6 ms·

The stuff on teaching was just amazing. His graph on what makes a good teacher was jaw dropping to me. Once he put it out there, it was really hard for me to

The stuff on teaching was just amazing. His graph on what makes a good teacher was jaw dropping to me. Once he put it out there, it was really hard for me to avoid the question of why we are not focusing more on what makes good teacher performance.

uuilly 18y ago
In my opinion teacher accountability is the most pressing social issue of our time. Gates has been all over this for a while now...
- access_denied 18y ago
  What about paying them decently? Other than some positions at Ivy-League, becoming a teacher is just bad math, financially speaking. Why would anyone intelligent want to become a teacher?
  - jballanc 18y ago
    In economics, how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are. So, Lebron James makes millions because we value the ability to throw a ball through a metal ring, and we demand that someone be so good at this that only a handful of Americans can fulfill these positions. I'll let you continue the reasoning for teacher pay as a homework exercise...
    - andreyf 18y ago
      how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are This is a statement of fact, not opinion of what ought to be. Part of what Gates (and others) are saying, I think, is that to have a better functioning society, we need to increase the value society puts on teaching. If we provide the educational opportunity that Bill Gates, John Resig, or Larry Page got to every child in America, we will all be a lot better off.
      - jpd 18y ago
        By adding a way to measure teaching ability, we can make good teachers a highly prized resource and reward them by giving them higher salaries and more prominent positions amongst their peers. With measurements we can set standards of how good a teacher have to be and demand that someone be so good at teaching that significantly less Americans can fulfill these positions, driving their worth up.
  - wallflower 18y ago
    I'll try to dig up the link later but I remember a Time or Newsweek cover story that said that the number one reason teachers quit the profession is the students' parents. I recall two horrifying stories from it: 1) A parent calling to complain about a 'C' that her daughter got because she wrote the daughter's report, 2) A college student handing his cellphone during class to the professor. On the line was his irate parent to complain for his kid about a grade. That being said, I've discussed this with my friends many times and I've gradually been convinced that more than anything - parents' involvement in their education was/is vitally important. A couple of them made it out of the ghetto.
    - access_denied 18y ago
      Unreasonable parents are part of the problem, yes. In the case of the cell-phone, what would happen if the director of that school would enforce "law and order"?
    - wallflower 18y ago
      Could not find the link directly but it was captured by a message board: Why Teachers Hate Parents, Time Magazine "Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs." "Perhaps the most complicated part of the conversation—beyond all the issues of race and class and culture, the growing pressures to succeed and arguments over how success should be defined—is the problem of memory. When they meet in that conference, parent and teacher bring their own school experiences with them—what went right and wrong, what they missed. They are determined for it to be different for the child they both care about. They go into that first-grade room and sit in the small chairs and can easily be small again themselves. It is so tempting to use the child's prospects to address their own regrets. So teachers learn to choose their words with care and hope that they can build a partnership with parents that works to everyone's advantage and comes at no one's expense. And parents over time may realize that when it comes to their children, they still have much to learn. "I think that we love our children so much that they make us a little loony at times," says Arch Montgomery, head of the Asheville School in North Carolina. He winces at parents who treat their child as a cocktail-party trophy or a vanity sticker for the window of their SUV, but he also understands their behavior. "I think most parents desperately want to do what is right for their kids. This does not bring out the better angels of our natures, but it is understandable, and it is forgivable." http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&page=2 http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&#38...
  - Goladus 18y ago
