simple as that, and it turns out that everyone, even a student knows it.!



Can the Problem Be Solved?

Yes! But we must find a way to do two things:

1. Give teachers the mentoring and opportunity to develop to their fullest capability

2. Pay the best teachers commensurate to their performance as evidenced in the development of their students achievement gains.



To do this the education community must develop and install the administration infrastructure that focuses on and hires administrative personnel who have the knowledge and training to develop the teachers. This may require by-passing the Teacher’s Unions, or it may require privatizing the public schools.


An alternative way to deal with this would be to covert our classrooms to digital. In this case the expert teacher is piped into the class room via TV and is interactive with the student. The lecturing teacher of the past is replaced in the class room by a monitor who keeps discipline, and attends to the needs of those students who fail to understand the information. This information is conveyed to the monitor via computer which tracks each student’s performance as they respond to tests while progressing at their own speed. The fact that it is right up to the latest digital technology will have the ancillary benefit of

When you consider that our country has a severe shortage of graduates with knowledge in science, engineering, technology and mathematics, we cannot delay action to make up for this critical shortage if we are to be competitive in the new global and digital world. No matter which course is taken, something must be done soon because we are rapidly losing our competitive edge.