10 ms·

Why Do Schools Fire Losing Coaches But Not Bad Teachers?

72 points by solipsist 16y ago

kevinburke 16y ago
Some football coaches do well because they have good players, not because they coach them to do their absolute best. Other coaches do well because they get lucky and win games by 1 or 2 points even though they don't coach very good football teams (Michigan State springs to mind). I wonder whether student test scores give a more or less accurate impression of performance than on-field performance. The existence of the tool is surely better than nothing, however.
nithyad 16y ago
We need better ways to grade teachers than going by student performance in tests.
- lwat 16y ago
  What about a 'before' and 'after' testing system instead?
  - nithyad 16y ago
    The 'Before' and 'After' system can work well for coaching. But good teaching is not necessarily coaching students to produce better results in tests. According to me, a good teacher will help students gain an interest in the subject, appreciate the subject better which in-turn helps you perform better. A student is capable of flunking in-spite of being taught well. In my opinion teachers should be assessed by parents and the management by having a system where every now and then parents are allowed to be part of the class.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      A student is capable of flunking in-spite of being taught well. Absolutely. This is why you don't evaluate teacher performance based on a sample size of 1. If only teachers had a statistically significant number of students (e.g., 40+) every year! Then this process of evaluating them based on student performance wouldn't be so hopeless!
      - nithyad 16y ago
        Good results don't necessarily imply good teaching either. If it's a class of 40 reasonably motivated and intelligent students they would all perform well irrespective of how they were taught.
        yummyfajitas 16y ago
        This is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling
        nithyad 16y ago
        Thanks for the link. This is interesting. Why aren't more schools adopting it?
- rmc 16y ago
  Why? What's wrong with student tests? What would you suggest?
  - nithyad 16y ago
    You can check my answer below. But I am myself not convinced that is the best method.
artost 16y ago
I like the way they handle this at the Sudbury Valley School (http://sudval.org http://sudval.org). They essentially have realized that there is no objective way to measure a good teacher, so instead they take the darwinian approach. Every year all students (and staff) vote on which teachers thay want to keep, culling out the bad ones and just keeping the good ones. They actually have had teachers so good that they have been re-elected every year for more than 40 years.
- raganwald 16y ago
  I'm glad they have good results with this system. I recall a teacher in my high school who was very unpopular with many students. He was an ex military man and what I am about to tell you will sound like a cliché: He believed in strict discipline, penalized students heavily for being slightly late or having corrections on submitted work, and so on. He actually invented a new form of punishment at the school involving hard physical labour. I don't recall anyone having a Hollywood epiphany when subjected to his brutal style, no wonderful breakthroughs or students discovering their hidden depths. He would never have been re-elected by students. But was he a bad teacher? I don't know! I entered the school interested in the material he taught and left it still interested. Was he a bad teacher? Honestly, I have no idea. All I can say is that he was an unpopular teacher amongst many students.
jaxtapose 16y ago
a) Coaches can pick and choose their players. b) They get paid for the risk. Many schools pay more for a football coach than they do for the school principle. Imagine if each class had to have academic try outs? Now imagine that teachers got massive wages and bonuses for winning academic competitions? Now reflect on the number of deadshits in your classes that never, ever, would have passed an academic try out for anything. That's right, it's a stupid comparison. The only good thing is that most people would know they have a second or third rate education. Because they never met the cut to get into schools who used such a stupid system.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  > b) They get paid for the risk. Many schools pay more for a football coach than they do for the school principle. Some good points in your comment, but this one is off - coaches aren't getting paid for the risk. They're getting paid because talented ones bring in immense amounts of revenue and are in short supply - thus, the wages/price of coaches sets in at a high equilibrium. There's not the same scarcity of organizational administrators as there are sports coaches, which requires an extremely specialized skillset that's in high demand. Thus the, hmm, "increased revenue over alternative candidates" number is lower for principles than coaches. A lot lower. Thus, they get paid less. Rest of your comment has some good points though.
- yason 16y ago
  Excuse my ignorance and lack of better knowledge with regard to American school system but what is the thing with high-paid coaches in school? What is the connection between a school and (semi?)professional sports?