    Some teachers are paid very well, it depends on the district really. When I lived in upstate NY, I remember hearing that a few of the teachers in my school district made almost 100k, which is terrific for the cost of living in that region. And there are a lot of reasons other than financial, that people choose to become teachers. From my observations on decent school systems (I haven't seen the TED speech yet), the biggest feature of schoolteachers is complacency. It's not that they aren't intelligent, it's that they aren't ambitious. People go into teaching in order to have a safe, comfortable, predictable career path. And in many cases that's what it is, and the result is that teachers wind up living in a different reality.
    - scott_s 18y ago
      You're probably thinking about this NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01generationb.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01generationb.html An important point is that the teachers in the 100k range have been teachers for 30 years. Starting salaries are much different.
      - Goladus 18y ago
        No, actually, I wasn't thinking about that article, though it's a pretty good one. I was thinking about a much smaller, suburban district and the average there is probably closer to $50k. And yes, starting salaries are much lower-- as they are for most graduates in most other industries. I wasn't arguing that being a teacher is going to get you rich. But at least in NY, one makes enough to live comfortably. If you can handle dealing with kids on a daily basis, it isn't a bad career choice at all. Of course, NY State's public schools have a good reputation.
      - derwiki 18y ago
        My father retired with half the salary of my entry-level software engineering job. This was after 30+ years. Go Coshocton, Ohio.
  - jonknee 18y ago
    That gets prohibitively expensive because you can't pay for quality. Teacher unions have made it such that if you want to pay teachers a lot you have to pay them all (by seniority typically) a lot. That means you'll be grossly over paying a lot of staff.
  - yummyfajitas 18y ago
    Because they properly account for non-wage compensation? To begin, multiply teacher salaries by (12 months/year)/(9 months worked). Throw in the value of 3 consecutive months of vacation, great health plan, defined-benefit pensions (the pension plans that will soon bankrupt most states), and "can't get fired" job security. You'll find that teachers are paid quite nicely.
  - katz 18y ago
    One of my family members recently had a career change. Teaching is not that bad a career choice (if you compare with what difficulty a person with a Journalism or BA(Languages) degree may find work). Teaching has a couple of advantages: - The entry requirements are not that high. - The degree program is not that demanding. - There is always employment (compare that with journalism or pharmacology in some countries). - There is a huge shortage of teachers in 1st world countries. For immigration to some countries a teaching degree can count more than an engineering degree. - In some countries there are fairly long (paid) holidays for teachers. - There are a lot of half day (08h00-14h00) positions available. This is especially important for someone with children. - There are generally a lot of bursaries available to fund study and distance study is also a good option. - Some countries allow abridging studies: a person with another degree can work as a teacher while doing a 1 to 2 year diploma that will make them a fully qualified teacher.
    - Agathos 18y ago
      I don't know how demanding the degree program is but becoming a teacher includes a lot of hoops to jump through beyond that. A friend of mine wants to be a teacher and has just about finished her master's, but may move out of state for a couple of years for her fiance's sake. Apparently she has a limited time after finishing the master's get certified, and if she spends much of that time out of state it will be very difficult to accumulate the required teaching experience.
- omouse 18y ago
  Not only Gates, but Alan Kay and Seymour Papert have been gunning for constructivist ideas for longer than Gates I think.
  - Create 18y ago
    "Most schools define computer literacy as being able to operate Microsoft Office and maybe do a little web design. They're missing the point. That's like saying, "If you know which end of a book to hold up, and you know how to turn to Chapter Three, then you're literate." -- Alan Kay http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448721 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448721
abas 18y ago
