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adjusts his seat in his armchair Yes, my uninformed opinion, but reading the article, I think the quote from Marc Tucker towards the end is right: >And the cou

adjusts his seat in his armchair Yes, my uninformed opinion, but reading the article, I think the quote from Marc Tucker towards the end is right: >And the countries that give [teachers] more autonomy successfully are countries that have made an enormous investment in changing the pool from which they are selecting their teachers, then they make a much bigger investment than we do in the education of their future teachers, then they make a much bigger investment in the support of those teachers once they become teachers. Teachers in these institutions are given a level of respect we offer scientists, lawyers, other professionals, so of course they are trusted to be given autonomy. Imagine the same level of scrutiny given to such professionals, if say we mandate every minute in a doctor's meeting from a city authority, would they stand for it? When we talk about education, people often highlight the fact we spend a lot of money per student compared to other countries. This fact fits in with this hypothesis. Once an institution gains that respect, the rest can follow. No, it may not be causal (teachers being respected leads to higher pay, better quality teachers, etc) but they are certainly correlated.

mathattack 10y ago
This is very true. The limit of learning in a classroom is the ability of the teacher. The limit of learning in a school is the leadership of the principal. Caliber and esteem of teachers is the one commonality across all high performing systems. Programs like Teach For America help, but they are tiny compared to the overall size of teachers, and many leave frustrated after a few years. This situation isn't that different from developing software. If you have great programmers, you can cut them loose with less supervision. If you toss a lot of untrained mediocre bodies at problems, you need to invest a lot more in micromanagement to make sure nothing goes wrong.
Haven_Monahan 10y ago
Pretty Much Exactly That. Of course, you might want to go further, and ask why this hasn't happened. Why wouldn't some state or locality in the US demand that its teacher-training candidates have a BS in, say, nursing (for primary schoolteachers) or engineering (for highschool math and science) plus an appropriate score on an IQ test like the wonderlic (serving as a sanity check on the required credentials)? They would need these before being hired, even if they had a degree in education. Then, those teachers could demand higher autonomy (and better wages), and school boards would be inclined to go along. Why aren't parents and the school boards they elect willing or able to do this? One issue is of course that schools of education in the US are not getting the top cohort of high school graduating classes, and they work with what they get. The young woman (and it is almost all young women) gets a degree, a certificate, and gets to be in charge of your kids for six hours a day, even though when she was in your English class in HS she would copy her answers off of the test of your permanently-stoned buddies. Who wouldn't want watch her like a hawk? Next...the union. Some teachers can't teach, but they can for damn sure vote, and pay their union dues to the NEA. The NEA isn't actually opposed to education, but anything that diminishes the political clout of its lobby (no matter how justifiable to parents, students, or even its individual members) will be opposed w/ much firmness. Finally, there are...legal obstacles. Less said about them, the better...but they do exist.
- fsloth 10y ago
  I'll have inject a remark viz one of your hyopotheses. IQ tests are absolute bollocks - especially if gauging potential ability to teach.
  - Haven_Monahan 10y ago
    Citations, of course. Or are you simply of the Nicholas Garaufis school of thought; namely, if the test isn't perfect, it can't possibly be used as a hiring tool? After seeing what Judge G did to the FDNY training program, I'd have half a mind to buy extra smoke alarms and fire extinguishers if I lived in the city... Like a lot of people, I know some persons who would probably be excluded by the general approache I described upthread, and who ended up going into teaching and being really, really good at their specialty. That's why there should always be a way to make exceptions. That doesn't invalidate the principle that "book smart" isn't a bad criteria for new teachers, and that some tests can give a rough idea of how likely someone is to be so. Cliched but true: Tough cases make bad law. The plural of anecdote isn't data.
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      Report for testing citizen, a career will then be blindly assigned to you based on these results. I never thought Futurama could be used as a source on HN, but here we are!
    - chillwaves 10y ago
      How does an IQ test evaluate whether a person will work hard, follow best practices, connect with their students, etc?
    - fsloth 10y ago