  - loupgarou21 16y ago
    A lot of schools charge admission to watch the sporting event, so even though the kids don't earn any money (and many times have to pay to play) the school makes a fair amount of money from the sports. The better the coach, the better the team. The better the team, the more people will come and watch. The more people that watch, the more money for the school.
andrewce 16y ago
I'll agree quite readily to the notion that there are bad teachers, but before we jump on the "Let's fire 'em!" train, there are some things to consider: 1) A teacher whose students consistently perform below grade level, but who jump 2 or 3 grade levels under her teaching (in the course of a year) is probably not a bad teacher. I know several teachers, particularly those who work with students for whom English is not a native language or who work with students with communiications barriers, where this is the case. (My father is on the board of trustees of a school for the deaf and blind; this school consistently is one of the worst performing schools in the state, but at least part of that is because the vast majority of its students enter the school between 3 and 8 years behind grade level. I know the English teacher there, and she's responsible for some phenomenal gains, but even then it's rare that students will be reading and writing at grade level). 2) While we have a discussion of what bad teaching is, we also need to discuss what good teaching entails. "Sufficient progress on standardized tests" does not describe the teacher, but rather the students, and even then only on a single day. I'm willing to buy that there's some correlation between those tests and overall achievement, but would suggest that 3 hours is probably an insufficient amount of time to fully demonstrate one's learning over the previous 9 months. Let's have a vibrant discussion of the how's and why's of teaching excellently, both in terms of what it looks like in action and what it accomplishes. 3) Finally, let's take a good look at what useful, worthwhile learning entails, and what it looks like. It may be that the system of bells and periods is more destructive than it is productive (I suspect this to be true, given my knowledge of my own workflow, as well as how I had to drastically alter my workflow when I taught), and it may be that we spend too much time on low-level skills (like rote memorization solely for the purpose of taking a test) and not enough time on internalization and contextualization of meaningful knowledge and skills (how many students have you known who could only solve a math problem when they knew ahead of time, by way of reading the chapter heading, what that problem would entail, but would not be able to solve that problem if they saw it mixed in with other types of problems?) It's easy to say "Oh, let's fire the bottom 10% of teachers and replace them with excellent teachers", but such a statement falls flat on its face pretty quickly (for one, do we have a hidden reserve of these "excellent teachers", and if so, can we convince them to leave their more lucrative jobs elsewhere?). It's much more difficult, but also much more worthwhile, to say "Let's figure out what excellent teaching and learning look like, in all their dimensions, and then let's see if we can figure out how to make it happen more often." As far as education reform discussion topics go, I'd rather have the latter than the former.
scrod 16y ago
Why do wealthy corporations fire poorly performing employees but not bad corporate officers? That question is probably more important and relevant than trying to find yet another rationalization for attacking the middle class. That articles like this appear on HN at all is an embarrassment.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  At most Silicon Valley companys I've worked at, anything less than excellent performance resulted in executives losing their position - the equivalent of being "fired" (In some rare cases those executives stayed with the company in a reduced role, but that was rarely the case - who wants to go from Senior VP of marketing to manager of technical publications - and the requisite $500K+ year of compensation to $125K) On the flip side, as long as the line employee was performing reasonably adequately - they were rarely fired. Only those who were performing abysmally were part of the typical 10% annual churn. Your experience may be different, but, that was mine.
- krschultz 16y ago
  I've seen the opposite far more than what you are implying. It is a lot easier for the board to fire the execs, once you get to C-level it is practically a revolving door (and why a lot of them have contracts). Let me tell you right now, the CEO of BP was not the one making bad decisions on the oil rig. He probably didn't have a clue about what was happening on any given day on any given rig considering they own thousands. But he was gone a heck of a lot faster than whoever it was that made the decisions that blew the place up and killed 11 people.
- philwelch 16y ago
  That question is probably more important and relevant than trying to find yet another rationalization for attacking the middle class. The middle class doesn't consist completely of schoolteachers. In fact, it largely consists of families who are getting screwed over by a shitty public school system.
