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Not if it tilts the education system even more in favour of the wealthy. Education is one of the few options less wealthy families have to level the playing fi

Not if it tilts the education system even more in favour of the wealthy. Education is one of the few options less wealthy families have to level the playing field. We cant take this away by letting private organisations poaching the best teachers with huge financial incentives

barry-cotter 4y ago
> Education is one of the few options less wealthy families have to level the playing field. Teachers have very small effects on student learning within the normal range of competence. We can’t even be sure school effects exist outside teacher and student effects. > Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-psychology/article/abs/education-and-intelligence-pity-the-poor-teacher-because-student-characteristics-are-more-significant-than-teachers-or-schools/F73D9839D7E1398C33A117CB37E084E8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-p...
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  We can be pretty sure, because there are outliers. There is a math teacher in my city that thaught 170 kids a year for 20 years and none of them ever failed the ministerial exams (the average fail rate is 15 percent). The problem with these kinds of statistics is that when you are comparing performance relative to the population, low variance in teacher performance leads to the statistical artifact that they have low correlation. This isn't because teachers have little impact, it's because the variance in the quality of teachers is much lower than the variance of other factors. This shouldn't be surprising given the fact that the average student will go through 30-40 teachers, each having their impact. The variance in performance of any individual teacher will be severely blunted. This effect is actually fairly widespread in intelligence research, it's why adopted twin IQ studies greatly overstate the inheritance - by putting the cohorts of kids in standardized environments, you inadvertently control for everything but what is inherited, thus increasing the relative variance of the latter.

barry-cotter 4y ago

> Education is one of the few options less wealthy families have to level the playing field. Teachers have very small effects on student learning within the normal range of competence. We can’t even be sure school effects exist outside teacher and student effects. > Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-psychology/article/abs/education-and-intelligence-pity-the-poor-teacher-because-student-characteristics-are-more-significant-than-teachers-or-schools/F73D9839D7E1398C33A117CB37E084E8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-p...

sudosysgen 4y ago
We can be pretty sure, because there are outliers. There is a math teacher in my city that thaught 170 kids a year for 20 years and none of them ever failed the ministerial exams (the average fail rate is 15 percent). The problem with these kinds of statistics is that when you are comparing performance relative to the population, low variance in teacher performance leads to the statistical artifact that they have low correlation. This isn't because teachers have little impact, it's because the variance in the quality of teachers is much lower than the variance of other factors. This shouldn't be surprising given the fact that the average student will go through 30-40 teachers, each having their impact. The variance in performance of any individual teacher will be severely blunted. This effect is actually fairly widespread in intelligence research, it's why adopted twin IQ studies greatly overstate the inheritance - by putting the cohorts of kids in standardized environments, you inadvertently control for everything but what is inherited, thus increasing the relative variance of the latter.