Education: It starts with the teachers

If you were asked what was the single greatest reason for any educational success you enjoyed, how would you answer?

Many of you would agree: It was a teacher. A teacher or teachers made all the difference.

Malcolm Gladwell is a teacher of a different sort. He is what every journalist should aspire to be; someone who can step back from what looks obvious and, in the course of his reporting, illustrate not just what's happening, but explain why. And the answers are rarely what you expect.

The author of bestsellers like The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. Several years ago he compiled several of his best magazine articles into a book he called What the Dog Saw and other adventures.

No journalist we know has researched more rigorously and then written as concisely and clearly on the importance of teachers - and the myriad challenges facing education - as Gladwell. For our discussion here's a starting point, from What the Dog Saw:

"... What's more - and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world - the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

"Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

"Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the United States is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the United States could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom 6 percent to 10 percent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers..."

What makes a teacher great - or even average? More to the point, how do we get more great teachers? A nation that has relied almost exclusively on colleges and universities to mass produce teachers for a century or more won't like our suggestion, which we'll share Friday.