The stuff on teaching was just amazing. His graph on what makes a good teacher was jaw dropping to me. Once he put it out there, it was really hard for me to avoid the question of why we are not focusing more on what makes good teacher performance.
"Most schools define computer literacy as being able to operate Microsoft Office and maybe do a little web design. They're missing the point. That's like saying, "If you know which end of a book to hold up, and you know how to turn to Chapter Three, then you're literate." -- Alan Kay
What about paying them decently? Other than some positions at Ivy-League, becoming a teacher is just bad math, financially speaking. Why would anyone intelligent want to become a teacher?
In economics, how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are. So, Lebron James makes millions because we value the ability to throw a ball through a metal ring, and we demand that someone be so good at this that only a handful of Americans can fulfill these positions. I'll let you continue the reasoning for teacher pay as a homework exercise...
how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are
This is a statement of fact, not opinion of what ought to be. Part of what Gates (and others) are saying, I think, is that to have a better functioning society, we need to increase the value society puts on teaching.
If we provide the educational opportunity that Bill Gates, John Resig, or Larry Page got to every child in America, we will all be a lot better off.
By adding a way to measure teaching ability, we can make good teachers a highly prized resource and reward them by giving them higher salaries and more prominent positions amongst their peers. With measurements we can set standards of how good a teacher have to be and demand that someone be so good at teaching that significantly less Americans can fulfill these positions, driving their worth up.
Some teachers are paid very well, it depends on the district really. When I lived in upstate NY, I remember hearing that a few of the teachers in my school district made almost 100k, which is terrific for the cost of living in that region.
And there are a lot of reasons other than financial, that people choose to become teachers.
From my observations on decent school systems (I haven't seen the TED speech yet), the biggest feature of schoolteachers is complacency. It's not that they aren't intelligent, it's that they aren't ambitious. People go into teaching in order to have a safe, comfortable, predictable career path. And in many cases that's what it is, and the result is that teachers wind up living in a different reality.
No, actually, I wasn't thinking about that article, though it's a pretty good one. I was thinking about a much smaller, suburban district and the average there is probably closer to $50k.
And yes, starting salaries are much lower-- as they are for most graduates in most other industries.
I wasn't arguing that being a teacher is going to get you rich. But at least in NY, one makes enough to live comfortably. If you can handle dealing with kids on a daily basis, it isn't a bad career choice at all. Of course, NY State's public schools have a good reputation.
I'll try to dig up the link later but I remember a Time or Newsweek cover story that said that the number one reason teachers quit the profession is the students' parents. I recall two horrifying stories from it: 1) A parent calling to complain about a 'C' that her daughter got because she wrote the daughter's report, 2) A college student handing his cellphone during class to the professor. On the line was his irate parent to complain for his kid about a grade.
That being said, I've discussed this with my friends many times and I've gradually been convinced that more than anything - parents' involvement in their education was/is vitally important. A couple of them made it out of the ghetto.
Could not find the link directly but it was captured by a message board:
Why Teachers Hate Parents, Time Magazine
"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."
"Perhaps the most complicated part of the conversation—beyond all the issues of race and class and culture, the growing pressures to succeed and arguments over how success should be defined—is the problem of memory. When they meet in that conference, parent and teacher bring their own school experiences with them—what went right and wrong, what they missed. They are determined for it to be different for the child they both care about. They go into that first-grade room and sit in the small chairs and can easily be small again themselves. It is so tempting to use the child's prospects to address their own regrets. So teachers learn to choose their words with care and hope that they can build a partnership with parents that works to everyone's advantage and comes at no one's expense. And parents over time may realize that when it comes to their children, they still have much to learn. "I think that we love our children so much that they make us a little loony at times," says Arch Montgomery, head of the Asheville School in North Carolina. He winces at parents who treat their child as a cocktail-party trophy or a vanity sticker for the window of their SUV, but he also understands their behavior. "I think most parents desperately want to do what is right for their kids. This does not bring out the better angels of our natures, but it is understandable, and it is forgivable."