      "Grit" by Angela Duckworth contains excellent examples of the unfair outcomes false negatives cause. She's also published research dealing with this topic: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/19/7716.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/108/19/7716.abstract People can get bad scores just because they are really nervous, etc. Now you have a score, that does not display your innate abilities at all, but, it blocks you from several activities you might excel and enjoy. To inject some qualitative opinions of my own, totally lacking of any refrences: IQ tests can be used to sieve through populations - with false negatives. Their only utility in career context is as an arbitrary tool to reduce candidate population. The only sane motivation for their use would be a political or economic pressure to restrict number of candidates to make their evaluation and processing cheaper downstream. The downsides are: arbitrary unfair blocking of individual careers, potentially removing candidates that would excel. If the point is to reduce the population, then generally, if the cost function of candidate quality cannot be evaluated precisely, a completely random process would likely lead to a better outcome than some arbitrary numeric metric. (I'll need to dig through my algorithm resources to formulate a precise reference if someone wants for this last statement).
nawitus 10y ago
>teachers being respected leads to higher pay Note that teachers are not paid well in Finland. The average wage for a classroom teacher is $43k per year, which is slightly less than the average wage of all workers.
- trm42 10y ago
  Please take into account that the Finnish health care and getting kids to school etc is free compared to the US system, so 40-50k wage in Finland is fine. Not sure how much more those add, but would guess something like 20k.
  - nawitus 10y ago
    Which is why I added the comparison to average wage.
trhway 10y ago
>Teachers in these institutions are given a level of respect we offer scientists, lawyers, other professionals, those countries have lesser skewed Pareto, in particular becoming doctor/lawyer/civil engineer/etc. there doesn't result in such high earnings vs. other options, and that makes the other options feasible for capable people. And while it may look like a zero sum game of redistribution of the capable people it is really not - having wide choice of semi-equal career options people will study&work in their respective career of choice equally hard vs. just slacking in the "looser" choices, especially the unionized ones.
smelendez 10y ago
I've also heard from a number of sources, including Finnish acquaintances, that there's more consensus in Finnish society about what kids should be doing in school. In the U.S., there's a decades-long consensus that schools should be better, along with heated, unresolved debates about all the details: discipline (including physical discipline), religious instruction and history, evolution, violence and bullying, homework, sex ed, sports, civil rights history, vocational training, school district borders and school assignment, arts and music, financial literacy, dress codes, cafeteria menus, disabilities and mental health issues, handwriting, testing, student transportation, animal dissection... The list goes on and on, and the battle lines are more complex than red versus blue. Since there's no agreement, but everyone thinks they know part of the solution, politicians (and voters) at every level of government attempt to impose their will on the schools, meaning more and more regulations for educators and students.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  Why not allow (mostly) autonomy to the schools in this kind of question so that there is a school for every taste (as long as their are enough parents with children to fill the classrooms of such a school)? Parents should (mostly) not care to what school children of other parents go as long there is a school that satisfies their desires for their children.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    Are you aware of the US' population density? I grew up in a town where the entire population, at the last census, was a bit over 11,000 people. It would've taken probably two hours or more each way to provide bus service to the local "big city" (a whopping 50,000 people!). How would you support multiple schools offering real choice in approach in a community that size and that spread out? And then how would you scale it to work in all the other places in the US which are like this?
    - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
      It isn't easily solvable for young students, but for high school age kids it is. You can increase course offerings through some sort of in-school distance learning. The last 2 years, when kids are generally 16-18 could sometimes go away to school. Of course, all of this requires some investment and planning. The political fix would be to buss the students to far-flung schools.
pasiaj 10y ago
There is an interesting dynamic in Finland that arises from the substantial wealth transfers and the small size of our economy. This creates a situation where the difference in income between a teacher and a lawyer or an MBA is not very big. Teachers in Finland enjoy a very long vacation, also. Basically for top talent the choise is between a very meaningful job, autonomy, ok pay and looooong vacations and working long hours in dronish jobs and not getting paid that much better.
- adventured 10y ago
  Well here's the interesting thing, teachers in Finland are not making more than teachers in the US, and teachers in the US also get a long vacation. The US also has a similar pupil to teacher ratio as Finland. https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2014/sep/05/how-the-job-of-a-teacher-compares-around-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/201...
  - pasiaj 10y ago
    I believe strongly, that the important wage comparison is not between the Finnish teacher and the US teacher, but between the US teacher and the US MBA, and the Finnish teacher and the Finnish MBA. In US a teacher makes about a third of what an MBA gets. In Finland the difference is an way smaller when you account for all the wealth transfers.

