
Why Do Schools Fire Losing Coaches But Not Bad Teachers? - solipsist
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/why_do_schools_fire_losing_coa.html
======
yardie
Coaches get to pick who is on their team. They have tryouts and some even get
paid for it. But this only applies to high performing athletic schools (the
ones you read about in the local paper that win county/state/regional titles).
Other schools are purely volunteer efforts. The coach may be a teacher willing
to give up free time everyday before and during the sports schedule.

For example, my history teacher was also the soccer coach. He wasn't great at
it but someone had to wrangle a bunch of wiry teenagers and make them
practice. He got nothing from it except the respect of his players.

The only teachers that get to chose their students are in governor's or magnet
schools. Here students have to apply every year to be considered for the
rigorous programs. Many teachers also apply for the job because of better pay,
better students, and better curriculum. Teachers that don't perform can be
fired. With a school full of motivated and talented students its entirely the
responsibility of the teachers, they can't hide behind the excuse of lazy
students and parents because, here, there are none.

The teacher in a poor school district doesn't have much of a choice. Some
things don't work no matter how hard you try and the blame can't rest entirely
on the teachers. But having poor students shouldn't be a fireable offense.

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Eliezer
People don't really care about whether students learn anything, the resultant
catastrophes not being visible for years and then being hard to blame on
anyone in particular. But they care about sports teams losing, which they see
right away and makes them feel like losers right now, and it's easy to blame
the coach.

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rnemo
I clicked on the link to this article expecting some thoughtful questions on
why poor teaching is a contributing factor to poor education overall in
America, and how the system is doing much about it, but I feel like I read an
entire article that can be summarized as "A lot of teachers are doing good
work, sometimes under tough conditions, but plenty of them need firing too. We
need a way to figure out the ones that need to be fired, somehow. Possibly
involving test scores."

In my opinion, the question we need to be asking is not "how do we find bad
apples" but "how do we improve the quality of the apple tree." Good education
is hard to come by regardless of what teacher, or indeed, school district you
come from. The problem may not be how good is teacher performance, or even how
good is student performance, but what is the quality of the teaching goals and
design of lessons. Once we've successfully answered that question, then we can
focus on the teachers who consistently have "losing seasons."

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cafard
One word for you: "cut". Turn out for the basketball team short, slow, and
unable to shoot, and you will not be suiting up. Hell, turn up as a "project"
and you may be cut. A kid at my high school did not make the team until his
junior year (as I recall). He got an athletic scholarship to college, was in
the running for NBA rookie of the year, and eventually picked up a
championship ring, not as a star but as a respected bit player. When he was 14
he could be cut from the team. I doubt his Algebra I teacher had any such
option.

Another word: "recruit". Even the public high schools end up with a lot of
athletes who do not live within the nominal boundaries. The high school a co-
worker's son once attended is now a power in football. Why? The parents of a
star athlete concluded they liked the program and found an apartment in town.
A city high school is a power in girls' basketball, with players from all over
the city. And then there are the Catholic high schools, the private schools,
etc.

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andrewce
I'll agree quite readily to the notion that there are bad teachers, but before
we jump on the "Let's fire 'em!" train, there are some things to consider:

1) A teacher whose students consistently perform below grade level, but who
jump 2 or 3 grade levels under her teaching (in the course of a year) is
probably not a bad teacher. I know several teachers, particularly those who
work with students for whom English is not a native language or who work with
students with communiications barriers, where this is the case.

(My father is on the board of trustees of a school for the deaf and blind;
this school consistently is one of the worst performing schools in the state,
but at least part of that is because the vast majority of its students enter
the school between 3 and 8 years behind grade level. I know the English
teacher there, and she's responsible for some phenomenal gains, but even then
it's rare that students will be reading and writing at grade level).

2) While we have a discussion of what bad teaching is, we also need to discuss
what good teaching entails. "Sufficient progress on standardized tests" does
not describe the teacher, but rather the students, and even then only on a
single day. I'm willing to buy that there's some correlation between those
tests and overall achievement, but would suggest that 3 hours is probably an
insufficient amount of time to fully demonstrate one's learning over the
previous 9 months.