Unreasonable parents are part of the problem, yes. In the case of the cell-phone, what would happen if the director of that school would enforce "law and order"?
One of my family members recently had a career change. Teaching is not that bad a career choice (if you compare with what difficulty a person with a Journalism or BA(Languages) degree may find work).
Teaching has a couple of advantages:
- The entry requirements are not that high.
- The degree program is not that demanding.
- There is always employment (compare that with journalism or pharmacology in some countries).
- There is a huge shortage of teachers in 1st world countries. For immigration to some countries a teaching degree can count more than an engineering degree.
- In some countries there are fairly long (paid) holidays for teachers.
- There are a lot of half day (08h00-14h00) positions available. This is especially important for someone with children.
- There are generally a lot of bursaries available to fund study and distance study is also a good option.
- Some countries allow abridging studies: a person with another degree can work as a teacher while doing a 1 to 2 year diploma that will make them a fully qualified teacher.
I don't know how demanding the degree program is but becoming a teacher includes a lot of hoops to jump through beyond that. A friend of mine wants to be a teacher and has just about finished her master's, but may move out of state for a couple of years for her fiance's sake. Apparently she has a limited time after finishing the master's get certified, and if she spends much of that time out of state it will be very difficult to accumulate the required teaching experience.
Because they properly account for non-wage compensation?
To begin, multiply teacher salaries by (12 months/year)/(9 months worked). Throw in the value of 3 consecutive months of vacation, great health plan, defined-benefit pensions (the pension plans that will soon bankrupt most states), and "can't get fired" job security. You'll find that teachers are paid quite nicely.
That gets prohibitively expensive because you can't pay for quality. Teacher unions have made it such that if you want to pay teachers a lot you have to pay them all (by seniority typically) a lot. That means you'll be grossly over paying a lot of staff.
On teachers, Gates says that after 3 years, a teachers' performance generally doesn't change.
He put up a graph of what influences teachers' performance. By far the greatest effect came from 'past performance,' distantly followed by a having a math degree (for math teachers), and Teach for America experience. Almost negligible came the last item, 'having a masters degree.'
Next, Gates looked at the incentive structure within schools -- it's primarily seniority based, with a bonus if someone has a master's degree.
He noted that good teachers leave the system at a rate slightly higher than that of bad teachers.
He contrasted charter schools such as KIPP (http://www.kipp.org/), where the school evaluates teachers on their performance -- with the traditional model.
The traditional model contractually limits how schools can evaluate their teachers, for example, a principal is contractually not permitted to sit in on a teacher's class more than a few times a year (sometimes even once per year), and even those times, the principal must provide advance notice. Gates compared this to running a factory with some workers "making crap" but the management being banned from observing them without prior notice, so that the workers "might actually try and fool you into thinking we're doing a good job in that one brief moment."
Gates next noted that even a teacher wanted to improve -- can't. New York, for example, passed a law banning schools using teacher improvement data to determine tenure.
Gates closed noting his optimism, praising the testing data for revealing something. He posited the idea of using digital video to record all public school classrooms to give teachers the opportunity to review their work and consult with each other to improve. Gates said: "By thinking of this as a personnel system we can do it much better."
He finished by saying he thought "education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have." He mentioned the House-version of stimulus bill had funding for "these data systems," but the Senate version took that out, because "there are people threatened by these things." He reiterated his optimism, however, saying that people were beginning to recognize the importance of education.
Good catch. Sorry, I shouldn't have used influences. Thanks for pointing it out.
Gates used the word explain. At about 12:50, he said "This chart takes four different factors and asks how much do they they explain teaching quality?"
I was just watching and saw that. I think 'explain' is the wrong word. Something causes teacher quality. It usually doesn't change over time. Knowing it doesn't change over time lets you make predictions. But that isn't explaining what the cause really is.