rnemo 16y ago
I clicked on the link to this article expecting some thoughtful questions on why poor teaching is a contributing factor to poor education overall in America, and how the system is doing much about it, but I feel like I read an entire article that can be summarized as "A lot of teachers are doing good work, sometimes under tough conditions, but plenty of them need firing too. We need a way to figure out the ones that need to be fired, somehow. Possibly involving test scores." In my opinion, the question we need to be asking is not "how do we find bad apples" but "how do we improve the quality of the apple tree." Good education is hard to come by regardless of what teacher, or indeed, school district you come from. The problem may not be how good is teacher performance, or even how good is student performance, but what is the quality of the teaching goals and design of lessons. Once we've successfully answered that question, then we can focus on the teachers who consistently have "losing seasons."
yardie 16y ago
Coaches get to pick who is on their team. They have tryouts and some even get paid for it. But this only applies to high performing athletic schools (the ones you read about in the local paper that win county/state/regional titles). Other schools are purely volunteer efforts. The coach may be a teacher willing to give up free time everyday before and during the sports schedule. For example, my history teacher was also the soccer coach. He wasn't great at it but someone had to wrangle a bunch of wiry teenagers and make them practice. He got nothing from it except the respect of his players. The only teachers that get to chose their students are in governor's or magnet schools. Here students have to apply every year to be considered for the rigorous programs. Many teachers also apply for the job because of better pay, better students, and better curriculum. Teachers that don't perform can be fired. With a school full of motivated and talented students its entirely the responsibility of the teachers, they can't hide behind the excuse of lazy students and parents because, here, there are none. The teacher in a poor school district doesn't have much of a choice. Some things don't work no matter how hard you try and the blame can't rest entirely on the teachers. But having poor students shouldn't be a fireable offense.
Eliezer 16y ago
People don't really care about whether students learn anything, the resultant catastrophes not being visible for years and then being hard to blame on anyone in particular. But they care about sports teams losing, which they see right away and makes them feel like losers right now, and it's easy to blame the coach.
gagi 16y ago
> what is the difference between coaching football or basketball and teaching history or English? 1. A sports coach can force a player out of the games or out of the team if that player doesn't attend the practices. Teachers have no such power: students can't be forced to practice the material out of school, and they can't be removed from class for not practicing. 1. Standardized testing reflects, at best, decently the purpose and aims of general education. A competitive game of fotball, on the other hand, reflects perfectly the purpose and aims of football training. Simply said, the purpose of sports is to train a player to win the game. The purpose of general education is not to write a test successfully. Rather -- it shouldn't be the purpose of general education. The purpose of education is to disseminate knowledge and critical thinking skills. That purpose needs to be measured in a correct fashion. Think how silly it would be, instead of a competitive game of football, that each team was given a set of drills to perform, on their own, on an empty field, to prove their worth in football. It'd be absurd. It doesn't fit the purpose of their training. The purpose of education shouldn't be to pass some tests. A more constructive conversation, I believe, would be to find places, distinct disconnects if you will, where the method used to measure progress and achievement in education does not reflect the purpose and aims of education.
nervechannel 16y ago
Mlodinow in "The Drunkard's Walk" makes the very good point that the 'losing streaks' that lead to coach firings (and Hollywood studio boss sackings) are almost entirely explainable by perfectly normal random variation. http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0375424040 http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/... Not only that, but the subsequent 'improvements' are generally due to regression to the mean. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean It's depressing that an pompously-titled site like American Thinker can completely fail to consider this...
mike463 16y ago
A: No coaches union.
kamiller 16y ago
sports bring in money and affect the bottom line, bad teachers don't
- krschultz 16y ago
  http://bit.ly/blfSNz http://bit.ly/blfSNz According to Sports Illustrated, "Of the 120 athletic departments that play I-A football, 106 lost money in 2009"
jwh 16y ago