Let's have a vibrant discussion of the how's and why's of teaching
excellently, both in terms of what it looks like in action and what it
accomplishes.

3) Finally, let's take a good look at what useful, worthwhile learning
entails, and what it looks like. It may be that the system of bells and
periods is more destructive than it is productive (I suspect this to be true,
given my knowledge of my own workflow, as well as how I had to drastically
alter my workflow when I taught), and it may be that we spend too much time on
low-level skills (like rote memorization solely for the purpose of taking a
test) and not enough time on internalization and contextualization of
meaningful knowledge and skills (how many students have you known who could
only solve a math problem when they knew ahead of time, by way of reading the
chapter heading, what that problem would entail, but would not be able to
solve that problem if they saw it mixed in with other types of problems?)

It's easy to say "Oh, let's fire the bottom 10% of teachers and replace them
with excellent teachers", but such a statement falls flat on its face pretty
quickly (for one, do we have a hidden reserve of these "excellent teachers",
and if so, can we convince them to leave their more lucrative jobs
elsewhere?).

It's much more difficult, but also much more worthwhile, to say "Let's figure
out what excellent teaching and learning look like, in all their dimensions,
and then let's see if we can figure out how to make it happen more often."

As far as education reform discussion topics go, I'd rather have the latter
than the former.

~~~
rmc
_A teacher whose students consistently perform below grade level, but who jump
2 or 3 grade levels under her teaching (in the course of a year) is probably
not a bad teacher._

Easy, reward the improvement in test results, not the test results. This could
also encourage good teachers to go to lower performing schools (since they
might see the largest gain (and hence pay rise) there).

 _for one, do we have a hidden reserve of these "excellent teachers", and if
so, can we convince them to leave their more lucrative jobs elsewhere?_

Yes, pay them more. If you are very skilled at mathematics or engineering, you
might be a good maths teacher. However you can get much better money working
in Google, than working as a teacher. So pay maths teachers Google level
salaries. You would have to pay teachers different amounts depending on what
they teach.

~~~
caseysoftware
Merit-based pay will never work as long as the unions and clueless
administrators are in control.

In early 2002, I was working with a local high school's theatre group. Since I
wasn't a parent, the rules said I had to get "hired" as a teachers' aide even
though I was doing it for free.

I did the fingerprinting for the background check, provided a college
transcript, and filled out the form. A month later I was rejected.

When I looked into it, I was told that I couldn't be a teachers' aide since I
didn't take a college-level algebra class. In fact, I was asked "how did you
get through college without taking any math?"

I pointed out that I had taken Calc 1-3, Diff Eq 1 & 2, Stats, Physics, and
_oh yeah_ had a BS in Electrical Engineering. But since I didn't have a
college-level class with "algebra" in the name, I was rejected.

I didn't expect the administrators to know how to _do_ Calc, but I did expect
them to realize it was an advanced math class.

~~~
nkassis
That's hilarious if true, I would assume that the majority of math teachers
would have also skipped college algebra to go straight for Calc since this is
pretty common today.

~~~
kevin_morrill
More appalling than hilarious. Putting even the algebra aside, by this logic
the following would be forbid in this school:

-Thomas Edison assisting in a science lesson -Bill Gates helping kids learn to program -John Rockefeller teaching a business seminar -Michael Dell talking about supply chain -Walt Disney teaching an art lesson

All never obtained a college degree (save honorary ones). It would be one
thing if primary education had a basis for its elitism. But instead they're
failing at an increasing rate.

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nervechannel
Mlodinow in "The Drunkard's Walk" makes the very good point that the 'losing
streaks' that lead to coach firings (and Hollywood studio boss sackings) are
almost entirely explainable by perfectly normal random variation.

[http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-
Lives/...](http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-
Lives/dp/0375424040)

Not only that, but the subsequent 'improvements' are generally due to
regression to the mean.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean>

It's depressing that an pompously-titled site like American Thinker can
completely fail to consider this...

------
gagi
> what is the difference between coaching football or basketball and teaching
> history or English?

1\. A sports coach can force a player out of the games or out of the team if
that player doesn't attend the practices. Teachers have no such power:
students can't be forced to practice the material out of school, and they
can't be removed from class for not practicing.

