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The Case for a Teacher Bar Exam

41 points by kevinalexbrown 14y ago

darkxanthos 14y ago
It seems like there are so few teachers now. Maybe the first problem to solve is why we as a nation don't invest more in paying good wages to our teachers.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  These issues with teachers are largely in school districts in poor areas. The wealthy suburban school district I attended had no issues with teacher quality, and friends I made in college from all over the country confirmed this to be true on the national level. Since school districts are primarily funded by local taxes, poor children end up with bad teachers. I believe this is what NCLB was created to fix, but that wasn't successful for a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which was probably the tying of funding to continual yearly improvement in standardized test scores.
  - dragonwriter 14y ago
    Actually, the problem isn't just school districts being funded by local taxes -- even states that have statewide policies that equalize funding have the same problem. The thing is, poor school districts are often, comparatively, unattractive and unsafe places to work even with the same expenditures of funds (because they are often in unattractive and unsafe communities), so teachers often don't want to work there. (And NCLB wasn't created to fix this problem, it was created to divert funding from education to private testing vendors and provide a mechanism to rate public schools as failing as a political maneuver to build support for privatization of schools.)
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      > The thing is, poor school districts are often, comparatively, unattractive and unsafe places to work even with the same expenditures of funds Why is this problem so difficult to fix, at least within the school environment? Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police. > And NCLB wasn't created to fix this problem, it was created to divert funding from education to private testing vendors and provide a mechanism to rate public schools as failing as a political maneuver to build support for privatization of schools. Sure, that could very likely be the ulterior motive for the program (among other similar theories), but the public justification for NCLB was nevertheless to improve schools in poor areas.
      - japhyr 14y ago
        "Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police." It's about a lot more than "policing" a confined space. It's about dealing with all of the issues that come with high-poverty areas. Children come to school hungry, tired, and traumatized. They have had ineffective teachers for multiple years in the past. Many have already given up, because they have felt given up on. These are not "quite easy" problems to fix.
        ktsmith 14y ago
        > They have had ineffective teachers for multiple years in the past. Even those that have been fortunate enough to have great teachers may not be doing as well as their peers in schools with better economic surroundings. Having involved parents can make a huge difference in academic achievement. > Children come to school hungry Year after year the one thing my wife will point out as having made a positive impact at the schools she's taught at has been her students getting breakfast at school every day as part of the routine. Initially she found it disruptive but over time they have logged fewer behavior related incidents, fewer nurse visits and more attentiveness in the morning. It's an anecdote but four years without it followed by four years with it and she's convinced. All eight years were at Title I schools with 100% free/reduced lunch as well as the before and after school meal program. The specific change was serving the morning meal in the classroom ensuring the kids were getting it.
      - dragonwriter 14y ago
        It is difficult to fix "within the school environment" because it is a problem with the socioeconomic environment within which the school environment is embedded (including the population from which the school draws pupils), and it involves the area through which teachers have to transit to get to the school. Correcting for it maybe can be done, but it costs money, which means even with state level policies which aim to equalize school funding across rich and poor districts the poor districts end up behind in terms of academic resources, because they have to spend more money counteracting the effects of being in poor districts.
      - tossacct 14y ago
  - ktsmith 14y ago
    School funding often breaks down at the state level not the local level though it varies by state of course. Simply being in a wealthy suburb does not mean that your school has any more funding than a school in a poor area. In fact it's quite likely that your schools received significantly less money than schools in poorer areas due to federal funding via grants and things like Title I.
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      In that case, why are there not better teachers in poor school districts? After all, if my school was receiving less funding and still had good teachers, then those poor districts must have stellar teachers. And yet we continue to hear about how teachers suck.
      - japhyr 14y ago
        The higher level of funding does not translate to higher-paid teachers. That money goes to supporting students. It can be used to implement school breakfast programs, hire additional support staff, develop afterschool programs, etc. But a school can't just decide to pay its teachers more. The other important answer to this question is that low pay is not the major disincentive for working in an urban school. It's the challenges of working in a high-poverty environment. Those challenges are numerous, and pretty well documented. There are many similar issues in low-income rural areas.
        w1ntermute 14y ago
        > But a school can't just decide to pay its teachers more. Why not? If there are so many environmental reasons why teaching at such a school is disincentivized, providing a monetary incentive could bring in teachers.
        ktsmith 14y ago
        > Why not? State law prevents it in many cases. Collective bargaining agreements with unions, standard pay scales etc.
- jpwagner 14y ago
  The article addresses this. Do you have an argument to make?
rayiner 14y ago
Every article about how terrible the U.S. education system is is more or less bunk. Judge Posner on such comparisons: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-role-of-schools-in-student-performance-on-standardized-testsposner.html http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-... More numbers: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html?m=1 http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc.
- minikomi 14y ago
