Of Teachers and A-Rod, Part Two

I wrote a post, making the argument that if Alex Rodriguez were represented by a union like the teacher’s union, he’d make far less and the game would be far less interesting. Several people pointed out in comments that A-Rod is represented by a union. Yes, he is, but he is not represented by a union that is like the NEA.

The MLBPA does not try to limit rewards for merit. It focuses on maintaing labor relations and keeping a free market alive where players earn what the market will bear. It doesn’t try to make it impossible to get rid of a bad baseball player.

However, one commenter carried things to a whole level of, “Teachers can’t cut it…”

Baseball players desire to do well, and usually are encouraged by their families and friends. Many students, on the other hand, are not motivated, or have learning difficulties. Many are not encouraged or helped by their families. Many come to school tired because they had to take care of younger siblings, or their parents were fighting last night, or their mom was busted for possession of meth. Teachers want and try to teach all of these students, but often they cannot learn until the underlying issues are dealt with. Yes, a really good teacher will help them learn, but the learning will not always be reflected in test scores (or batting averages, for that matter). So, Mr. Graham, please do not compare teaching to a game. The stakes are so much higher.

First of all, to those who play it for a living, baseball is more than than a game. However, this stirring defense of poor performing teachers is somewhat astounding.

Let us consider the fact that despite the poor situation of their students, there are teachers that succeed in getting their students motivated to learn. If there were no great teachers, then the commenter might have a point.

Teachers to, have natural abilities, as speakers. They have cultivated abilities to connect with their students or not. Anyone who has been in any type of class from College or the corporate world knows that there are differences between a good teacher, a mediocre teacher, and a bad teacher. 

Yet, what the commenter is that Mr. Miyagi was wrong when he said, “There is no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher.” And insist that the opposite is true, “There is no such thing as a bad teacher only a bad student.”

Malcolm Glidwell wrote an excellent piece on teachers that I’d urge everyone to read.  He makes this very important point in the article:

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.

It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.

I know it’s at some people’s core to get emotional in their defense of really bad teachers, but hard research is not backing this up. Good teachers, teach better.

Finally, as an aside I would suggest that if family situation is so important to education, that we’d do well as a society to stop stating that all family structures are created equal, and focus some effort on supporting families rather than undermining them in the various ways that government does.