1\. Standardized testing reflects, at best, decently the purpose and aims of
general education. A competitive game of fotball, on the other hand, reflects
perfectly the purpose and aims of football training. Simply said, the purpose
of sports is to train a player to win the game. The purpose of general
education is not to write a test successfully. Rather -- it _shouldn't_ be the
purpose of general education.

The purpose of education is to disseminate knowledge and critical thinking
skills. That purpose needs to be measured in a correct fashion.

Think how silly it would be, instead of a competitive game of football, that
each team was given a set of drills to perform, on their own, on an empty
field, to prove their worth in football. It'd be absurd. It doesn't fit the
purpose of their training. The purpose of education shouldn't be to pass some
tests.

A more constructive conversation, I believe, would be to find places, distinct
disconnects if you will, where the method used to measure progress and
achievement in education does not reflect the purpose and aims of education.

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kevinburke
Some football coaches do well because they have good players, not because they
coach them to do their absolute best. Other coaches do well because they get
lucky and win games by 1 or 2 points even though they don't coach very good
football teams (Michigan State springs to mind). I wonder whether student test
scores give a more or less accurate impression of performance than on-field
performance. The existence of the tool is surely better than nothing, however.

------
nithyad
We need better ways to grade teachers than going by student performance in
tests.

~~~
rmc
Why? What's wrong with student tests? What would you suggest?

~~~
nithyad
You can check my answer below. But I am myself not convinced that is the best
method.

------
jwh
What about the effect of bad students? Isn't education a two-way process
involving a supplier and a consumer?

I got my highest grades in subjects I enjoyed (Business and Mathematics) and
my lowest grades in those I didn't (English). Was my English teacher not as
good because I got a D yet the Business and Maths teachers got an A or B out
of me? Does the fact that other students got A in English and a D or E in
Business or Maths show that actually the English teacher is 'better'? Or was
it just an anomaly?

Sure, there are no doubt a tiny minority of teachers who (in the UK at least)
have paid thousands for a degree, gone through some form of postgraduate
training and accreditation (years in total) only to land a job and then throw
it all away. However, my own opinion is that 'bad teachers' are an excuse for
bad students and (anecdotally and just in my experience) poor parental/primary
caregiver role models. I saw the same 'my son/daughter is performing poorly
because of bad teachers' come from parents whose children were more adept at
petty crime and drug dealing.

------
detokaal
Visibility and Value. Athletics are far more visible, and thus on the
community's mind to a greater degree; plus athletics has a higher value than
education for most of our parents here.

In our community, the football team is number one. The team (and coach)
receive far more media coverage for their wins and losses than classroom
students get for test scores. Parents of football players value the victory
more than academics as well. Parents will purchase hundreds of dollars in
gear, shoes, summer camps, etc. but those same kids have no internet access,
no notebooks, no highlighters, no basic computers or software.

Losing 10% of football games in a season gets the coach fired because everyone
hears about it every day and because it is important to the school board and
parents. 50% of our students drop out before graduation and it gets a
paragraph on page 6 of the local paper, and no one cares because we have a
great school: the football team won the conference again.

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michaelbuckbee
There was a very interesting study done of the Shaker Heights school system in
Cleveland that found parental involvement was the main determining factor of
student success.

<http://www.racematters.org/whyareblackstudentslagging.htm>

Now, that's not to say that there aren't good and bad teachers out there and
that we shouldn't find ways to reward the good and drive out the bad, but I
think it's focusing too much of the attention on the wrong problem.

~~~
cafard
Shaker Heights is a very well off suburb of Cleveland. It used to rank in the
top five cities in the country for per capita income.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
That was sort of the point of the study. That even in a very affluent school
district that different populations views of parental vs school involvement
were primarily responsible for the large gap in student achievement.

------
artost
I like the way they handle this at the Sudbury Valley School
(<http://sudval.org>). They essentially have realized that there is no
objective way to measure a good teacher, so instead they take the darwinian
approach. Every year all students (and staff) vote on which teachers thay want
to keep, culling out the bad ones and just keeping the good ones.

They actually have had teachers so good that they have been re-elected every
year for more than 40 years.