I agree. I'm not sure that the technological techniques he mentioned will be very successful though. I think video of great teachers will help some, but as he said in his description of a great teacher: they are looking around and seeing what kids are paying attention, etc. I think kids will benefit the most from that kind of attention and I think that is even more true of at risk kids.
One thing I think might help is to have teachers observe each other. I taught a bit in grad school and would have liked to observe some of the other teachers who were really good and to have them observe me and give me suggestions.
I associate with a nature school that runs weekly programs for home schooled kids (the kids come one or two full school days a week). The instructors and helpers interact with all the kids throughout the year (they break into groups, but change it up a lot). During prep time they will talk with each other about the individual kids - where they think they are at and what they can do to help the kids grow. I've been really impressed and was thrilled with the adult programs I have done with them. The instructors aren't paid very much either, they are passionate about it though. And they have helpers who are doing it for free (some are actually paying a little for it as part of an apprenticeship program).
This graph, shown at 12:50, shows how good four different factors are at predicting whether a teacher will raise the test scores of her students, and they are:
1) Past Performance (presumably, whether the teacher raised his students' test scores the year before, although it's not defined)
2) Whether or not the teacher majored in math
3) Whether or not the teacher participated in TFA
4) Whether or not the teacher has a Master's in Education
The best predictor is #1, which just means that the best predictor of whether a teacher is good at raising test scores is to see if they were good at that last year too. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.
Probably the issue is that most teachers are quite bad and there's a limit to how much they can improve. So most teachers probably don't want any of this.
I read somewhere that Chris Anderson was quoted as saying that the caption for this talk should be that "Bill gates releases more bugs into the world".
One very interesting question he touched on but didn't really answer: If the market is heartless and government is incompetent, then how do we address issues such as these?
The market is heartless, for the same reasons government isn't - the hearts of the citizens. Markets don't feel, because they need to reflect the feelings of stakeholders, politicians do feel because they are increasingly elected to impose their feelings on citizens.
If the market is heartless and government is incompetent, then the government should decide on goals and pay actors in the private sector for implementing them.
Want to figure out which teachers are the best ones? Pay for student performance. The market will sort everything else out. You don't have to publish standards of what makes a good teacher, heck you don't even have to make pursuit of good teachers a defined goal, any more than you need to pass a law saying "Make sure you hire those programmers who are ten times as effective as the other ones."
(I know there is one glaring problem here, namely that a politically powerful lobby considers that solution anathema, but it would work.)
More than one, really. State schools in the UK are incentivised in a way similar to this.
What it results in is gaming of the performance measures.
For example, pupils are steered into softer subjects where results are easier to attain. Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade left to their own devices.
Push that down to the per-teacher level and good teachers would not want to work with difficult pupils, since they will get poor results and less pay. "So make the pay conditional on improvement rather than absolute attainment". OK, in which case you've just made an incentive for children to be labeled as behaviourally difficult and academically poor so that they can be improved more.
Want to get better teachers? Pump more damn money in. Get good managers and get good quality people teaching. Make it a profession people aspire to work in once more.
The thing is, you'll have to keep it up for about a generation (with not much to show for it), to flush the system through. Good luck with that politically.
Markets are not a panacea. Particularly so with subjective measures.
Education (in the broader sense of what we want to achieve) is subjective - even academic results are more subjective than one might think - how many mathematics qualifications is a history qualification of the same level 'worth'?
I'm not really sure what I believe here, but I'm going to make the argument of true believer in the powers of market forces. The purist objection here would be that you need to follow through; get out of the market's way further down the chain.
If you choose to reward achievement, you have to measure achievement. If achievement is measured by standardized testing, then people will game the metrics. However, if the market chooses the testing procedures, it will reward metrics which are harder to game. This would take several iterations (read: many years) to stabilize, but it should converge on some sort of solution.
