I wish there was less focus on teachers, and more focus on fixing the problem of how badly kids fall behind before they ever get to school.
The battle is IMO largely won and lost in years 0-5, before kids even reach 1st grade. That's why programs like "Baby College" in Harlem are so important.
Even when kids do reach school age, the work of teachers is either amplified or underminded by parents.
My wife teaches 2nd grade (in a poor, needy school district), and frankly, the hours a day she has them can't undo the failure of parents in the kid's early development, nor overcome the constant sabotage of parents undoing much of the day's progress.
Yes, there are bad teachers. But good teachers can badly struggle due to no fault of their own. One teacher may go from superstar metrics to really poor numbers, based on the luck of the draw.
The point is, if you really want to improve education, you have to start in the home, in early childhood.
The battle is IMO largely won and lost in years 0-5, before kids even reach 1st grade. That's why programs like "Baby College" in Harlem are so important.
Head Start was designed precisely to solve this problem. It has existed for 40 years and hasn't solved it, for the kinds of reasons that are described here: http://epa.sagepub.com/content/17/1/62.abstract and here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=226111 . People have been trying to show that Head Start leads to longitudinal improvements for the entirety of Head Start's existence, and they've failed. I work in my family's business as a grant writing consultant, and we've had a bunch of clients running Head Start programs and Head Start clones. They don't work.
In short, you're advocating for an approach here that has already (mostly) failed. Gates is at least saying that we shouldn't keep rewarding teachers for things (seniority, degrees) that don't actually impact student achievement.
No, what I'm talking about is absolutely not Head Start.
The students of Head Start are preschool children.
The students of Baby College are parents. It's about teaching people how to be parents.
When the problem is that bad parenting sabotages structured education, the answer isn't to start the education earlier. The answer (well, at least part of it) is to improvetheparents.
The battle is IMO largely won and lost in years 0-5, before kids even reach 1st grade. That's why programs like "Baby College" in Harlem are so important.
Even when kids do reach school age, the work of teachers is either amplified or underminded by parents.
My wife teaches 2nd grade (in a poor, needy school district), and frankly, the hours a day she has them can't undo the failure of parents in the kid's early development, nor overcome the constant sabotage of parents undoing much of the day's progress.
Yes, there are bad teachers. But good teachers can badly struggle due to no fault of their own. One teacher may go from superstar metrics to really poor numbers, based on the luck of the draw.
The point is, if you really want to improve education, you have to start in the home, in early childhood.