suggesting that if the United States systematically persuaded the bottom 5 percent of teachers to leave teaching for some other occupation, year after year after year, it wouldn't be long before the academic achievement outcomes in United States schools would be as high as those in schools anywhere in the world. The issues he considers in his article are quite interesting, and show that he has thought a long time about education reform and side-effects of education policies.
As for the claim that the bottom 5 percent of teachers leaving the occupation couldn't be made up numerically (you mentioned 10 percent, but I am following Hanushek's figure), I disagree with that claim on several grounds.
1) Previous studies of the issue have shown that there are many credentialed teachers who are not currently actively teaching full-time. Again, I am still Googling for studies as I post this (this is a fact I read in books years ago), but it's fairly widely known that there are teachers with credentials who currently don't participate in the teacher labor force.
2) On the basis of international comparisons of class sizes, and on the basis that a bottom-5-percent teacher probably does more harm than good, we might just as well persuade the worst teachers to do other kinds of work, and have the top 95 percent of teachers divide up the students for slightly larger class sizes each, and perhaps a share of the compensation packages formerly allocated to the worse teachers who have left the occupation.
3) Supply of labor is generally elastic with respect to demand (especially in the current United States economy, with high unemployment). If schools around the country announce that they are dismissing teachers who don't perform well, and still sticking to the same class size targets, something else will change (perhaps the prestige of the occupation of teaching, as it becomes known as an occupation that doesn't tie the fortune of competent teachers to pay scales designed for incompetent teachers) and new workers will be attracted to make the investment, whatever that is, to enter the occupation.
See Hanushek's article for more details. I think this is an important issue to discuss, and I'm glad you joined issue about what is possible, and what should be done.
The biggest thing that probably will get overlooked, even by what I'd like to do, are bright students at poor schools.
I'm glad you mentioned that issue at the bottom of your post. That is an issue of great concern to me too. My reply to the article submission in this thread, with a link to an article by Kenschaft on mathematics teaching,
is motivated by that concern. Best wishes for finding people to collaborate with to help improve education for able students from low-income backgrounds who currently can't afford to shop for schools.
Eric's famous position I do find somewhat flawed. First, the gold standard everyone uses is Finland, but Finland doens't do this. In fact none of the top ranking countries do such a program. I'd love to see this done w/ gret success in a single poor-performing school district first.
Also, in some of the analysis I've seen the US already does relatively well when you control for various relative socio-economic strata. The point being that the problem isn't really in a lot of schools. But there are very targeted schools where the problems run really deep. Cutting 5% of the teachers from Overlake HS in Bellevue is probably worthless (and even counterproductive). And, at least based on the numbers, you could fire everyone at Oakland International.
Plus it just doesn't pass the sniff test to me that you can simply get the 6 million best teachers in the US and inner city Detroit starts scoring like Singapore. Just doesn't smell right, unless we deal with some of the larger issues.
Lastly, I just don't think you can fire 5%, or 300K/year, and realistically fill those spots. And unlike the private sector, no one is going to pin their hopes on a profession where a bad year, likely ends your career (since firings of gov't positions are public record).
Eric Hanushek shows steps of reasoning, based on facts, in one of his published articles,
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/leadingmatters/san_francisco/d...
suggesting that if the United States systematically persuaded the bottom 5 percent of teachers to leave teaching for some other occupation, year after year after year, it wouldn't be long before the academic achievement outcomes in United States schools would be as high as those in schools anywhere in the world. The issues he considers in his article are quite interesting, and show that he has thought a long time about education reform and side-effects of education policies.
As for the claim that the bottom 5 percent of teachers leaving the occupation couldn't be made up numerically (you mentioned 10 percent, but I am following Hanushek's figure), I disagree with that claim on several grounds.
1) Previous studies of the issue have shown that there are many credentialed teachers who are not currently actively teaching full-time. Again, I am still Googling for studies as I post this (this is a fact I read in books years ago), but it's fairly widely known that there are teachers with credentials who currently don't participate in the teacher labor force.
2) On the basis of international comparisons of class sizes, and on the basis that a bottom-5-percent teacher probably does more harm than good, we might just as well persuade the worst teachers to do other kinds of work, and have the top 95 percent of teachers divide up the students for slightly larger class sizes each, and perhaps a share of the compensation packages formerly allocated to the worse teachers who have left the occupation.
3) Supply of labor is generally elastic with respect to demand (especially in the current United States economy, with high unemployment). If schools around the country announce that they are dismissing teachers who don't perform well, and still sticking to the same class size targets, something else will change (perhaps the prestige of the occupation of teaching, as it becomes known as an occupation that doesn't tie the fortune of competent teachers to pay scales designed for incompetent teachers) and new workers will be attracted to make the investment, whatever that is, to enter the occupation.
See Hanushek's article for more details. I think this is an important issue to discuss, and I'm glad you joined issue about what is possible, and what should be done.
The biggest thing that probably will get overlooked, even by what I'd like to do, are bright students at poor schools.
I'm glad you mentioned that issue at the bottom of your post. That is an issue of great concern to me too. My reply to the article submission in this thread, with a link to an article by Kenschaft on mathematics teaching,
http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf
is motivated by that concern. Best wishes for finding people to collaborate with to help improve education for able students from low-income backgrounds who currently can't afford to shop for schools.