I think the fundamental problem here is forcing the market to not become complacent. This sort of thing needs to be done like a genetic algorithm. Every state tries a different testing procedure and then tests cross-pollinate and evolve under the pressure of market forces. There would need to be some way to reward experimentation as well, so that we don't wind up with one homogenized solution that stops progressing; there would need to be "random mutations".
Market forces aren't infallible. They're compromised by a profit motive, and that's not always a good thing.
If you want to see a market in action, look at TV networks. The big networks move farther and farther away from actual reporting. They go for lowest-common-denominator. The channels that do produce great pieces of TV either do it only sporadically, or they're pay-for channels that attract a more sophisticated audience. Even then, the show that critics call the greatest show in history - The Wire - had to fight to get its last season aired. It had an extremely small viewing audience.
However, if the market chooses the testing procedures, it will reward metrics which are harder to game.
Which metrics possibly exist that can't be gamed? The minute you have any metric, you're creating a "good" and a "bad" scale, and that means that people can cram towards the good as much as possible.
> However, if the market chooses the testing procedures, it will reward metrics which are harder to game.
How would you achieve this?
> This would take several iterations (read: many years) to stabilize, but it should converge on some sort of solution.
What makes you think this? Markets aren't immune to fashion and fad. We don't see stable financial markets, why should we see stable markets in education?
"Quality", "design", and "beauty" are all very subjective things and the market regularly gives options incorporating all of them. I see no reason why "educational attainment" would be any harder. (Imagine a future in which two schools got into a Mac vs. PC war: "Sure, you could go to Boring Prep. And you'll learn to read and do calculus. Yeah yeah, boring. Come to Trendy Fashionable High, where we nurture your mind holistically... and also have mandatory gym class so you look like this svelte model." Seeing that ad would give me about as much joy as a staunch Boring Prep grad is capable of feeling in his shrunken, blackened heart.)
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Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade left to their own devices.
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I could think of worse outcomes than public schools discovering triage. Academic triage, like medical triage, would probably result in more survivors. I mean, we're certainly not effectively educating the highest risk students now: if making that explicit saves education for the average folks who share the same classrooms, well, that is a price I'm willing to pay.
Here's the problem: how do you define student performance? Are we going based on grades? Because that leads to a system that's easily gamed without significant results. I was a B-and-C student in high school because I thought a lot of the stuff I was learning was crap. In the classes I did like, I'd deliberately take risks with what I did and that kept my grade from staying an A+. Is that a failure? The best teachers I had very often didn't give me As, because they were the teachers I'd really strain myself for - and for me, straining was trying to solve answers in a unique way rather than churning out generic A crap.
The other option is that you monitor students for achievement. Again, it's hard. Is that based on money? Personal student happiness? Again, depending on what the metric is, teachers will game it. Go for money and English teachers will start encouraging students to do something more worthwhile than write and study English for a living. If you make it "how many students get a college degree" then you're diluting the college pool further and you're neglecting students who're interested in vocational school and in working on their own rather than continuing education.
The best solution is to remove metric and go by the opinions of experienced people. Good administrators know good teachers when they see them. Good teachers always go by their own formula. If the system effectively removes restriction amongst teachers, then you'll see an increase in student performance, and suddenly paying teachers more is worth it. The problem is that teaching is an act of creativity; it's an art as much as anything is. Formula kills teaching. The minute you make something mandatory it's dead to kids. The problem is, formula feels safer, but it never works.
Polticians are a self-selected groups, but even if they weren't, they'd never could really represent the "interests of the electorate". It's naive to think they could.
What you often see on TED presentations is that these people know how to make a single simple powerful argument. It's actually quite difficult. They get the right graph up there.The right numbers or facts that make the combination of reason & emotion click.
He's right about the importance of education and the poor state of it in the US, but I'm not convinced that the private sector can't handle it. Inside American Education (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowel...) is a really interesting book on what our current system is like (although a bit dated, it's from 1992).