  I found this episode of This American Life a pretty thought provoking discussion on the same subject, and definitely worth a listen. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/474/transcript http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/474/t...
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123 and I'm glad to see that so many participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. Eric Hanushek has produced many peer-reviewed papers on the importance of teacher quality, http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-quality http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-quality and I encourage participants on Hacker News who like to discuss education policy to read them thoughtfully. Better-quality teachers matter, both for test scores in the short term and for outcomes that matter a lot more in the long term. Every article about how terrible the U.S. education system is is more or less bunk. "Every" such article? How many have you actually read? Have you lived in another country for any length of time, as I have? Quite a few authors have devoted more time and effort to careful international comparisons of education than the two bloggers you recommended to back up your opinion. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2013/01/09-timss-pisa-loveless http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts... http://educationnext.org/is-the-us-catching-up/ http://educationnext.org/is-the-us-catching-up/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ Content analysis of the textbooks (for people who can read Japanese or Korean or Chinese or Russian--but how many Americans is that?) makes the point very clear. See http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd... (a LONG but worthwhile read I learned about from another Hacker News participant) for more about what's really missing in United States education. See also http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/29/look-east-young-man/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/29/lo... from a professor of mathematics at Princeton about which students come to Princeton well prepared for the courses there.
lhnn 14y ago
I think it would be interesting to see this implemented at a state level, where it belongs, rather than trying to accomplish this at the Federal level. On one side, teachers do suffer from excess bureaucracy, underappreciation and (sometimes) lack of skills. On the other, mandatory guilds/bars are not usually something I'm a fan of, on principle.
- mjmahone17 14y ago
  Why not create a non-mandatory bar, like the ABA? This group could create high-standards teacher certifications, possibly something similar to how actuaries have a series of tests in order to get accredited at a specific level (and the amount of schooling they have isn't relevant, just the level they've managed to pass). I know a lot of states wouldn't require it, but if I'm a principle and someone's taken the time to get accredited, I think that's a good reason to hire them. Especially in more competitive areas like English and History. We wouldn't prevent people from practicing teaching without accreditation, but it should be more difficult, in the long term, as more and more teachers do get accredited.
  - japhyr 14y ago
    Teachers can earn National Board certification[0]. This is a fairly rigorous process, that demonstrates teachers have a higher level of proficiency. [0] http://www.nbpts.org/ http://www.nbpts.org/
jpwagner 14y ago
[best test takers] is unlikely to be strongly correlated with [best teachers].
- mjmahone17 14y ago
  Should we remove the qualification for med school being that you do exceptionally well on the MCAT? Should we eliminate the LSAT and Bar exams for lawyers? Because it's likely that, at the very least, the best teachers should be able to pass rigorous tests, even if they aren't the absolute best at said test.
mr_luc 14y ago
That's funny - I was just thinking that we need to remove all of the current certification-based requirements for teachers. This seems to go the other way. Education needs to change drastically. It needs to be nimble. It needs to start providing value in a post-industrial economy -- i.e, it needs to train kids to do knowledge work. You'll know it's making progress when graduating from High School starts to mean something again. No one knows what that transition will look like, or what it will take. Most people agree it'll be disruptive and messy, and the teaching profession is already being disrupted (Coursera, Codecademy, etc). It seems as though raising the barriers to entry for teaching as a profession, by adding yet another layer of certification, is a protectionist move that could get in the way of 'good disruption.'
- randomdata 14y ago
  I was thinking similar thoughts. You want to hire the best people possible, not those who have jumped though various hoops. Shrinking the pool of possible people you can hire is never going to raise the quality of talent available. How could it?
  - dragonwriter 14y ago
    In general, if the process that shrinks the pool is better at chopping off the low end of the distribution than the process that selects individual members from the pool to employ is at avoiding selecting from the low end of the distribution, then shrinking the pool by that method prior to selection will, in fact, raise the quality of talent actually selected. More specifically, "jumping through hoops" selects, if nothing else, for motivation, which is a not-unimportant qualification for teaching.
    - randomdata 14y ago
      It selects those who are motivated to jump through hoops, but not necessarily those who are motivated to become better teachers. To throw away a hypothetical someone who is clearly the best person for the job just because he doesn't meet some artificial criteria seems reckless.
Alex3917 14y ago
This is dumb. States already require teachers to pass standardized tests to demonstrate content mastery and pedagogical skill, and there is zero reason to think that it does anything to improve teacher quality, let alone to think that implementing it on the federal level would improve teacher quality. And there is tons of evidence showing that merit pay not only doesn't improve teaching quality, but actually makes it worse. The idea that the reason why Finland's kids do better on some random test is because we don't have standardized testing and merit pay for teachers is absurd. This is just another attempt at the privatization of schooling so that capitalists can gut the school system and monetize children.
- vor_ 14y ago
  > And there is tons of evidence showing that merit pay not only doesn't improve teaching quality, but actually makes it worse. Do you have links to this evidence? I'm genuinely curious; my own searching brings up evidence in favor of merit pay, such as this recent study: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/23/does-teacher-merit-pay-work-a-new-study-says-yes/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/23/d...
pmorici 14y ago
