
The Case for a Teacher Bar Exam - kevinalexbrown
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/the-case-for-a-teacher-bar-exam/267030/
======
rayiner
Every article about how terrible the U.S. education system is is more or less
bunk. Judge Posner on such comparisons: [http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-...](http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-role-of-schools-in-student-
performance-on-standardized-testsposner.html)

More numbers: [http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-
abou...](http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-
scores-usa.html?m=1)

The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not
convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a
wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city
Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white
flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go
to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc.

~~~
kevinalexbrown
I've volunteered in inner city Chicago schools. I coached a middle school
debate team there. There were times when I believe I was the only non-black
person in the building. This made the debate topic of racial profiling even
more difficult to discuss, but the kids managed it really well. A paraphrased
quotation from one student: "On the one hand I don't like racial profiling
because the white police come by every half-hour, but on the other hand there
are gunshots every two hours." It doesn't even matter how accurate she was,
that was her perception of the current state of her life.

I thought this article was interesting, because if teaching at a nice "white"
school in the suburbs isn't considered super prestigious, what will make
inner-city Chicago teaching prestigious in the long term? I've heard Teach for
America suggested, and I've had friends who've done it. But TFA teachers are
often not in it for "the long haul" because for the "best and brightest" to
stay teaching in the inner city isn't prestigious enough to counter the
frustration.

So while many articles about the US education system are bunk, and this one
doesn't seem to focus on the inner city, I think the principles might still
apply.

EDIT: Please, I don't want anyone to get the impression I think I understand
everything about the problems South Side Chicago students face. I did have the
privilege of observing some of the challenges they face first-hand, but I
still have very little knowledge of the actual state of mind growing up in
such places really consists of.

~~~
rayiner
You can't change the situation in the south side of Chicago with some
teachers. It is, unfortunately, a much deeper rooted and more systematic
problem.

I'm Asian, and one of the things Asian parents tell their kids is: choose your
friends very carefully. You will become the kind of person you surround
yourself with. So what of a kid on the south side? Surrounded by kids with no
fathers, from families with no education or belief in education? Surrounded by
drug dealers and gang bangers?

These communities will never improve so long as they remain so completely
segregated, economically and racially. That's the tough issue nobody wants to
address.

~~~
frozenport
The unfortunate part is that many parents do believe in education despite or
as a direct consequence of their miserable situation. The answer for these
families is often parochial schools, which speaks the deficiencies in Chicago
city schools.

The real problem is that many of these folks trust the public schools to
facilitate health development but it is precisely in Chicago city schools that
kids are surrounded with these negative factors: kids see drug dealers, gang
bangers and violence in school. Imagine if you left your kid with a baby
sitter, only to find him hanging out with a drug dealer?

~~~
ktsmith
> kids see drug dealers, gang bangers and violence in school

Kids that are seeing those things at school are seeing them outside of school
as well.

------
mr_luc
That's funny - I was just thinking that we need to _remove_ all of the current
certification-based requirements for teachers. This seems to go the other way.

Education needs to change drastically. It needs to be nimble. It needs to
start providing value in a post-industrial economy -- i.e, it needs to train
kids to do knowledge work. You'll know it's making progress when graduating
from High School starts to mean something again.

No one knows what that transition will look like, or what it will take. Most
people agree it'll be disruptive and messy, and the teaching profession is
already being disrupted (Coursera, Codecademy, etc).

It seems as though raising the barriers to entry for teaching as a profession,
by adding yet another layer of certification, is a protectionist move that
could get in the way of 'good disruption.'

~~~
randomdata
I was thinking similar thoughts. You want to hire the best people possible,
not those who have jumped though various hoops. _Shrinking_ the pool of
possible people you can hire is never going to raise the quality of talent
available. How could it?

~~~
dragonwriter
In general, if the process that shrinks the pool is better at chopping off the
low end of the distribution than the process that selects individual members
from the pool to employ is at avoiding selecting from the low end of the
distribution, then shrinking the pool by that method prior to selection will,
in fact, raise the quality of talent actually selected.