The private sector could handle it. He points to private schools that are already succeeding with the poorest children. The problem is how to get the government and unions out of the way so successful ideas can be widely applied. I think a voucher system would quickly begin to solve many of Americas education problems. Such systems have already succeeded in Sweden and parts of the US.
As a few other people here have suggested, standardized test scores are a pretty narrow measure of education quality. Bill Gates mentioned that everyone in the room had probably had a few great teachers to get them to where they are now. When I think about the great teachers I have had, I certainly don't think they were great because they raised my standardized test scores. They were great because they gave me a much deeper understanding of a topic, or opened my eyes to something I hadn't seen before.
Yes, the best teachers I had may have increased my standardized test scores some as a side effect, but it would be an insult to them if that's why I admired them so much as teachers.
Test prep can be done in a factory, but not education.
Yea ... if they were malaria infected, it would have been a different story though. I thought that's why there was a big deal, that maybe he released infected ones.
Dont know whats the big deal over simple mosquitoes !
Just an awareness thing. Since he was talking about malaria-carrying mosquitos when he released them, releasing them had a greater psychological impact than otherwise.
Another (earlier) thread on a similar theme:
Ken Robinson says that the teachers who can encounter their kids and allow them to be creative can thereby allow them to have tools they'll need in the present post-industrial world.
He specifically mentions what he calls "inflation" meaning a BA used to be something, then it was an MA, and now a PHD.
I've watched it a few times now. His point about valuing math above music or art is well taken, by me anyway.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools...
Watched until 1:40. That chart could be taught in school as "how to lie with data": reduction from 20 to 10 made to look more dramatic by changing the scale.
Re: education
So Gates has been all over this, and there are many components to it.
The question to this forum is, what technology is needed to help make great teachers? To Tim O'Reilly's slogan, this is clearly the stuff that matters.
I always feel a little frustrated when I listen to Gates. He's notorious for his bluntness in business, behind closed doors. However, in public he can come across as disingenuous -- passive-aggressive even. Why doesn't he chastise the incompetent teachers and rapacious unions more directly? You can tell he wants to, and probably does at the dinner table. Perhaps he fears a backlash against MS.
What more would it accomplish? It would just be emotional ranting. Often that kind of thing adds more adversarial elements to the problem and improves nothing.
I'm not suggesting he work himself into a foaming-at-the-mouth sort of rage, but there's an unsettling disconnect between the subject matter -- the plight of generations of students caught in bad public schools -- and his emotional tone. Personally, I value sincere communication and feel a little anxious when someone is forcing me to read between the lines. There is a place for justified anger in communication, as long as it remains civil.
As for the practical consequences, if there is a congruency between the words and how they are expressed (body language, tone, etc.), the message tends to land a little heavier.
Not to be mean, but this is a little ignorant. The areas in which Gates does his work are extremely impoverished. Getting food is a real issue, having a bed net is a luxury.
In 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day.
When you're living with such an income, you're probably starving and hoping you make it through another week. Even if it were possible for someone to save the amount needed, there may still not be a shop around where you can buy one, especially in rural areas.
Eh, if people can buy clothing, they can buy a net which is a cheaper item. They cost 15 dollars on amazon, and the wholesale price is probably about 50 cents. It's not like the whole continent is still living with bones through their hair,
Maybe Bill Gates should be put in a jar and be told: There is no reason only animals get treated like objects.
I know, most people will think mosquitoes aint important and have no feelings. That they are like machines.
Personally, when I look at the behaviour of mosquitoes, they have a lot in common with me and you. So I would prefer to leave them alone and let them decide on their own where to go. What if some more complex animal then humans comes along and decides "Oh, humans are so simple. We can just treat them like stones or wood". Would we agree?
Having spent more than my share of time in the mosquito-infested plains of northern Italy, I am more than happy to mercilessly squash any of the damn things that are around me. I wouldn't react very well to a person who spent their nights making buzzing noises in my ears and biting me, either.