~~~
raganwald
I'm glad they have good results with this system. I recall a teacher in my
high school who was very unpopular with many students. He was an ex military
man and what I am about to tell you will sound like a cliché: He believed in
strict discipline, penalized students heavily for being slightly late or
having corrections on submitted work, and so on. He actually invented a new
form of punishment at the school involving hard physical labour. I don't
recall anyone having a Hollywood epiphany when subjected to his brutal style,
no wonderful breakthroughs or students discovering their hidden depths.

He would never have been re-elected by students. But was he a bad teacher? I
don't know! I entered the school interested in the material he taught and left
it still interested. Was he a bad teacher? Honestly, I have no idea. All I can
say is that he was an unpopular teacher amongst many students.

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mike463
A: No coaches union.

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douglasputnam
I hear lots of smart people arguing that education can be improved by fired
low performing teachers, breaking unions, enforcing discipline, raising test
scores, etc. What I don't hear is lots of smart people saying, "Hey. I'm
smart. I care about education. I think I'll become a teacher."

Not a single critic of education has come forward to say, I want to help by
becoming a really great teacher.

~~~
philwelch
You can't fix a broken system by becoming part of the system. _Many_ critics
of public education have set up their own systems, of course--the whole
charter school, Montessori, and homeschooling movements for example--but right
now the best bet is to rescue children from the public school system and put
them into something better.

Even if you can fix the public school system, becoming a teacher is not the
way to do it.

------
jgs715
The one difference that stands out to me is that sports coaches are allowed to
pick their students for the teams and punish those who do not work. As opposed
to most teachers which have limited control over who is in their classes and
how to punish them if they are slacking ( besides bad grades ).

------
forkandwait
Perhaps teachers unions and tenure are part of the reason that we don't fire
teachers? Coaches don't have tenure.

------
MattArnold
They fire losing coaches but not bad teachers because sports players want to
win. Students do not.

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kamiller
sports bring in money and affect the bottom line, bad teachers don't

~~~
krschultz
<http://bit.ly/blfSNz>

According to Sports Illustrated, "Of the 120 athletic departments that play
I-A football, 106 lost money in 2009"

------
jaxtapose
a) Coaches can pick and choose their players. b) They get paid for the risk.
Many schools pay more for a football coach than they do for the school
principle.

Imagine if each class had to have academic try outs? Now imagine that teachers
got massive wages and bonuses for winning academic competitions? Now reflect
on the number of deadshits in your classes that never, ever, would have passed
an academic try out for anything.

That's right, it's a stupid comparison.

The only good thing is that most people would know they have a second or third
rate education. Because they never met the cut to get into schools who used
such a stupid system.

~~~
yason
Excuse my ignorance and lack of better knowledge with regard to American
school system but what is the thing with high-paid coaches in _school_? What
is the connection between a school and (semi?)professional sports?

~~~
loupgarou21
A lot of schools charge admission to watch the sporting event, so even though
the kids don't earn any money (and many times have to pay to play) the school
makes a fair amount of money from the sports. The better the coach, the better
the team. The better the team, the more people will come and watch. The more
people that watch, the more money for the school.

~~~
gvb
The kids are not paid directly[1], but the kids that go to the schools that
you see on TV _are_ paid indirectly in the form of scholarships and other
perqs.

Depending on the school, a full ride scholarship has a value in the range of
$10,000 to $50,000 and up.

[1] "Gifts" do happen, but there are severe penalties for both the kids and
the schools when caught.

------
scrod
Why do wealthy corporations fire poorly performing employees but not bad
corporate officers?

That question is probably more important and relevant than trying to find yet
another rationalization for attacking the middle class. That articles like
this appear on HN at all is an embarrassment.

~~~
ghshephard
At most Silicon Valley companys I've worked at, anything less than excellent
performance resulted in executives losing their position - the equivalent of
being "fired" (In some rare cases those executives stayed with the company in
a reduced role, but that was rarely the case - who wants to go from Senior VP
of marketing to manager of technical publications - and the requisite $500K+
year of compensation to $125K)

On the flip side, as long as the line employee was performing reasonably
adequately - they were rarely fired. Only those who were performing abysmally
were part of the typical 10% annual churn.

Your experience may be different, but, that was mine.