There is a great documentary called "Waiting For Superman" that addresses the inner city school problem and so called achievement gap. It's on NetFlix. If you haven't seen it it is worth the time.
chrismealy 14y ago
You own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Your team stinks. You want to turn it into the Yankees. Do you have your players work longer hours for less pay? Add lots of testing? Go after the players' union? Or do you just do what the Yankees do, and pay more for better players?
- adventured 14y ago
  You're already the Yankees. You pay far more than everybody else, and you're not winning enough to justify the vast expenditures. The only thing keeping your franchise afloat is a media network that pays for it all (tax payers endlessly subsidizing horrific teaching results despite the highest pay scale in the developed world). And who in their right mind would want to be the Yankees? You pay two times too much for all your players, and almost never win a championship because of it. You've got A-Rod, a broken down disaster that you pay $30+ million per year for, that you bought because you were foolishly trying to buy a championship instead of building a real team. The Pirates get more wins per dollars spent. The Pirates won a mere 16 less games (17% less than NYY), but paid roughly 66% less for that performance. And if you want to talk raw winning. Let's talk the Cincinnati Reds. They won two more games than the Yankees, with 55% less payroll. While other teams with half the payroll take home the world series title year after year, the Yankees might be lucky to eek out one title every ten years, and pay $2 billion dollars for it.
manglav 14y ago
I have a question for HN. At what point do you become responsible for your own education? Before, you may have not had a public library near you. Nowadays, there is too much information. Curation? Multiple MOOC's have taken the problem and squashed it. Internet Access? I'm not sure, but I remember reading that Comcast gives subsidized rates in poor income areas. Computers / Notebooks? This I'm not sure about at all. What access do people have? Assuming people have access to education, at what point are "educators" defunct? I feel as though I would not have gone to high school had these MOOC's been available. However, I did have enough personal curiosity to pursue these things. In college now, I'm not "spoon fed" anymore, it is my responsibility to do well, and seek out help if I am struggling. I am just curious where people think that line is drawn, and if it's different for everyone or not. I am for the Bar exam - for goodness's sake, we still have teachers trying to teach Creationism! One of my favorite videos on reforming education, from a very logical perspective from Sir Ken Robinson. Bonus: it's pictorially animated! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
- bphogan 14y ago
  Say you have parents who split up when you were two. Then say your mom works two jobs and doesn't help you with your homework, ever. Say you go to school on Monday and your first decent meal is the snack the teacher gives you on Monday morning. Say this is Kindergarten. At what point do you then even learn to become responsible for your own education? Unfortunately I've recently been introduced to a lot of those kinds of things, and it's really hard to make that change from judging. It was easy to see the unmotivated kid in the class as a slacker. Then we find out he wasn't eating cos it was a choice between getting food or paying for heat. Our backgrounds shape us much more than teachers do. What goes on outside of the class does too. You're a motivated self-learner. How much of that, truly, is because of the environment you grew up in? I know I sling code because my dad bought a computer and let me play on it when I was 7. I was encouraged by my dad to learn on my own.
  - manglav 14y ago
    bphogan I was not saying these kids are unmotivated and should focus on school - I am very sorry for even letting my comment be unclear. Of course our children should be nurtured, and the fact that this situation exists is awful. Everyone is different when it comes to what shapes them, for me it was a few select science teachers (not so much my environment in this case). That's why I am such a fan for Teach for America. I know four of my classmates who have elected to participate, and it has been the most rewarding experience of their lives. The thing that kids appreciate most? That they care. Really care. One idea thing I've always wondered about was making a safe place in this cities to code. I wrote a paper on how 1. School districts can cut IT budgets instead of teaching staff by using servers and thin clients instead of full desktop computers. Then 2. after school, adding some coding classes after school (including meals, stews are healthy,cheap, and hot), with the eventual goal of becoming a self-sufficient outsourcing team. Or making mockups, or even slicing PSD's. I feel as though if Hacker Dojo's and such exist, eventually a charity version will be created as well. There could be sponsors from FB / Google / IBM, etc... It's just a dream. I've always been a supporter of education for all. It's just a really, really, hard problem. I can't think of doing anything that these other startups aren't doing, so I'm waiting until I can contribute a bit more. Thanks for the anecdote bphogan, it really hit home.
mynameishere 14y ago
The massive forced population transfers involved in making the US like Finland would probably be a splotch on our history.
eriksank 14y ago
In my opinion, the article does not address what I experience as the real problem in the field of education: total lack of freedom to choose. After confiscating ("appropriating") the budget from the pockets of the parents, the politicians add insult upon injury by deciding in the parents' stead what education should be all about. I just want a competing portfolio of education service providers of which I choose the ones I want to work with, and I pay them out of my own pocket. Why does this kind of freedom seem so impossible to achieve even in the so-called "land of the free"?
- codva 14y ago
  It's possible, but you have to opt out of the system and do it all yourself. Neither of my kids ever went to school - both killed it on the SAT and other standardized tests while spending far less time on "school" than their traditionally educated peers. Not that I think standardized test scores really prove much, but if we are going to measure the success of education by them, then both my kids were wild successes, and neither ever went to school. Of course, that option is not practical for 90% of the population.
j2kun 14y ago
A scary majority of my constituent mathematics majors in undergrad told me this of linear algebra (a basic mathematics subject), "I don't care about this stupid shit. I just want to get my degree so I can go teach." We need a bar exam to weed out these scary people.