More specifically, "jumping through hoops" selects, if nothing else, for
motivation, which is a not-unimportant qualification for teaching.

~~~
adventured
That's one of the problems: the process would not inherently be better at
chopping off the low end.

Bar exams are guild based funnels. In my opinion they more often than not act
as barriers to competition, protect the entrenched, and inflate pay
artificially for those that get into the guild. They limit supply, but nothing
guarantees that supply is the best of the possible candidates. That would
depend on the nature of the examination/s (not to mention some of the best
candidates simply won't like the hoops that have to be jumped through), and
good luck with that given the hyper political atmosphere around teaching /
teachers.

------
chrismealy
You own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Your team stinks. You want to turn it into the
Yankees. Do you have your players work longer hours for less pay? Add lots of
testing? Go after the players' union? Or do you just do what the Yankees do,
and pay more for better players?

~~~
adventured
You're already the Yankees. You pay far more than everybody else, and you're
not winning enough to justify the vast expenditures. The only thing keeping
your franchise afloat is a media network that pays for it all (tax payers
endlessly subsidizing horrific teaching results despite the highest pay scale
in the developed world).

And who in their right mind would want to be the Yankees? You pay two times
too much for all your players, and almost never win a championship because of
it. You've got A-Rod, a broken down disaster that you pay $30+ million per
year for, that you bought because you were foolishly trying to buy a
championship instead of building a real team.

The Pirates get more wins per dollars spent. The Pirates won a mere 16 less
games (17% less than NYY), but paid roughly 66% less for that performance.

And if you want to talk raw winning. Let's talk the Cincinnati Reds. They won
two more games than the Yankees, with 55% less payroll.

While other teams with half the payroll take home the world series title year
after year, the Yankees might be lucky to eek out one title every ten years,
and pay $2 billion dollars for it.

------
manglav
I have a question for HN. At what point do you become responsible for your own
education?

Before, you may have not had a public library near you. Nowadays, there is too
much information. Curation? Multiple MOOC's have taken the problem and
squashed it. Internet Access? I'm not sure, but I remember reading that
Comcast gives subsidized rates in poor income areas. Computers / Notebooks?
This I'm not sure about at all. What access do people have?

Assuming people have access to education, at what point are "educators"
defunct? I feel as though I would not have gone to high school had these
MOOC's been available. However, I did have enough personal curiosity to pursue
these things. In college now, I'm not "spoon fed" anymore, it is my
responsibility to do well, and seek out help if I am struggling. I am just
curious where people think that line is drawn, and if it's different for
everyone or not. I am for the Bar exam - for goodness's sake, we still have
teachers trying to teach Creationism!

One of my favorite videos on reforming education, from a very logical
perspective from Sir Ken Robinson. Bonus: it's pictorially animated!
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U>

~~~
bphogan
Say you have parents who split up when you were two. Then say your mom works
two jobs and doesn't help you with your homework, ever. Say you go to school
on Monday and your first decent meal is the snack the teacher gives you on
Monday morning.

Say this is Kindergarten.

At what point do you then even learn to become responsible for your own
education?

Unfortunately I've recently been introduced to a lot of those kinds of things,
and it's really hard to make that change from judging.

It was easy to see the unmotivated kid in the class as a slacker. Then we find
out he wasn't eating cos it was a choice between getting food or paying for
heat.

Our backgrounds shape us much more than teachers do. What goes on outside of
the class does too.

You're a motivated self-learner. How much of that, truly, is because of the
environment you grew up in?

I know I sling code because my dad bought a computer and let me play on it
when I was 7. I was encouraged by my dad to learn on my own.

~~~
manglav
bphogan I was not saying these kids are unmotivated and should focus on school
- I am very sorry for even letting my comment be unclear. Of course our
children should be nurtured, and the fact that this situation exists is awful.

Everyone is different when it comes to what shapes them, for me it was a few
select science teachers (not so much my environment in this case). That's why
I am such a fan for Teach for America. I know four of my classmates who have
elected to participate, and it has been the most rewarding experience of their
lives. The thing that kids appreciate most? That they care. Really care.