What about the effect of bad students? Isn't education a two-way process involving a supplier and a consumer? I got my highest grades in subjects I enjoyed (Business and Mathematics) and my lowest grades in those I didn't (English). Was my English teacher not as good because I got a D yet the Business and Maths teachers got an A or B out of me? Does the fact that other students got A in English and a D or E in Business or Maths show that actually the English teacher is 'better'? Or was it just an anomaly? Sure, there are no doubt a tiny minority of teachers who (in the UK at least) have paid thousands for a degree, gone through some form of postgraduate training and accreditation (years in total) only to land a job and then throw it all away. However, my own opinion is that 'bad teachers' are an excuse for bad students and (anecdotally and just in my experience) poor parental/primary caregiver role models. I saw the same 'my son/daughter is performing poorly because of bad teachers' come from parents whose children were more adept at petty crime and drug dealing.
michaelbuckbee 16y ago
There was a very interesting study done of the Shaker Heights school system in Cleveland that found parental involvement was the main determining factor of student success. http://www.racematters.org/whyareblackstudentslagging.htm http://www.racematters.org/whyareblackstudentslagging.htm Now, that's not to say that there aren't good and bad teachers out there and that we shouldn't find ways to reward the good and drive out the bad, but I think it's focusing too much of the attention on the wrong problem.
- cafard 16y ago
  Shaker Heights is a very well off suburb of Cleveland. It used to rank in the top five cities in the country for per capita income.
  - michaelbuckbee 16y ago
    That was sort of the point of the study. That even in a very affluent school district that different populations views of parental vs school involvement were primarily responsible for the large gap in student achievement.
cafard 16y ago
One word for you: "cut". Turn out for the basketball team short, slow, and unable to shoot, and you will not be suiting up. Hell, turn up as a "project" and you may be cut. A kid at my high school did not make the team until his junior year (as I recall). He got an athletic scholarship to college, was in the running for NBA rookie of the year, and eventually picked up a championship ring, not as a star but as a respected bit player. When he was 14 he could be cut from the team. I doubt his Algebra I teacher had any such option. Another word: "recruit". Even the public high schools end up with a lot of athletes who do not live within the nominal boundaries. The high school a co-worker's son once attended is now a power in football. Why? The parents of a star athlete concluded they liked the program and found an apartment in town. A city high school is a power in girls' basketball, with players from all over the city. And then there are the Catholic high schools, the private schools, etc.
detokaal 16y ago
Visibility and Value. Athletics are far more visible, and thus on the community's mind to a greater degree; plus athletics has a higher value than education for most of our parents here. In our community, the football team is number one. The team (and coach) receive far more media coverage for their wins and losses than classroom students get for test scores. Parents of football players value the victory more than academics as well. Parents will purchase hundreds of dollars in gear, shoes, summer camps, etc. but those same kids have no internet access, no notebooks, no highlighters, no basic computers or software. Losing 10% of football games in a season gets the coach fired because everyone hears about it every day and because it is important to the school board and parents. 50% of our students drop out before graduation and it gets a paragraph on page 6 of the local paper, and no one cares because we have a great school: the football team won the conference again.
forkandwait 16y ago
Perhaps teachers unions and tenure are part of the reason that we don't fire teachers? Coaches don't have tenure.
jgs715 16y ago
The one difference that stands out to me is that sports coaches are allowed to pick their students for the teams and punish those who do not work. As opposed to most teachers which have limited control over who is in their classes and how to punish them if they are slacking ( besides bad grades ).
douglasputnam 16y ago
I hear lots of smart people arguing that education can be improved by fired low performing teachers, breaking unions, enforcing discipline, raising test scores, etc. What I don't hear is lots of smart people saying, "Hey. I'm smart. I care about education. I think I'll become a teacher." Not a single critic of education has come forward to say, I want to help by becoming a really great teacher.
- philwelch 16y ago
  You can't fix a broken system by becoming part of the system. Many critics of public education have set up their own systems, of course--the whole charter school, Montessori, and homeschooling movements for example--but right now the best bet is to rescue children from the public school system and put them into something better. Even if you can fix the public school system, becoming a teacher is not the way to do it.
MattArnold 16y ago
They fire losing coaches but not bad teachers because sports players want to win. Students do not.