It seems like there are so few teachers now. Maybe the first problem to solve is why we as a nation don't invest more in paying good wages to our teachers.

w1ntermute 14y ago
These issues with teachers are largely in school districts in poor areas. The wealthy suburban school district I attended had no issues with teacher quality, and friends I made in college from all over the country confirmed this to be true on the national level. Since school districts are primarily funded by local taxes, poor children end up with bad teachers. I believe this is what NCLB was created to fix, but that wasn't successful for a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which was probably the tying of funding to continual yearly improvement in standardized test scores.
- dragonwriter 14y ago
  Actually, the problem isn't just school districts being funded by local taxes -- even states that have statewide policies that equalize funding have the same problem. The thing is, poor school districts are often, comparatively, unattractive and unsafe places to work even with the same expenditures of funds (because they are often in unattractive and unsafe communities), so teachers often don't want to work there. (And NCLB wasn't created to fix this problem, it was created to divert funding from education to private testing vendors and provide a mechanism to rate public schools as failing as a political maneuver to build support for privatization of schools.)
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    > The thing is, poor school districts are often, comparatively, unattractive and unsafe places to work even with the same expenditures of funds Why is this problem so difficult to fix, at least within the school environment? Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police. > And NCLB wasn't created to fix this problem, it was created to divert funding from education to private testing vendors and provide a mechanism to rate public schools as failing as a political maneuver to build support for privatization of schools. Sure, that could very likely be the ulterior motive for the program (among other similar theories), but the public justification for NCLB was nevertheless to improve schools in poor areas.
    - japhyr 14y ago
      "Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police." It's about a lot more than "policing" a confined space. It's about dealing with all of the issues that come with high-poverty areas. Children come to school hungry, tired, and traumatized. They have had ineffective teachers for multiple years in the past. Many have already given up, because they have felt given up on. These are not "quite easy" problems to fix.
      - ktsmith 14y ago
        > They have had ineffective teachers for multiple years in the past. Even those that have been fortunate enough to have great teachers may not be doing as well as their peers in schools with better economic surroundings. Having involved parents can make a huge difference in academic achievement. > Children come to school hungry Year after year the one thing my wife will point out as having made a positive impact at the schools she's taught at has been her students getting breakfast at school every day as part of the routine. Initially she found it disruptive but over time they have logged fewer behavior related incidents, fewer nurse visits and more attentiveness in the morning. It's an anecdote but four years without it followed by four years with it and she's convinced. All eight years were at Title I schools with 100% free/reduced lunch as well as the before and after school meal program. The specific change was serving the morning meal in the classroom ensuring the kids were getting it.
    - dragonwriter 14y ago
      It is difficult to fix "within the school environment" because it is a problem with the socioeconomic environment within which the school environment is embedded (including the population from which the school draws pupils), and it involves the area through which teachers have to transit to get to the school. Correcting for it maybe can be done, but it costs money, which means even with state level policies which aim to equalize school funding across rich and poor districts the poor districts end up behind in terms of academic resources, because they have to spend more money counteracting the effects of being in poor districts.
    - tossacct 14y ago
- ktsmith 14y ago
  School funding often breaks down at the state level not the local level though it varies by state of course. Simply being in a wealthy suburb does not mean that your school has any more funding than a school in a poor area. In fact it's quite likely that your schools received significantly less money than schools in poorer areas due to federal funding via grants and things like Title I.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    In that case, why are there not better teachers in poor school districts? After all, if my school was receiving less funding and still had good teachers, then those poor districts must have stellar teachers. And yet we continue to hear about how teachers suck.
    - japhyr 14y ago
      The higher level of funding does not translate to higher-paid teachers. That money goes to supporting students. It can be used to implement school breakfast programs, hire additional support staff, develop afterschool programs, etc. But a school can't just decide to pay its teachers more. The other important answer to this question is that low pay is not the major disincentive for working in an urban school. It's the challenges of working in a high-poverty environment. Those challenges are numerous, and pretty well documented. There are many similar issues in low-income rural areas.
      - w1ntermute 14y ago
        > But a school can't just decide to pay its teachers more. Why not? If there are so many environmental reasons why teaching at such a school is disincentivized, providing a monetary incentive could bring in teachers.
        ktsmith 14y ago
        > Why not? State law prevents it in many cases. Collective bargaining agreements with unions, standard pay scales etc.
jpwagner 14y ago
The article addresses this. Do you have an argument to make?