mathattack 10y ago

This is very true. The limit of learning in a classroom is the ability of the teacher. The limit of learning in a school is the leadership of the principal. Caliber and esteem of teachers is the one commonality across all high performing systems. Programs like Teach For America help, but they are tiny compared to the overall size of teachers, and many leave frustrated after a few years. This situation isn't that different from developing software. If you have great programmers, you can cut them loose with less supervision. If you toss a lot of untrained mediocre bodies at problems, you need to invest a lot more in micromanagement to make sure nothing goes wrong.

Haven_Monahan 10y ago

Pretty Much Exactly That. Of course, you might want to go further, and ask why this hasn't happened. Why wouldn't some state or locality in the US demand that its teacher-training candidates have a BS in, say, nursing (for primary schoolteachers) or engineering (for highschool math and science) plus an appropriate score on an IQ test like the wonderlic (serving as a sanity check on the required credentials)? They would need these before being hired, even if they had a degree in education. Then, those teachers could demand higher autonomy (and better wages), and school boards would be inclined to go along. Why aren't parents and the school boards they elect willing or able to do this? One issue is of course that schools of education in the US are not getting the top cohort of high school graduating classes, and they work with what they get. The young woman (and it is almost all young women) gets a degree, a certificate, and gets to be in charge of your kids for six hours a day, even though when she was in your English class in HS she would copy her answers off of the test of your permanently-stoned buddies. Who wouldn't want watch her like a hawk? Next...the union. Some teachers can't teach, but they can for damn sure vote, and pay their union dues to the NEA. The NEA isn't actually opposed to education, but anything that diminishes the political clout of its lobby (no matter how justifiable to parents, students, or even its individual members) will be opposed w/ much firmness. Finally, there are...legal obstacles. Less said about them, the better...but they do exist.

fsloth 10y ago
I'll have inject a remark viz one of your hyopotheses. IQ tests are absolute bollocks - especially if gauging potential ability to teach.
- Haven_Monahan 10y ago
  Citations, of course. Or are you simply of the Nicholas Garaufis school of thought; namely, if the test isn't perfect, it can't possibly be used as a hiring tool? After seeing what Judge G did to the FDNY training program, I'd have half a mind to buy extra smoke alarms and fire extinguishers if I lived in the city... Like a lot of people, I know some persons who would probably be excluded by the general approache I described upthread, and who ended up going into teaching and being really, really good at their specialty. That's why there should always be a way to make exceptions. That doesn't invalidate the principle that "book smart" isn't a bad criteria for new teachers, and that some tests can give a rough idea of how likely someone is to be so. Cliched but true: Tough cases make bad law. The plural of anecdote isn't data.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Report for testing citizen, a career will then be blindly assigned to you based on these results. I never thought Futurama could be used as a source on HN, but here we are!
  - chillwaves 10y ago
    How does an IQ test evaluate whether a person will work hard, follow best practices, connect with their students, etc?
  - fsloth 10y ago
    "Grit" by Angela Duckworth contains excellent examples of the unfair outcomes false negatives cause. She's also published research dealing with this topic: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/19/7716.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/108/19/7716.abstract People can get bad scores just because they are really nervous, etc. Now you have a score, that does not display your innate abilities at all, but, it blocks you from several activities you might excel and enjoy. To inject some qualitative opinions of my own, totally lacking of any refrences: IQ tests can be used to sieve through populations - with false negatives. Their only utility in career context is as an arbitrary tool to reduce candidate population. The only sane motivation for their use would be a political or economic pressure to restrict number of candidates to make their evaluation and processing cheaper downstream. The downsides are: arbitrary unfair blocking of individual careers, potentially removing candidates that would excel. If the point is to reduce the population, then generally, if the cost function of candidate quality cannot be evaluated precisely, a completely random process would likely lead to a better outcome than some arbitrary numeric metric. (I'll need to dig through my algorithm resources to formulate a precise reference if someone wants for this last statement).