One idea thing I've always wondered about was making a safe place in this
cities to code. I wrote a paper on how 1. School districts can cut IT budgets
instead of teaching staff by using servers and thin clients instead of full
desktop computers. Then 2. after school, adding some coding classes after
school (including meals, stews are healthy,cheap, and hot), with the eventual
goal of becoming a self-sufficient outsourcing team. Or making mockups, or
even slicing PSD's. I feel as though if Hacker Dojo's and such exist,
eventually a charity version will be created as well. There could be sponsors
from FB / Google / IBM, etc...

It's just a dream.

I've always been a supporter of education for all. It's just a really, really,
hard problem. I can't think of doing anything that these other startups aren't
doing, so I'm waiting until I can contribute a bit more. Thanks for the
anecdote bphogan, it really hit home.

------
Alex3917
This is dumb. States already require teachers to pass standardized tests to
demonstrate content mastery and pedagogical skill, and there is zero reason to
think that it does anything to improve teacher quality, let alone to think
that implementing it on the federal level would improve teacher quality.

And there is tons of evidence showing that merit pay not only doesn't improve
teaching quality, but actually makes it worse.

The idea that the reason why Finland's kids do better on some random test is
because we don't have standardized testing and merit pay for teachers is
absurd. This is just another attempt at the privatization of schooling so that
capitalists can gut the school system and monetize children.

~~~
vor_
> And there is tons of evidence showing that merit pay not only doesn't
> improve teaching quality, but actually makes it worse.

Do you have links to this evidence? I'm genuinely curious; my own searching
brings up evidence in favor of merit pay, such as this recent study:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/23/d...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/23/does-
teacher-merit-pay-work-a-new-study-says-yes/)

------
darkxanthos
It seems like there are so few teachers now. Maybe the first problem to solve
is why we as a nation don't invest more in paying good wages to our teachers.

~~~
w1ntermute
These issues with teachers are largely in school districts in poor areas. The
wealthy suburban school district I attended had no issues with teacher
quality, and friends I made in college from all over the country confirmed
this to be true on the national level.

Since school districts are primarily funded by local taxes, poor children end
up with bad teachers. I believe this is what NCLB was created to fix, but that
wasn't successful for a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which was
probably the tying of funding to continual yearly improvement in standardized
test scores.

~~~
ktsmith
School funding often breaks down at the state level not the local level though
it varies by state of course. Simply being in a wealthy suburb does not mean
that your school has any more funding than a school in a poor area. In fact
it's quite likely that your schools received significantly less money than
schools in poorer areas due to federal funding via grants and things like
Title I.

~~~
w1ntermute
In that case, why are there not better teachers in poor school districts?
After all, if my school was receiving less funding and still had good
teachers, then those poor districts must have stellar teachers. And yet we
continue to hear about how teachers suck.

~~~
ktsmith
The teachers are making the same amount of money regardless of what school
they work at. Most school districts have had pay scales based on amount of
college education (degrees and credit hours) and longevity in the district.
That is starting to change but there doesn't seem to be a good way to judge
"merit" when determining teacher pay at the moment.

Teaching jobs in wealthy areas can often be vastly easier than in poor areas
and as such they are highly desirable and hard to get due to a lack of
teachers leaving those positions. When you teach at a school in a wealthy
neighborhood you can expect great parental involvement, an active PTA that
picks up the slack during budget shortfalls etc. When you work at a poor
school you can expect to be a counselor, get little to no parental involvement
and have to deal with tons of issues tangential to education. Teachers don't
last long, the average teacher is only expected to last 3-5 years in the
field.

A few anecdotes. The school district my wife teaches in pays for no PE
teachers due to budget shortfalls. Three of the elementary schools in town
have PE teachers that show up between three and four days per week entirely
funded by the schools PTAs. The elementary schools in wealthy neighborhoods
send home supply lists with items like paper, pencils, crayons, paper towels
and kleenex. The parents send all that stuff in. The poor schools have that
provided but once it's gone there isn't any more because the parents can't
afford to pick up the slack. The school my wife teaches at is Title I
provision G. That means the kids get all three of their meals at school during
the week. 40% of the students at her school are classified as being "in
transition" which is a bureaucratic way of saying homeless. There's a lot more
money being spent at my wife's school than the "good" schools but most of it
isn't spent on education, it's spent on the basic needs of the kids.