rayiner 14y ago

Every article about how terrible the U.S. education system is is more or less bunk. Judge Posner on such comparisons: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-role-of-schools-in-student-performance-on-standardized-testsposner.html http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-... More numbers: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html?m=1 http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc.

minikomi 14y ago
I found this episode of This American Life a pretty thought provoking discussion on the same subject, and definitely worth a listen. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/474/transcript http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/474/t...
tokenadult 14y ago
Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123 and I'm glad to see that so many participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. Eric Hanushek has produced many peer-reviewed papers on the importance of teacher quality, http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-quality http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-quality and I encourage participants on Hacker News who like to discuss education policy to read them thoughtfully. Better-quality teachers matter, both for test scores in the short term and for outcomes that matter a lot more in the long term. Every article about how terrible the U.S. education system is is more or less bunk. "Every" such article? How many have you actually read? Have you lived in another country for any length of time, as I have? Quite a few authors have devoted more time and effort to careful international comparisons of education than the two bloggers you recommended to back up your opinion. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2013/01/09-timss-pisa-loveless http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts... http://educationnext.org/is-the-us-catching-up/ http://educationnext.org/is-the-us-catching-up/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ Content analysis of the textbooks (for people who can read Japanese or Korean or Chinese or Russian--but how many Americans is that?) makes the point very clear. See http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd... (a LONG but worthwhile read I learned about from another Hacker News participant) for more about what's really missing in United States education. See also http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/29/look-east-young-man/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/29/lo... from a professor of mathematics at Princeton about which students come to Princeton well prepared for the courses there.

lhnn 14y ago

I think it would be interesting to see this implemented at a state level, where it belongs, rather than trying to accomplish this at the Federal level. On one side, teachers do suffer from excess bureaucracy, underappreciation and (sometimes) lack of skills. On the other, mandatory guilds/bars are not usually something I'm a fan of, on principle.