I agree. I'm not sure that the technological techniques he mentioned will be very successful though. I think video of great teachers will help some, but as he said in his description of a great teacher: they are looking around and seeing what kids are paying attention, etc. I think kids will benefit the most from that kind of attention and I think that is even more true of at risk kids. One thing I think might help is to have teachers observe each other. I taught a bit in grad school and would have liked to observe some of the other teachers who were really good and to have them observe me and give me suggestions. I associate with a nature school that runs weekly programs for home schooled kids (the kids come one or two full school days a week). The instructors and helpers interact with all the kids throughout the year (they break into groups, but change it up a lot). During prep time they will talk with each other about the individual kids - where they think they are at and what they can do to help the kids grow. I've been really impressed and was thrilled with the adult programs I have done with them. The instructors aren't paid very much either, they are passionate about it though. And they have helpers who are doing it for free (some are actually paying a little for it as part of an apprenticeship program).
amichail 18y ago
Probably the issue is that most teachers are quite bad and there's a limit to how much they can improve. So most teachers probably don't want any of this.
olavk 18y ago
Perhaps I didn't understand fully, but didn't he just say that nobody knows why some teachers are better than others?
schmave 18y ago
This graph, shown at 12:50, shows how good four different factors are at predicting whether a teacher will raise the test scores of her students, and they are: 1) Past Performance (presumably, whether the teacher raised his students' test scores the year before, although it's not defined) 2) Whether or not the teacher majored in math 3) Whether or not the teacher participated in TFA 4) Whether or not the teacher has a Master's in Education The best predictor is #1, which just means that the best predictor of whether a teacher is good at raising test scores is to see if they were good at that last year too. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.
dominik 18y ago
Enlightening talk. On teachers, Gates says that after 3 years, a teachers' performance generally doesn't change. He put up a graph of what influences teachers' performance. By far the greatest effect came from 'past performance,' distantly followed by a having a math degree (for math teachers), and Teach for America experience. Almost negligible came the last item, 'having a masters degree.' Next, Gates looked at the incentive structure within schools -- it's primarily seniority based, with a bonus if someone has a master's degree. He noted that good teachers leave the system at a rate slightly higher than that of bad teachers. He contrasted charter schools such as KIPP (http://www.kipp.org/ http://www.kipp.org/), where the school evaluates teachers on their performance -- with the traditional model. The traditional model contractually limits how schools can evaluate their teachers, for example, a principal is contractually not permitted to sit in on a teacher's class more than a few times a year (sometimes even once per year), and even those times, the principal must provide advance notice. Gates compared this to running a factory with some workers "making crap" but the management being banned from observing them without prior notice, so that the workers "might actually try and fool you into thinking we're doing a good job in that one brief moment." Gates next noted that even a teacher wanted to improve -- can't. New York, for example, passed a law banning schools using teacher improvement data to determine tenure. Gates closed noting his optimism, praising the testing data for revealing something. He posited the idea of using digital video to record all public school classrooms to give teachers the opportunity to review their work and consult with each other to improve. Gates said: "By thinking of this as a personnel system we can do it much better." He mentioned _Work Hard, Be Nice_, a book about KIPP: http://www.amazon.com/Work-Hard-Be-Nice-Promising/dp/1565125169 http://www.amazon.com/Work-Hard-Be-Nice-Promising/dp/1565125... Gates said he sent everyone at the TED talk a free copy. He finished by saying he thought "education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have." He mentioned the House-version of stimulus bill had funding for "these data systems," but the Senate version took that out, because "there are people threatened by these things." He reiterated his optimism, however, saying that people were beginning to recognize the importance of education.
- xenophanes 18y ago
  You're telling me that past performance influences future performance of teachers? Like, causes it? I think you must mean predicts. I hope Gates didn't say influences.
jbrun 18y ago
Teachers vs. Quarterbacks Here is a very good article by Gladwell comparing the difficulty in finding good teachers to that of choosing NFL quarterbacks: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_...

