

Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless - comatose_kid
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/05/17/experience-as-a-teacher-turns-out-to-be-worthless/

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vitaminj
The title of this story is a bit misleading. From the Urban Institute website,
the Teach for America teachers were "high-achieving college graduates ... [who
in North Carolina] tended to have graduated from more selective colleges and
universities". So they're essentially comparing the cream of the crop college
graduates with a bunch of experienced (but presumably average) teachers. For
the claim in the title to be really tested, high achievers with teaching
experience need to be evaluated against high achievers with no experience.

Notwithstanding, I suppose the interesting conclusion is that intelligence and
talent beats out experience (on average) in teaching. Ultimately the ideal
situation would be to have teachers with intelligence AND experience.

That said however, I personally feel that using test scores as the metric for
evaluating teachers is a bit dubious.

~~~
comatose_kid
I just used the title of the original blog post.

What other metric could be used for evaluating teachers?

~~~
sanj
Derivative of test scores.

A good teacher should make your scores _improve_. The absolute numbers are
much less meaningful.

~~~
Jesin
No, it really depends on the teacher. My precalculus teacher (probably the
best math teacher I've ever had) gives progressively harder tests/quizzes as
we learn more about each topic. He ignores the textbook and writes the tests
himself.

(Incidentally, we've recently been covering derivatives.)

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art_wells
Since current educational objectives in the U.S.A have shifted from genuine,
classroom-centric education to national simplified standardized testing, and
schoolteacher skills can only be evaluated on their ability to teach to the
test, this result can hardly be surprising. Older, more experienced teachers
are distracted by caring about students and schools rather than tests, and do
weird things that most of us might recall as great educational experiences
that only distract from filling in the right bubbles.

Yes, inexperienced teachers are probably significantly better. Soon, computers
with marginally skilled babysitters can take their place. Better yet, since
standardized tests are all that matter now, we should just buy computers that
can take the standardized tests for the students and be done with it. We'll
get simple, easy-to-understand numbers and won't have to trust anyone so
unstable as an experienced teacher.

There are somethings we can't measure well, and measuring poorly is only going
to deliver a false confidence. I don't propose another metric. I propose we
don't measure something we can't.

~~~
anamax
> Since current educational objectives in the U.S.A have shifted from genuine,
> classroom-centric education to national simplified standardized testing

The above suggests that schools were ruined by the shift to "let's see if
we're getting what we're paying for". While there may have been a time when
schools were considerably better than they are today, they weren't
significantly better right before the recent testing push. The testing push
was a reaction to crappy schools, not the cause.

Note that the charter school movement makes it possible for folks to have "old
style" schools for many definitions of "old" Feel free to demonstrate the
superiority of your approach.

~~~
danprager
Just because testing was a reaction to crappy schools doesn't mean that it
leads to improvement.

* * *

I don't have time to start my own alternative school and report back to this
thread. But I note that

    
    
      Brin & Page, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Will Wright
    

all attended Montessori or Montessori-influenced schools.

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noonespecial
I think we might be seeing a bias here.

 _New teachers care._

In my experience that $80,000/year "experienced" unionized public school
teacher stopped caring about teaching before I was born.[1]

[1] Yes I know that this is a gross generalization and that there are very
good teachers that educated and inspire throughout their careers simply
because thats the kind of people they are. They are rare. Thats why we
remember them so fondly.