72 points by solipsist 16y ago

Some football coaches do well because they have good players, not because they coach them to do their absolute best. Other coaches do well because they get lucky and win games by 1 or 2 points even though they don't coach very good football teams (Michigan State springs to mind). I wonder whether student test scores give a more or less accurate impression of performance than on-field performance. The existence of the tool is surely better than nothing, however.

nithyad 16y ago

We need better ways to grade teachers than going by student performance in tests.

lwat 16y ago
What about a 'before' and 'after' testing system instead?
- nithyad 16y ago
  The 'Before' and 'After' system can work well for coaching. But good teaching is not necessarily coaching students to produce better results in tests. According to me, a good teacher will help students gain an interest in the subject, appreciate the subject better which in-turn helps you perform better. A student is capable of flunking in-spite of being taught well. In my opinion teachers should be assessed by parents and the management by having a system where every now and then parents are allowed to be part of the class.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    A student is capable of flunking in-spite of being taught well. Absolutely. This is why you don't evaluate teacher performance based on a sample size of 1. If only teachers had a statistically significant number of students (e.g., 40+) every year! Then this process of evaluating them based on student performance wouldn't be so hopeless!
    - nithyad 16y ago
      Good results don't necessarily imply good teaching either. If it's a class of 40 reasonably motivated and intelligent students they would all perform well irrespective of how they were taught.
      - yummyfajitas 16y ago
        This is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling
        nithyad 16y ago
        Thanks for the link. This is interesting. Why aren't more schools adopting it?
rmc 16y ago
Why? What's wrong with student tests? What would you suggest?
- nithyad 16y ago
  You can check my answer below. But I am myself not convinced that is the best method.

artost 16y ago

I like the way they handle this at the Sudbury Valley School (http://sudval.org http://sudval.org). They essentially have realized that there is no objective way to measure a good teacher, so instead they take the darwinian approach. Every year all students (and staff) vote on which teachers thay want to keep, culling out the bad ones and just keeping the good ones. They actually have had teachers so good that they have been re-elected every year for more than 40 years.

raganwald 16y ago
I'm glad they have good results with this system. I recall a teacher in my high school who was very unpopular with many students. He was an ex military man and what I am about to tell you will sound like a cliché: He believed in strict discipline, penalized students heavily for being slightly late or having corrections on submitted work, and so on. He actually invented a new form of punishment at the school involving hard physical labour. I don't recall anyone having a Hollywood epiphany when subjected to his brutal style, no wonderful breakthroughs or students discovering their hidden depths. He would never have been re-elected by students. But was he a bad teacher? I don't know! I entered the school interested in the material he taught and left it still interested. Was he a bad teacher? Honestly, I have no idea. All I can say is that he was an unpopular teacher amongst many students.

jaxtapose 16y ago

a) Coaches can pick and choose their players. b) They get paid for the risk. Many schools pay more for a football coach than they do for the school principle. Imagine if each class had to have academic try outs? Now imagine that teachers got massive wages and bonuses for winning academic competitions? Now reflect on the number of deadshits in your classes that never, ever, would have passed an academic try out for anything. That's right, it's a stupid comparison. The only good thing is that most people would know they have a second or third rate education. Because they never met the cut to get into schools who used such a stupid system.

lionhearted 16y ago
> b) They get paid for the risk. Many schools pay more for a football coach than they do for the school principle. Some good points in your comment, but this one is off - coaches aren't getting paid for the risk. They're getting paid because talented ones bring in immense amounts of revenue and are in short supply - thus, the wages/price of coaches sets in at a high equilibrium. There's not the same scarcity of organizational administrators as there are sports coaches, which requires an extremely specialized skillset that's in high demand. Thus the, hmm, "increased revenue over alternative candidates" number is lower for principles than coaches. A lot lower. Thus, they get paid less. Rest of your comment has some good points though.
yason 16y ago
Excuse my ignorance and lack of better knowledge with regard to American school system but what is the thing with high-paid coaches in school? What is the connection between a school and (semi?)professional sports?
- loupgarou21 16y ago
  A lot of schools charge admission to watch the sporting event, so even though the kids don't earn any money (and many times have to pay to play) the school makes a fair amount of money from the sports. The better the coach, the better the team. The better the team, the more people will come and watch. The more people that watch, the more money for the school.