uuilly 18y ago

In my opinion teacher accountability is the most pressing social issue of our time. Gates has been all over this for a while now...

access_denied 18y ago
What about paying them decently? Other than some positions at Ivy-League, becoming a teacher is just bad math, financially speaking. Why would anyone intelligent want to become a teacher?
- jballanc 18y ago
  In economics, how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are. So, Lebron James makes millions because we value the ability to throw a ball through a metal ring, and we demand that someone be so good at this that only a handful of Americans can fulfill these positions. I'll let you continue the reasoning for teacher pay as a homework exercise...
  - andreyf 18y ago
    how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are This is a statement of fact, not opinion of what ought to be. Part of what Gates (and others) are saying, I think, is that to have a better functioning society, we need to increase the value society puts on teaching. If we provide the educational opportunity that Bill Gates, John Resig, or Larry Page got to every child in America, we will all be a lot better off.
    - jpd 18y ago
      By adding a way to measure teaching ability, we can make good teachers a highly prized resource and reward them by giving them higher salaries and more prominent positions amongst their peers. With measurements we can set standards of how good a teacher have to be and demand that someone be so good at teaching that significantly less Americans can fulfill these positions, driving their worth up.
- wallflower 18y ago
  I'll try to dig up the link later but I remember a Time or Newsweek cover story that said that the number one reason teachers quit the profession is the students' parents. I recall two horrifying stories from it: 1) A parent calling to complain about a 'C' that her daughter got because she wrote the daughter's report, 2) A college student handing his cellphone during class to the professor. On the line was his irate parent to complain for his kid about a grade. That being said, I've discussed this with my friends many times and I've gradually been convinced that more than anything - parents' involvement in their education was/is vitally important. A couple of them made it out of the ghetto.
  - access_denied 18y ago
    Unreasonable parents are part of the problem, yes. In the case of the cell-phone, what would happen if the director of that school would enforce "law and order"?
  - wallflower 18y ago
    Could not find the link directly but it was captured by a message board: Why Teachers Hate Parents, Time Magazine "Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs." "Perhaps the most complicated part of the conversation—beyond all the issues of race and class and culture, the growing pressures to succeed and arguments over how success should be defined—is the problem of memory. When they meet in that conference, parent and teacher bring their own school experiences with them—what went right and wrong, what they missed. They are determined for it to be different for the child they both care about. They go into that first-grade room and sit in the small chairs and can easily be small again themselves. It is so tempting to use the child's prospects to address their own regrets. So teachers learn to choose their words with care and hope that they can build a partnership with parents that works to everyone's advantage and comes at no one's expense. And parents over time may realize that when it comes to their children, they still have much to learn. "I think that we love our children so much that they make us a little loony at times," says Arch Montgomery, head of the Asheville School in North Carolina. He winces at parents who treat their child as a cocktail-party trophy or a vanity sticker for the window of their SUV, but he also understands their behavior. "I think most parents desperately want to do what is right for their kids. This does not bring out the better angels of our natures, but it is understandable, and it is forgivable." http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&page=2 http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&#38...
- Goladus 18y ago
  Some teachers are paid very well, it depends on the district really. When I lived in upstate NY, I remember hearing that a few of the teachers in my school district made almost 100k, which is terrific for the cost of living in that region. And there are a lot of reasons other than financial, that people choose to become teachers. From my observations on decent school systems (I haven't seen the TED speech yet), the biggest feature of schoolteachers is complacency. It's not that they aren't intelligent, it's that they aren't ambitious. People go into teaching in order to have a safe, comfortable, predictable career path. And in many cases that's what it is, and the result is that teachers wind up living in a different reality.
  - scott_s 18y ago
    You're probably thinking about this NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01generationb.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01generationb.html An important point is that the teachers in the 100k range have been teachers for 30 years. Starting salaries are much different.
    - Goladus 18y ago
      No, actually, I wasn't thinking about that article, though it's a pretty good one. I was thinking about a much smaller, suburban district and the average there is probably closer to $50k. And yes, starting salaries are much lower-- as they are for most graduates in most other industries. I wasn't arguing that being a teacher is going to get you rich. But at least in NY, one makes enough to live comfortably. If you can handle dealing with kids on a daily basis, it isn't a bad career choice at all. Of course, NY State's public schools have a good reputation.
    - derwiki 18y ago
      My father retired with half the salary of my entry-level software engineering job. This was after 30+ years. Go Coshocton, Ohio.
- jonknee 18y ago
  That gets prohibitively expensive because you can't pay for quality. Teacher unions have made it such that if you want to pay teachers a lot you have to pay them all (by seniority typically) a lot. That means you'll be grossly over paying a lot of staff.
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  Because they properly account for non-wage compensation? To begin, multiply teacher salaries by (12 months/year)/(9 months worked). Throw in the value of 3 consecutive months of vacation, great health plan, defined-benefit pensions (the pension plans that will soon bankrupt most states), and "can't get fired" job security. You'll find that teachers are paid quite nicely.
- katz 18y ago
  One of my family members recently had a career change. Teaching is not that bad a career choice (if you compare with what difficulty a person with a Journalism or BA(Languages) degree may find work). Teaching has a couple of advantages: - The entry requirements are not that high. - The degree program is not that demanding. - There is always employment (compare that with journalism or pharmacology in some countries). - There is a huge shortage of teachers in 1st world countries. For immigration to some countries a teaching degree can count more than an engineering degree. - In some countries there are fairly long (paid) holidays for teachers. - There are a lot of half day (08h00-14h00) positions available. This is especially important for someone with children. - There are generally a lot of bursaries available to fund study and distance study is also a good option. - Some countries allow abridging studies: a person with another degree can work as a teacher while doing a 1 to 2 year diploma that will make them a fully qualified teacher.
  - Agathos 18y ago
    I don't know how demanding the degree program is but becoming a teacher includes a lot of hoops to jump through beyond that. A friend of mine wants to be a teacher and has just about finished her master's, but may move out of state for a couple of years for her fiance's sake. Apparently she has a limited time after finishing the master's get certified, and if she spends much of that time out of state it will be very difficult to accumulate the required teaching experience.
omouse 18y ago
Not only Gates, but Alan Kay and Seymour Papert have been gunning for constructivist ideas for longer than Gates I think.
- Create 18y ago
  "Most schools define computer literacy as being able to operate Microsoft Office and maybe do a little web design. They're missing the point. That's like saying, "If you know which end of a book to hold up, and you know how to turn to Chapter Three, then you're literate." -- Alan Kay http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448721 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448721