mjmahone17 14y ago
Why not create a non-mandatory bar, like the ABA? This group could create high-standards teacher certifications, possibly something similar to how actuaries have a series of tests in order to get accredited at a specific level (and the amount of schooling they have isn't relevant, just the level they've managed to pass). I know a lot of states wouldn't require it, but if I'm a principle and someone's taken the time to get accredited, I think that's a good reason to hire them. Especially in more competitive areas like English and History. We wouldn't prevent people from practicing teaching without accreditation, but it should be more difficult, in the long term, as more and more teachers do get accredited.
- japhyr 14y ago
  Teachers can earn National Board certification[0]. This is a fairly rigorous process, that demonstrates teachers have a higher level of proficiency. [0] http://www.nbpts.org/ http://www.nbpts.org/

jpwagner 14y ago

[best test takers] is unlikely to be strongly correlated with [best teachers].

mjmahone17 14y ago
Should we remove the qualification for med school being that you do exceptionally well on the MCAT? Should we eliminate the LSAT and Bar exams for lawyers? Because it's likely that, at the very least, the best teachers should be able to pass rigorous tests, even if they aren't the absolute best at said test.

mr_luc 14y ago

That's funny - I was just thinking that we need to remove all of the current certification-based requirements for teachers. This seems to go the other way. Education needs to change drastically. It needs to be nimble. It needs to start providing value in a post-industrial economy -- i.e, it needs to train kids to do knowledge work. You'll know it's making progress when graduating from High School starts to mean something again. No one knows what that transition will look like, or what it will take. Most people agree it'll be disruptive and messy, and the teaching profession is already being disrupted (Coursera, Codecademy, etc). It seems as though raising the barriers to entry for teaching as a profession, by adding yet another layer of certification, is a protectionist move that could get in the way of 'good disruption.'

randomdata 14y ago
I was thinking similar thoughts. You want to hire the best people possible, not those who have jumped though various hoops. Shrinking the pool of possible people you can hire is never going to raise the quality of talent available. How could it?
- dragonwriter 14y ago
  In general, if the process that shrinks the pool is better at chopping off the low end of the distribution than the process that selects individual members from the pool to employ is at avoiding selecting from the low end of the distribution, then shrinking the pool by that method prior to selection will, in fact, raise the quality of talent actually selected. More specifically, "jumping through hoops" selects, if nothing else, for motivation, which is a not-unimportant qualification for teaching.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    It selects those who are motivated to jump through hoops, but not necessarily those who are motivated to become better teachers. To throw away a hypothetical someone who is clearly the best person for the job just because he doesn't meet some artificial criteria seems reckless.

Alex3917 14y ago

This is dumb. States already require teachers to pass standardized tests to demonstrate content mastery and pedagogical skill, and there is zero reason to think that it does anything to improve teacher quality, let alone to think that implementing it on the federal level would improve teacher quality. And there is tons of evidence showing that merit pay not only doesn't improve teaching quality, but actually makes it worse. The idea that the reason why Finland's kids do better on some random test is because we don't have standardized testing and merit pay for teachers is absurd. This is just another attempt at the privatization of schooling so that capitalists can gut the school system and monetize children.

vor_ 14y ago
> And there is tons of evidence showing that merit pay not only doesn't improve teaching quality, but actually makes it worse. Do you have links to this evidence? I'm genuinely curious; my own searching brings up evidence in favor of merit pay, such as this recent study: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/23/does-teacher-merit-pay-work-a-new-study-says-yes/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/23/d...

pmorici 14y ago

There is a great documentary called "Waiting For Superman" that addresses the inner city school problem and so called achievement gap. It's on NetFlix. If you haven't seen it it is worth the time.

chrismealy 14y ago

You own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Your team stinks. You want to turn it into the Yankees. Do you have your players work longer hours for less pay? Add lots of testing? Go after the players' union? Or do you just do what the Yankees do, and pay more for better players?

adventured 14y ago
You're already the Yankees. You pay far more than everybody else, and you're not winning enough to justify the vast expenditures. The only thing keeping your franchise afloat is a media network that pays for it all (tax payers endlessly subsidizing horrific teaching results despite the highest pay scale in the developed world). And who in their right mind would want to be the Yankees? You pay two times too much for all your players, and almost never win a championship because of it. You've got A-Rod, a broken down disaster that you pay $30+ million per year for, that you bought because you were foolishly trying to buy a championship instead of building a real team. The Pirates get more wins per dollars spent. The Pirates won a mere 16 less games (17% less than NYY), but paid roughly 66% less for that performance. And if you want to talk raw winning. Let's talk the Cincinnati Reds. They won two more games than the Yankees, with 55% less payroll. While other teams with half the payroll take home the world series title year after year, the Yankees might be lucky to eek out one title every ten years, and pay $2 billion dollars for it.

