Splinter education businesses like Teach For America and Kipp schools are getting better results for kids than the national education average, so they are getting media coverage from Bill Gates at TED conference, Oprah, etc. This is great news because it indicates change pockets are becoming more known to the public in the overall business of education.

I am sure most of us are tired of those who continue to spew flame to everyone around them that there are all of these serious issues in education. Yes, OK, thanks for that, Mr. Perceptive. We have proven this for years already with our country’s world decline and atrocious dropout rates. While we eternally complain about our education system and spin in the mud what the problems are, trying to convince each other which problems are the right ones, we are just emulating the cries of all the sinking businesses that have come before us. Fight internally while someone walks out the door and starts a new splinter business that is faster and better.

As one commenter said, let’s just start doing what we must do to improve. The problem is defined: we need great teachers.

What I am saying is that if you are an educator who is being driven mad because you shout and shout about what needs to change in education but nobody is listening to you and your party, then you are not being resourceful enough. Be a part of the solution by connecting with the people out there who are being successful in teaching kids at a world-class level and talking to the people who can do something about it.

I am inspired by this conversation and many of the posts on here. What I will do to improve US kids’ learning experience and achievement is to design new teacher development curriculum at my education company that I will do my best to get done in as many US schools as we can. And if I fail I get fired. That’s the stakes we need for education in this country.

Nor was their much discussion about Gladwell’s policy proposal that closes his book – that one option is to pay teachers a LOT more but to cast a much bigger net at the front in and “weed out” a significant number of new hires in the first couple of years (Gladwell’s analogy between financial advisors and teaching profession). What is sad, in my opinion, is that a lot of the really interesting insights of the article are getting lost in the “teaching v football” analogy rather than the more subtle point – that the current system, which hat has roots firmly planted in the 19th century and the “apprentice student teacher to the school teacher in the little red school house, make ANY sense today.

So what MIGHT Gladwell’s model look like? It MIGHT get rid of the 5th year – indeed it might open the profession’s entry point to those without a BA/BS. It would insert these “student teachers” in large numbers into classrooms at low wages to work under/supporting teachers (2-3 in a class?). After a period of time (2-3 years, with at least a couple of master teachers providing input) a relatively small number (10-20%) would to advance and be compensated at levels commensurate with other professionals in fields where there is high degree of “churn” among entry level professionals (the law, finance). It would remove significant layers of the “administration” (do any other skilled professions have ANYTHING analogous to the bloated district offices of our modern school districts?) putting much more power into the hands of the master teachers.

Heterogeneous teaching conditions are much trickier problems. . In many professions that isn’t a problem – financial advisors, lawyers or accountants are evaluated different even in the largest of firms if they are working in markets with a significant opportunity to grow one’s business than in markets were there is not as much wealth/opportunity. The challenge in teaching is that we would have to have the kind of discussion that is almost impossible to have in the United States – one that realistically says that in certain settings teaching can make a tremendous difference but that it is unlikely one could ever, irrespective of teaching quality, create a cohort of high school graduates that would achieve the same level of success as a similar sized cohort from a much more affluent setting. That strikes deep into the heart into some powerful parts of the American mythos. To belabor the point, it is as if we gave a financial advisor in rural Nebraska the same $ goal for generating new business as an advisor in Palm Beach or East Hampton.

And so we muddle along. Teachers, smarter than most, know that the underlying myth that ANYONE can succeed if they just work hard and have the right teacher, resist being held solely accountable for student achievement when they have no control over a huge number of other factors. Taxpayers demand that all teachers live up to the mythologized ideal of the dedicated superstar teacher in the inner city who throws out the stale curriculum and, overnight, turns her classroom from disruptive brats into budding ivy league candidates. Those in the industry (but not the classroom) face economic realities that encourage them to look for a silver bullet or the “next new thing” that will let both students and teachers “at the mean” achieve breakthrough results – as if, to close on Gladwell’s ideas – one could suddenly teach a great collegiate spread QB an entirely new game by simply learning how to call the signals phonetically.

Yet those points aside I personally hope that edwonk readers don’t overlook Gladwell’s insights. They would hopefully spur a more mundane discussion than football vs. teaching but one that is critical – – is the current system of the 5th year credential, a year of student teaching, 2 years of untenured teaching and then tenure with modest incremental bumps for years of experience the best way to structure recruiting and compensation in this profession?

On the larger question of the piece I wonder… Is the NFL v Public School Teacher debate simply a mismatch of metaphors? Schools operate in a vastly different culture than do competitive sports. As was said above, there is the belief that there should be no “losers” in education which is something unfathomable in athletics. We can measure against metrics just as QBs do, but the bottom line for football teams is win-loss record. We, as educators, are under the belief that losses are unacceptable.

