Educational Experimentation

I just read this article about teacher training colleges, and it struck a nerve. I am very opinionated on this topic, and I've felt a blog post brewing for years. This just pushed me over the edge. Apologies to all the education majors I'm about to offend.

There are many problems with U.S. education, and it's not fair to blame everything on the teachers. My post below does not address all of the complicated issues.

That said, I took a few education classes in college and then fled in terror. My fellow students were mostly dunces: they couldn't do research, write a decent essay, or grasp basic statistical principles. (More on that later.) The professors were little better: the curriculum focused on abstract theory and not on anything useful, like "this is how to quell a riot." I actually asked a tenured professor of education about classroom management once. He shrugged and said "Oh, just be consistent, and you'll do fine."

When I say the education majors couldn't grasp basic statistical principles, I'm not talking about "this is how I take a data set of test results and calculate the standard distribution." I'm not even talking about struggling with "this is why it's a lot harder for a kid re-taking the SATs to move from the 95th to the 96th percentile than from the 50th to the 55th percentile." No, I'm talking about problems like not even grasping why "scoring in the 99th percentile on a national achievement test" is different than "getting 99 percent of the answers right." Some of these people couldn't even figure out the difference between a mean and a median, let alone how to find each.

My class in "measurement and assessment in teaching" was actually very helpful. It taught me how to design a good test, the pros and cons of each type of test (essay, multiple choice, etc), and when to use each. Sadly, the material was wasted on most of my classmates.

I took a "Children's Literature" class in which half of the students were English majors and half were education majors. I peer reviewed the most appalling paper ever--three pages of poorly spelled ungrammatical gushing about how much the author just loved children, with nary a research reference in sight.

That semester, I frequently emerged from class shaken to the core. "I never want him to teach my kids math, or her to teach my kids English, or...well, I never want any of them to teach my kids ANYTHING," I told Jon. (This is a testament to just how shaken I was: normally I avoided any mention of hypothetical future children when talking to Jon.)

Don't even get me started with the problems of teachers of middlin' capability dealing with brilliant students who can out-think them at every turn. I was reasonably charitable to my teachers, but I recall sitting in Mrs. N's 5th-grade class, thinking, "If I didn't have a conscience, I could make this woman's life a daily living hell."

For years, I have considered the problem. If I were designing the perfect education system, how would I go about it? The simple answer is that, if I could, I would fix families. Since that isn't an option, here are my next best suggestions:

1) Raise admission standards to colleges of education. Require prospective teachers to pass some basic exams before they begin their course of study.
2) Require ivory tower college professors to spend a semester "in the trenches" every three years. (After all, we force "in the trenches" teachers to take college classes occasionally to re-certify. Let's reciprocate.) Bonus points for teaching remedial summer school classes in the inner city.
3) Recruit people who have mastered core areas and train them in how to teach. Would you rather have a French teacher who is great at sticking to The Book, or one who is actually fluent in the target language? Would you rather recruit an education major with a 2.0 GPA (from a mediocre school), teach him some rudimentary chemistry, and hope it sticks? Or would you rather grab a person who did R&D for DOW for a few years, give her intensive training for six months, and then shove her in front of a classroom?
4) Hold colleges of education accountable. Look at long-term success rates. Ask graduates to complete surveys after one, two, three, five, and ten years. See how many of them are still teaching. Publish this information to prospective students.
5) Focus more on guided real-world practice teaching and less on abstract educational theory. Most of the people in my classes who could answer questions about Jean Piaget were going to be hopeless at actually managing a classroom.
6) Apprentice new teachers to master teachers. Focus on practical techniques and problem-solving.
7) Start a pilot program to evaluate the "bar exam" idea. It has merit and should be considered. If it works, try to spread its adoption.
8) Raise teacher standards--AND pay. Recruit the best and then pay them well. Let go of our "desperate for warm bodies" model.
9) Once we have actual teachers in place, give them a great deal of leeway. Tell them what results we want, and hold them accountable--but don't micromanage the daily lessons.
10) Recognize that even the best teachers can only do so much with kids from failing homes. Don't expect teachers to be independent social workers. Support them, but don't demand miracles.

Never mind. Most of this is impossible in our current ossified system of politics, teacher's unions, and Tradition. Scrap it all and start over. Or homeschool.

If sea steaders can start petri dishes of sociopoliticaleconomic experimentation, I want to join them. Let's start an educational utopia and see what happens. It probably wouldn't work, but at least we wouldn't be trying to impose our latest teaching fads on the rest of the United States.

My only caveat is that the experiments must be performed by actual scientists and statisticians, not education majors.

Who's with me?