nawitus 10y ago

>teachers being respected leads to higher pay Note that teachers are not paid well in Finland. The average wage for a classroom teacher is $43k per year, which is slightly less than the average wage of all workers.

trm42 10y ago
Please take into account that the Finnish health care and getting kids to school etc is free compared to the US system, so 40-50k wage in Finland is fine. Not sure how much more those add, but would guess something like 20k.
- nawitus 10y ago
  Which is why I added the comparison to average wage.

trhway 10y ago

>Teachers in these institutions are given a level of respect we offer scientists, lawyers, other professionals, those countries have lesser skewed Pareto, in particular becoming doctor/lawyer/civil engineer/etc. there doesn't result in such high earnings vs. other options, and that makes the other options feasible for capable people. And while it may look like a zero sum game of redistribution of the capable people it is really not - having wide choice of semi-equal career options people will study&work in their respective career of choice equally hard vs. just slacking in the "looser" choices, especially the unionized ones.

smelendez 10y ago

I've also heard from a number of sources, including Finnish acquaintances, that there's more consensus in Finnish society about what kids should be doing in school. In the U.S., there's a decades-long consensus that schools should be better, along with heated, unresolved debates about all the details: discipline (including physical discipline), religious instruction and history, evolution, violence and bullying, homework, sex ed, sports, civil rights history, vocational training, school district borders and school assignment, arts and music, financial literacy, dress codes, cafeteria menus, disabilities and mental health issues, handwriting, testing, student transportation, animal dissection... The list goes on and on, and the battle lines are more complex than red versus blue. Since there's no agreement, but everyone thinks they know part of the solution, politicians (and voters) at every level of government attempt to impose their will on the schools, meaning more and more regulations for educators and students.

wolfgke 10y ago
Why not allow (mostly) autonomy to the schools in this kind of question so that there is a school for every taste (as long as their are enough parents with children to fill the classrooms of such a school)? Parents should (mostly) not care to what school children of other parents go as long there is a school that satisfies their desires for their children.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  Are you aware of the US' population density? I grew up in a town where the entire population, at the last census, was a bit over 11,000 people. It would've taken probably two hours or more each way to provide bus service to the local "big city" (a whopping 50,000 people!). How would you support multiple schools offering real choice in approach in a community that size and that spread out? And then how would you scale it to work in all the other places in the US which are like this?
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    It isn't easily solvable for young students, but for high school age kids it is. You can increase course offerings through some sort of in-school distance learning. The last 2 years, when kids are generally 16-18 could sometimes go away to school. Of course, all of this requires some investment and planning. The political fix would be to buss the students to far-flung schools.

pasiaj 10y ago

There is an interesting dynamic in Finland that arises from the substantial wealth transfers and the small size of our economy. This creates a situation where the difference in income between a teacher and a lawyer or an MBA is not very big. Teachers in Finland enjoy a very long vacation, also. Basically for top talent the choise is between a very meaningful job, autonomy, ok pay and looooong vacations and working long hours in dronish jobs and not getting paid that much better.

adventured 10y ago
Well here's the interesting thing, teachers in Finland are not making more than teachers in the US, and teachers in the US also get a long vacation. The US also has a similar pupil to teacher ratio as Finland. https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2014/sep/05/how-the-job-of-a-teacher-compares-around-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/201...
- pasiaj 10y ago
  I believe strongly, that the important wage comparison is not between the Finnish teacher and the US teacher, but between the US teacher and the US MBA, and the Finnish teacher and the Finnish MBA. In US a teacher makes about a third of what an MBA gets. In Finland the difference is an way smaller when you account for all the wealth transfers.