abas 18y ago

I agree. I'm not sure that the technological techniques he mentioned will be very successful though. I think video of great teachers will help some, but as he said in his description of a great teacher: they are looking around and seeing what kids are paying attention, etc. I think kids will benefit the most from that kind of attention and I think that is even more true of at risk kids. One thing I think might help is to have teachers observe each other. I taught a bit in grad school and would have liked to observe some of the other teachers who were really good and to have them observe me and give me suggestions. I associate with a nature school that runs weekly programs for home schooled kids (the kids come one or two full school days a week). The instructors and helpers interact with all the kids throughout the year (they break into groups, but change it up a lot). During prep time they will talk with each other about the individual kids - where they think they are at and what they can do to help the kids grow. I've been really impressed and was thrilled with the adult programs I have done with them. The instructors aren't paid very much either, they are passionate about it though. And they have helpers who are doing it for free (some are actually paying a little for it as part of an apprenticeship program).

amichail 18y ago

Probably the issue is that most teachers are quite bad and there's a limit to how much they can improve. So most teachers probably don't want any of this.

olavk 18y ago

Perhaps I didn't understand fully, but didn't he just say that nobody knows why some teachers are better than others?

schmave 18y ago

This graph, shown at 12:50, shows how good four different factors are at predicting whether a teacher will raise the test scores of her students, and they are: 1) Past Performance (presumably, whether the teacher raised his students' test scores the year before, although it's not defined) 2) Whether or not the teacher majored in math 3) Whether or not the teacher participated in TFA 4) Whether or not the teacher has a Master's in Education The best predictor is #1, which just means that the best predictor of whether a teacher is good at raising test scores is to see if they were good at that last year too. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.

dominik 18y ago

Enlightening talk. On teachers, Gates says that after 3 years, a teachers' performance generally doesn't change. He put up a graph of what influences teachers' performance. By far the greatest effect came from 'past performance,' distantly followed by a having a math degree (for math teachers), and Teach for America experience. Almost negligible came the last item, 'having a masters degree.' Next, Gates looked at the incentive structure within schools -- it's primarily seniority based, with a bonus if someone has a master's degree. He noted that good teachers leave the system at a rate slightly higher than that of bad teachers. He contrasted charter schools such as KIPP (http://www.kipp.org/ http://www.kipp.org/), where the school evaluates teachers on their performance -- with the traditional model. The traditional model contractually limits how schools can evaluate their teachers, for example, a principal is contractually not permitted to sit in on a teacher's class more than a few times a year (sometimes even once per year), and even those times, the principal must provide advance notice. Gates compared this to running a factory with some workers "making crap" but the management being banned from observing them without prior notice, so that the workers "might actually try and fool you into thinking we're doing a good job in that one brief moment." Gates next noted that even a teacher wanted to improve -- can't. New York, for example, passed a law banning schools using teacher improvement data to determine tenure. Gates closed noting his optimism, praising the testing data for revealing something. He posited the idea of using digital video to record all public school classrooms to give teachers the opportunity to review their work and consult with each other to improve. Gates said: "By thinking of this as a personnel system we can do it much better." He mentioned _Work Hard, Be Nice_, a book about KIPP: http://www.amazon.com/Work-Hard-Be-Nice-Promising/dp/1565125169 http://www.amazon.com/Work-Hard-Be-Nice-Promising/dp/1565125... Gates said he sent everyone at the TED talk a free copy. He finished by saying he thought "education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have." He mentioned the House-version of stimulus bill had funding for "these data systems," but the Senate version took that out, because "there are people threatened by these things." He reiterated his optimism, however, saying that people were beginning to recognize the importance of education.

xenophanes 18y ago
You're telling me that past performance influences future performance of teachers? Like, causes it? I think you must mean predicts. I hope Gates didn't say influences.

jbrun 18y ago

Teachers vs. Quarterbacks Here is a very good article by Gladwell comparing the difficulty in finding good teachers to that of choosing NFL quarterbacks: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_...