~~~
w1ntermute
I am of the opinion that if these people cannot afford to properly raise their
children, they should not be having them. It shouldn't be the school's
responsibility to take care of all these basic parenting duties. Perhaps that
is where we should start.

What if the government were to offer $X to women in return for having their
tubes tied (same for the male equivalent)? Only the poor people would need the
money badly enough to actually do so. You could offer a small sum for a
reversible process (which you'd have to pay back in order to get it undone),
or a large sum for a permanent procedure. This could very likely solve a lot
of these issues in a generation.

~~~
ktsmith
> It shouldn't be the school's responsibility to take care of all these basic
> parenting duties. Perhaps that is where we should start.

That's true, but as a society we've pushed a LOT of non education related
responsibilities onto schools. Picking up the slack for parents that don't
want to be parents, or those that are trying very hard but struggling is just
the tip of the iceberg.

------
j2kun
A scary majority of my constituent mathematics majors in undergrad told me
this of linear algebra (a basic mathematics subject), "I don't care about this
stupid shit. I just want to get my degree so I can go teach."

We need a bar exam to weed out these scary people.

------
jpwagner
[best test takers] is unlikely to be strongly correlated with [best teachers].

~~~
mjmahone17
Should we remove the qualification for med school being that you do
exceptionally well on the MCAT? Should we eliminate the LSAT and Bar exams for
lawyers? Because it's likely that, at the very least, the best teachers should
be able to pass rigorous tests, even if they aren't the absolute best at said
test.

------
mynameishere
The massive forced population transfers involved in making the US like Finland
would probably be a splotch on our history.

------
pmorici
There is a great documentary called "Waiting For Superman" that addresses the
inner city school problem and so called achievement gap. It's on NetFlix. If
you haven't seen it it is worth the time.

------
lhnn
I think it would be interesting to see this implemented at a state level,
where it belongs, rather than trying to accomplish this at the Federal level.

On one side, teachers do suffer from excess bureaucracy, underappreciation and
(sometimes) lack of skills. On the other, mandatory guilds/bars are not
usually something I'm a fan of, on principle.

~~~
mjmahone17
Why not create a non-mandatory bar, like the ABA? This group could create
high-standards teacher certifications, possibly something similar to how
actuaries have a series of tests in order to get accredited at a specific
level (and the amount of schooling they have isn't relevant, just the level
they've managed to pass). I know a lot of states wouldn't require it, but if
I'm a principle and someone's taken the time to get accredited, I think that's
a good reason to hire them. Especially in more competitive areas like English
and History. We wouldn't prevent people from practicing teaching without
accreditation, but it should be more difficult, in the long term, as more and
more teachers do get accredited.

~~~
japhyr
Teachers can earn National Board certification[0]. This is a fairly rigorous
process, that demonstrates teachers have a higher level of proficiency.

[0] <http://www.nbpts.org/>

------
eriksank
In my opinion, the article does not address what I experience as the real
problem in the field of education: total lack of freedom to choose. After
confiscating ("appropriating") the budget from the pockets of the parents, the
politicians add insult upon injury by deciding in the parents' stead what
education should be all about. I just want a competing portfolio of education
service providers of which I choose the ones I want to work with, and I pay
them out of my own pocket. Why does this kind of freedom seem so impossible to
achieve even in the so-called "land of the free"?

~~~
codva
It's possible, but you have to opt out of the system and do it all yourself.
Neither of my kids ever went to school - both killed it on the SAT and other
standardized tests while spending far less time on "school" than their
traditionally educated peers. Not that I think standardized test scores really
prove much, but if we are going to measure the success of education by them,
then both my kids were wild successes, and neither ever went to school.

Of course, that option is not practical for 90% of the population.