andrewce 16y ago

I'll agree quite readily to the notion that there are bad teachers, but before we jump on the "Let's fire 'em!" train, there are some things to consider: 1) A teacher whose students consistently perform below grade level, but who jump 2 or 3 grade levels under her teaching (in the course of a year) is probably not a bad teacher. I know several teachers, particularly those who work with students for whom English is not a native language or who work with students with communiications barriers, where this is the case. (My father is on the board of trustees of a school for the deaf and blind; this school consistently is one of the worst performing schools in the state, but at least part of that is because the vast majority of its students enter the school between 3 and 8 years behind grade level. I know the English teacher there, and she's responsible for some phenomenal gains, but even then it's rare that students will be reading and writing at grade level). 2) While we have a discussion of what bad teaching is, we also need to discuss what good teaching entails. "Sufficient progress on standardized tests" does not describe the teacher, but rather the students, and even then only on a single day. I'm willing to buy that there's some correlation between those tests and overall achievement, but would suggest that 3 hours is probably an insufficient amount of time to fully demonstrate one's learning over the previous 9 months. Let's have a vibrant discussion of the how's and why's of teaching excellently, both in terms of what it looks like in action and what it accomplishes. 3) Finally, let's take a good look at what useful, worthwhile learning entails, and what it looks like. It may be that the system of bells and periods is more destructive than it is productive (I suspect this to be true, given my knowledge of my own workflow, as well as how I had to drastically alter my workflow when I taught), and it may be that we spend too much time on low-level skills (like rote memorization solely for the purpose of taking a test) and not enough time on internalization and contextualization of meaningful knowledge and skills (how many students have you known who could only solve a math problem when they knew ahead of time, by way of reading the chapter heading, what that problem would entail, but would not be able to solve that problem if they saw it mixed in with other types of problems?) It's easy to say "Oh, let's fire the bottom 10% of teachers and replace them with excellent teachers", but such a statement falls flat on its face pretty quickly (for one, do we have a hidden reserve of these "excellent teachers", and if so, can we convince them to leave their more lucrative jobs elsewhere?). It's much more difficult, but also much more worthwhile, to say "Let's figure out what excellent teaching and learning look like, in all their dimensions, and then let's see if we can figure out how to make it happen more often." As far as education reform discussion topics go, I'd rather have the latter than the former.

scrod 16y ago

Why do wealthy corporations fire poorly performing employees but not bad corporate officers? That question is probably more important and relevant than trying to find yet another rationalization for attacking the middle class. That articles like this appear on HN at all is an embarrassment.

ghshephard 16y ago
At most Silicon Valley companys I've worked at, anything less than excellent performance resulted in executives losing their position - the equivalent of being "fired" (In some rare cases those executives stayed with the company in a reduced role, but that was rarely the case - who wants to go from Senior VP of marketing to manager of technical publications - and the requisite $500K+ year of compensation to $125K) On the flip side, as long as the line employee was performing reasonably adequately - they were rarely fired. Only those who were performing abysmally were part of the typical 10% annual churn. Your experience may be different, but, that was mine.
krschultz 16y ago
I've seen the opposite far more than what you are implying. It is a lot easier for the board to fire the execs, once you get to C-level it is practically a revolving door (and why a lot of them have contracts). Let me tell you right now, the CEO of BP was not the one making bad decisions on the oil rig. He probably didn't have a clue about what was happening on any given day on any given rig considering they own thousands. But he was gone a heck of a lot faster than whoever it was that made the decisions that blew the place up and killed 11 people.
philwelch 16y ago
That question is probably more important and relevant than trying to find yet another rationalization for attacking the middle class. The middle class doesn't consist completely of schoolteachers. In fact, it largely consists of families who are getting screwed over by a shitty public school system.

