Education: One teacher suggestion

"Educational-reform efforts," writes Malcolm Gladwell in his book What the Dog Saw, "typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers - that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you've ... seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar...

"A group of researchers - Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard's school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress - have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications - as much as they appear related to teaching prowess - turn out to be about as useful in predicting success has having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans..."

As a point of comparison, Gladwell writes about a Minnesota-based financial services firm that, on average, interviews about 1,000 applicants for about 50 finalists who then go through a four-month training camp. From that emerge roughly 20 job winners; four years later, only about one-third of those have survived. The company estimates that it invests $100,000 to $250,000 in these employees over their first three or four years, and many ultimately wash out. But the rewards?

At the time of Gladwell's writing, the company had 125 full-time advisers. Of them, 71 qualified for the prestigious Million Dollar Round Table. Their investment was paying off with tremendous dividends.

In education, however, we do things very differently, leading Gladwell to ask:

"What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?"

Gladwell:

"Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree - and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start ... an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated... Given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half's material in one year, we're going to have to pay them a lot - both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

"... Taxpayers might well balk at the costs of trying out four teachers to find one good one. Teachers' unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement. But all the reformers want is for the teaching profession to copy what firms like [North Star in Minnesota] have been doing for years."

On Sunday, we'll conclude this mini-series by suggesting one practical way to improve American public education.