Teaching - What a tangled web

Three articles touching on education, all coincidentally read within a couple of days of each other (despite their publication dates), highlighting just how challenging the burden is that we place upon schools in multicultural, modern societies. All three articles are at least thought-provoking. It reinforces my perspective that so much is contingent upon the underlying culture of the home from which children emerge to attend school. See Growing a Reading Culture.

First is an article from the August 1st, 2009 edition of The Economist, The Quality of Teachers. Unfortunately the article is behind their commercial firewall so to the library for a hardcopy; I did find this pdf version though. In Britain, most schools are managed from the center, strongly subject to the guidelines and funding of the national government. The experiment described in the article has, therefore a somewhat greater chance of success in that environment than it might in the highly decentralized system in the US. Regardless, the last paragraph argues a willful blindness to the core issue that still makes their gamble a long shot.

Almost all education-policy documents and research papers these days start with a reminder that a child's family background is by far the strongest influence on his educational achievement. This evident truth could spur teachers to greater efforts to lean against that wind; instead, it is generally used to explain away poor children's weaker performance. Teach First challenges such defeatism. "We believe educational inequity is a solvable problem," says Mr Wigdortz, "and that the way to solve it is to get the best people teaching in the most challenging schools."

Great teachers might mitigate the impact of the home environment but they cannot substantially displace it.

Next is this report from the September 19th, 2009 edition of The Economist (again), In Knots Over Headscarves. Again the content is behind their firewall; here is an external link to the article. The final two paragraphs say it all. What do you do when your tolerance of multiple cultures encourages intolerant cultures? And of course, teachers are caught in the middle trying to address on the ground what has not been considered at a policy level.

In short, the story of the Atheneum is complicated. Unintended consequences abound. There are people of goodwill on both sides, and actors with murkier motives. The row will probably lead to the establishment of Muslim state schools in Antwerp: the city already has Catholic and Jewish schools. Patrick Janssens, the city's mayor, regrets this, saying he is "not particularly in favour" of single-faith schools. He puts his trust in long-term development: as more Muslims go to university, or feel that society offers them equal opportunities, they will be "liberated" and "realise that religion is not dominant over all other values."

The story of the Antwerp Atheneum is the latest example of a paradox: how should liberal, tolerant Europeans protect their values, even as they protect the rights of less liberal minorities in their midst? Blanket laws banning headscarves are hardly a liberal solution. But Belgium's piecemeal approach left Karin Heremans running something approaching a ghetto-school. Distrust anyone with a simple answer.

Finally, there is Malcolm Gladwell's article in the December 15th, 2008 New Yorker, Most Likely to Succeed. Here he focuses on the challenge of how do you a priori identify who will be successful and effective as a teacher? An interesting question with significant policy implications which present enormous political challenges. Nothing worth doing is ever easy though.

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 U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent 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. But there's a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.