manglav 14y ago

I have a question for HN. At what point do you become responsible for your own education? Before, you may have not had a public library near you. Nowadays, there is too much information. Curation? Multiple MOOC's have taken the problem and squashed it. Internet Access? I'm not sure, but I remember reading that Comcast gives subsidized rates in poor income areas. Computers / Notebooks? This I'm not sure about at all. What access do people have? Assuming people have access to education, at what point are "educators" defunct? I feel as though I would not have gone to high school had these MOOC's been available. However, I did have enough personal curiosity to pursue these things. In college now, I'm not "spoon fed" anymore, it is my responsibility to do well, and seek out help if I am struggling. I am just curious where people think that line is drawn, and if it's different for everyone or not. I am for the Bar exam - for goodness's sake, we still have teachers trying to teach Creationism! One of my favorite videos on reforming education, from a very logical perspective from Sir Ken Robinson. Bonus: it's pictorially animated! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

bphogan 14y ago
Say you have parents who split up when you were two. Then say your mom works two jobs and doesn't help you with your homework, ever. Say you go to school on Monday and your first decent meal is the snack the teacher gives you on Monday morning. Say this is Kindergarten. At what point do you then even learn to become responsible for your own education? Unfortunately I've recently been introduced to a lot of those kinds of things, and it's really hard to make that change from judging. It was easy to see the unmotivated kid in the class as a slacker. Then we find out he wasn't eating cos it was a choice between getting food or paying for heat. Our backgrounds shape us much more than teachers do. What goes on outside of the class does too. You're a motivated self-learner. How much of that, truly, is because of the environment you grew up in? I know I sling code because my dad bought a computer and let me play on it when I was 7. I was encouraged by my dad to learn on my own.
- manglav 14y ago
  bphogan I was not saying these kids are unmotivated and should focus on school - I am very sorry for even letting my comment be unclear. Of course our children should be nurtured, and the fact that this situation exists is awful. Everyone is different when it comes to what shapes them, for me it was a few select science teachers (not so much my environment in this case). That's why I am such a fan for Teach for America. I know four of my classmates who have elected to participate, and it has been the most rewarding experience of their lives. The thing that kids appreciate most? That they care. Really care. One idea thing I've always wondered about was making a safe place in this cities to code. I wrote a paper on how 1. School districts can cut IT budgets instead of teaching staff by using servers and thin clients instead of full desktop computers. Then 2. after school, adding some coding classes after school (including meals, stews are healthy,cheap, and hot), with the eventual goal of becoming a self-sufficient outsourcing team. Or making mockups, or even slicing PSD's. I feel as though if Hacker Dojo's and such exist, eventually a charity version will be created as well. There could be sponsors from FB / Google / IBM, etc... It's just a dream. I've always been a supporter of education for all. It's just a really, really, hard problem. I can't think of doing anything that these other startups aren't doing, so I'm waiting until I can contribute a bit more. Thanks for the anecdote bphogan, it really hit home.

mynameishere 14y ago

The massive forced population transfers involved in making the US like Finland would probably be a splotch on our history.

eriksank 14y ago

In my opinion, the article does not address what I experience as the real problem in the field of education: total lack of freedom to choose. After confiscating ("appropriating") the budget from the pockets of the parents, the politicians add insult upon injury by deciding in the parents' stead what education should be all about. I just want a competing portfolio of education service providers of which I choose the ones I want to work with, and I pay them out of my own pocket. Why does this kind of freedom seem so impossible to achieve even in the so-called "land of the free"?

codva 14y ago
It's possible, but you have to opt out of the system and do it all yourself. Neither of my kids ever went to school - both killed it on the SAT and other standardized tests while spending far less time on "school" than their traditionally educated peers. Not that I think standardized test scores really prove much, but if we are going to measure the success of education by them, then both my kids were wild successes, and neither ever went to school. Of course, that option is not practical for 90% of the population.

j2kun 14y ago

A scary majority of my constituent mathematics majors in undergrad told me this of linear algebra (a basic mathematics subject), "I don't care about this stupid shit. I just want to get my degree so I can go teach." We need a bar exam to weed out these scary people.