rnemo 16y ago

I clicked on the link to this article expecting some thoughtful questions on why poor teaching is a contributing factor to poor education overall in America, and how the system is doing much about it, but I feel like I read an entire article that can be summarized as "A lot of teachers are doing good work, sometimes under tough conditions, but plenty of them need firing too. We need a way to figure out the ones that need to be fired, somehow. Possibly involving test scores." In my opinion, the question we need to be asking is not "how do we find bad apples" but "how do we improve the quality of the apple tree." Good education is hard to come by regardless of what teacher, or indeed, school district you come from. The problem may not be how good is teacher performance, or even how good is student performance, but what is the quality of the teaching goals and design of lessons. Once we've successfully answered that question, then we can focus on the teachers who consistently have "losing seasons."

yardie 16y ago

Coaches get to pick who is on their team. They have tryouts and some even get paid for it. But this only applies to high performing athletic schools (the ones you read about in the local paper that win county/state/regional titles). Other schools are purely volunteer efforts. The coach may be a teacher willing to give up free time everyday before and during the sports schedule. For example, my history teacher was also the soccer coach. He wasn't great at it but someone had to wrangle a bunch of wiry teenagers and make them practice. He got nothing from it except the respect of his players. The only teachers that get to chose their students are in governor's or magnet schools. Here students have to apply every year to be considered for the rigorous programs. Many teachers also apply for the job because of better pay, better students, and better curriculum. Teachers that don't perform can be fired. With a school full of motivated and talented students its entirely the responsibility of the teachers, they can't hide behind the excuse of lazy students and parents because, here, there are none. The teacher in a poor school district doesn't have much of a choice. Some things don't work no matter how hard you try and the blame can't rest entirely on the teachers. But having poor students shouldn't be a fireable offense.

Eliezer 16y ago

People don't really care about whether students learn anything, the resultant catastrophes not being visible for years and then being hard to blame on anyone in particular. But they care about sports teams losing, which they see right away and makes them feel like losers right now, and it's easy to blame the coach.

gagi 16y ago

> what is the difference between coaching football or basketball and teaching history or English? 1. A sports coach can force a player out of the games or out of the team if that player doesn't attend the practices. Teachers have no such power: students can't be forced to practice the material out of school, and they can't be removed from class for not practicing. 1. Standardized testing reflects, at best, decently the purpose and aims of general education. A competitive game of fotball, on the other hand, reflects perfectly the purpose and aims of football training. Simply said, the purpose of sports is to train a player to win the game. The purpose of general education is not to write a test successfully. Rather -- it shouldn't be the purpose of general education. The purpose of education is to disseminate knowledge and critical thinking skills. That purpose needs to be measured in a correct fashion. Think how silly it would be, instead of a competitive game of football, that each team was given a set of drills to perform, on their own, on an empty field, to prove their worth in football. It'd be absurd. It doesn't fit the purpose of their training. The purpose of education shouldn't be to pass some tests. A more constructive conversation, I believe, would be to find places, distinct disconnects if you will, where the method used to measure progress and achievement in education does not reflect the purpose and aims of education.

nervechannel 16y ago

Mlodinow in "The Drunkard's Walk" makes the very good point that the 'losing streaks' that lead to coach firings (and Hollywood studio boss sackings) are almost entirely explainable by perfectly normal random variation. http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0375424040 http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/... Not only that, but the subsequent 'improvements' are generally due to regression to the mean. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean It's depressing that an pompously-titled site like American Thinker can completely fail to consider this...

mike463 16y ago

A: No coaches union.