So what’s the final score? On the relationship between picking QB and teachers from their success prior to the real-deal I would say Gladwell wins big. On the notion, pushed by several bloggers and posters, that education can be lumped into the other competitive domains such as sports, the stock market, and collecting bennie-babies as an investment I’d have to say it’s a loss.

Tell Childress to be careful to not scratch his head too much this week trying to strategize against Philly. You may have made your AYP by getting to the playoffs, but now it’s time to play with the big boys. You may need restructuring after next week.

E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles!!!!

Needed? If the system is based on coercion- taxation, union power, compulsory attendance, etc., then the need you speak of is artificial indeed. This massive social disconnect means that nobody knows what the real demand is nor its dynamic quantity or quality. Only the market provides this knowledge.

Of course, they need subject mastery and the rare ability to present the mastered subject to untrained people.

They need to be able to endure a little abuse and not take it to heart.

Also, the successful teacher has to be able to adapt to changing conditions, immediately if necessary.

Only one of these necessary conditions (subject mastery) can be inferred from an academic transcript. The other conditions can be taught, but usually through prosaic life experience, the kind you get working to pay your tuition bill. Of course I don’t have the statistics to back up this claim, but it seems that some of the best teachers of the past were from working-class or poor families who attained their desirable qualities as they struggled to get a degree and a certificate. Maybe there is a way to get more people like that in our classrooms. They will last longer and teach more effectively if we can identify them.

I, too, have been an attorney and a teacher, and am now a union rep for teachers and support staff. My husband is a teacher. When in the classroom, I was a good teacher. HE is a good teacher. But, we are very different teachers. Is he more effective than I was? Was I more effective than he is? Can we be different and still effective? I believe so, but the standards must take into account those differences.

It is difficult for me to believe that good, logical thinkers can come to the conclusion that ranking/grading/quantifying teachers and teaching is comparable to the NFL. The NFL is only a comparative microcosm of the teaching profession. Think of the number of middle school, then culled into high school, then further culled into college-level players. Not being a football fan, I have no idea how many of those become NFL players, but I’ll bet it’s a very small percentage. The same can not be said for teachers: there are millions because they are needed. As in any field, some are excellent, some good, and some poor, but determining which is which is darned hard.

A good quarterback with a poor coach will not have the same opportunities for success that a mediocre quarterback with a great coach will. Alternatively, a good quarterback with a good coach, but one with whom he does not “click”, may or may not do well. Teachers, too, have good principals/superintendents/and poor ones – all in the same career. There are differing expectations year-by-year and principal-by-principal. There are new evaluation forms and “no one will get an “exceptional” any more” statements as principals change. Comparing an evaluation (even a well-done one) from 1998 to one from 2008 can be an exercise in futility.

Comparing how good a quarterback is to his linebacker teammate is tricky. They have different roles on the field and one depends on the other. Then try comparing a an AP Physics teacher to a phys ed teacher to a special education teacher. Put those same three positions in an urban school system with little money, a suburban school system with more and a rural school system with just enough and see how difficult setting the standards can be for even those 9 combinations, let alone deciding whether or not any individual teacher has met the standards.

As a final note, one case I am dealing with right now involves a high school English teacher being judged by a former automotive teacher-turned-principal. The English teacher was seen by the now-Principal’s colleagues in the voc/tech school as being too tough on their students, which often translated as “That teacher doesn’t like our kids.”

Can the English teacher get a fair evaluation? Maybe. Maybe not. But the personalities, biases and histories of the individuals involved in assessing teachers’ effectiveness must all be taken into account when deciding whether or not any individual teacher is doing his or her job well. There is no “wins-loss” record to go by.

OK, I do have something serious to say.

I found Gladwell’s article to be disappointing because the only quantification of the problem that he mentions doesn’t seem to support his conclusion. Gladwell references Hanushek’s estimate that replacing the bottom 6%-10% of teachers with average teachers could mean closing the US test result gap with other countries of similar economic status. This statistic seems to indicate that teacher selection processes are already batting somewhere between .900 and .940. — notice that subtle switch to the baseball metaphor, the sport for real wonks — These numbers hardly seem to reflect processes that don’t know how to select teachers. Since the estimate is for all existing teachers and not just new teachers, the selection process is probably even doing better. So where’s the beef? Let’s have some numbers that could actually convince someone that a wholesale change in teacher retention practices might actually outperform marginal changes to the existing practices. It would seem there would be ample evidence from the business world. Why were those numbers not mentioned?