kamiller 16y ago

sports bring in money and affect the bottom line, bad teachers don't

krschultz 16y ago
http://bit.ly/blfSNz http://bit.ly/blfSNz According to Sports Illustrated, "Of the 120 athletic departments that play I-A football, 106 lost money in 2009"

jwh 16y ago

What about the effect of bad students? Isn't education a two-way process involving a supplier and a consumer? I got my highest grades in subjects I enjoyed (Business and Mathematics) and my lowest grades in those I didn't (English). Was my English teacher not as good because I got a D yet the Business and Maths teachers got an A or B out of me? Does the fact that other students got A in English and a D or E in Business or Maths show that actually the English teacher is 'better'? Or was it just an anomaly? Sure, there are no doubt a tiny minority of teachers who (in the UK at least) have paid thousands for a degree, gone through some form of postgraduate training and accreditation (years in total) only to land a job and then throw it all away. However, my own opinion is that 'bad teachers' are an excuse for bad students and (anecdotally and just in my experience) poor parental/primary caregiver role models. I saw the same 'my son/daughter is performing poorly because of bad teachers' come from parents whose children were more adept at petty crime and drug dealing.

michaelbuckbee 16y ago

There was a very interesting study done of the Shaker Heights school system in Cleveland that found parental involvement was the main determining factor of student success. http://www.racematters.org/whyareblackstudentslagging.htm http://www.racematters.org/whyareblackstudentslagging.htm Now, that's not to say that there aren't good and bad teachers out there and that we shouldn't find ways to reward the good and drive out the bad, but I think it's focusing too much of the attention on the wrong problem.

cafard 16y ago
Shaker Heights is a very well off suburb of Cleveland. It used to rank in the top five cities in the country for per capita income.
- michaelbuckbee 16y ago
  That was sort of the point of the study. That even in a very affluent school district that different populations views of parental vs school involvement were primarily responsible for the large gap in student achievement.

cafard 16y ago

One word for you: "cut". Turn out for the basketball team short, slow, and unable to shoot, and you will not be suiting up. Hell, turn up as a "project" and you may be cut. A kid at my high school did not make the team until his junior year (as I recall). He got an athletic scholarship to college, was in the running for NBA rookie of the year, and eventually picked up a championship ring, not as a star but as a respected bit player. When he was 14 he could be cut from the team. I doubt his Algebra I teacher had any such option. Another word: "recruit". Even the public high schools end up with a lot of athletes who do not live within the nominal boundaries. The high school a co-worker's son once attended is now a power in football. Why? The parents of a star athlete concluded they liked the program and found an apartment in town. A city high school is a power in girls' basketball, with players from all over the city. And then there are the Catholic high schools, the private schools, etc.

detokaal 16y ago

Visibility and Value. Athletics are far more visible, and thus on the community's mind to a greater degree; plus athletics has a higher value than education for most of our parents here. In our community, the football team is number one. The team (and coach) receive far more media coverage for their wins and losses than classroom students get for test scores. Parents of football players value the victory more than academics as well. Parents will purchase hundreds of dollars in gear, shoes, summer camps, etc. but those same kids have no internet access, no notebooks, no highlighters, no basic computers or software. Losing 10% of football games in a season gets the coach fired because everyone hears about it every day and because it is important to the school board and parents. 50% of our students drop out before graduation and it gets a paragraph on page 6 of the local paper, and no one cares because we have a great school: the football team won the conference again.

forkandwait 16y ago

Perhaps teachers unions and tenure are part of the reason that we don't fire teachers? Coaches don't have tenure.

jgs715 16y ago

The one difference that stands out to me is that sports coaches are allowed to pick their students for the teams and punish those who do not work. As opposed to most teachers which have limited control over who is in their classes and how to punish them if they are slacking ( besides bad grades ).

douglasputnam 16y ago

I hear lots of smart people arguing that education can be improved by fired low performing teachers, breaking unions, enforcing discipline, raising test scores, etc. What I don't hear is lots of smart people saying, "Hey. I'm smart. I care about education. I think I'll become a teacher." Not a single critic of education has come forward to say, I want to help by becoming a really great teacher.

philwelch 16y ago
You can't fix a broken system by becoming part of the system. Many critics of public education have set up their own systems, of course--the whole charter school, Montessori, and homeschooling movements for example--but right now the best bet is to rescue children from the public school system and put them into something better. Even if you can fix the public school system, becoming a teacher is not the way to do it.

MattArnold 16y ago

They fire losing coaches but not bad teachers because sports players want to win. Students do not.