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This is alarming but not particularly surprising to me, if the culture of education is similar between the US and Canada. Judging by this piece and one I read h

This is alarming but not particularly surprising to me, if the culture of education is similar between the US and Canada. Judging by this piece and one I read hear a few days back [1], there may be more similarities than I'd thought. Ed school for far too many is a compelling choice for people who want a relatively easy college degree. I don't want to diss the countless teachers who choose that route out of genuine passion and love for education and knowledge, but we don't do a whole lot to filter for these people. And it's an incredible shame, because my brief two year teaching career convinced me that it's one of the most demanding career paths a person could choose. I'm a lead engineer today and was once a startup founder, and neither job comes close to the stress, the emotional demands, the direspect, the time demands, the politics, the motivational skills, and the relationship building teaching required of me. We act like it's such a big mystery why we have such problems in education. To me it's pretty simple: 1. It's an extremely demanding job that's only becoming more demanding with the constant shifting of accountability (i.e. blame) onto the teachers. 2. Teacher prep is largely horrible. Many ed schools will take anyone with a heartbeat, and highly selective alternative prep programs like Teach For America (of which I am an alum) give people minimal training in comparison. 3. Segregation, poverty, and policy create a situation where the students in the greatest need are the worst-served. This is what really kills our system, because students of privilege often have enough advantages to make out okay even in spite of the first two issues. No amount of draconian accountability standards, school privatization, or winner-take-all compensation schemes are going to fix these things. There is some hope though, if we're willing to reach for it. We have a lot of human capital in our education system, but I think we're applying it poorly. Instead of feebly demanding that everyone suddenly become an 10x teacher, we should find better ways to utilize the competent (if not universally brilliant) people we do have. Reduce teaching load and scale back the job to something people can excel at without having to be a martyr. [1] https://medium.com/precarious-physicist/enoughs-enough-6c56afe36d00 https://medium.com/precarious-physicist/enoughs-enough-6c56a... [2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/15/what-if-finlands-great-teachers-taught-in-u-s-schools-not-what-you-think/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/...

omegaham 12y ago
One thing that I've become a firm believer in is that teaching isn't the problem; administration is. A good administrator or group of administrators will make the entire school into a team that can excel. They set a clear vision for what teachers need to know and do. They set clear standards for discipline, which are practiced in a fair, evenhanded, rational fashion. They uphold high standards and remove the non-hackers who can't do the job. They respond quickly to concerns and show that they legitimately care. Incidentally, one of the biggest reasons why private schools do so much better is that their administrations tend to be better. When a kid is acting up in class, he gets punished. When a teacher sucks, he gets fired. When concerns come up, they are addressed quickly and promptly. These things are so important that teachers willingly and happily take a pay cut just so that they can be in this environment. In contrast, a large number of public schools have horrifyingly incompetent administrators. The school then becomes a muddled mess where individual sparks are snuffed out by the chaos. Who would teach in such a place? One of my favorite models of people's performance is the "10-80-10" distribution. 10% are heroes, who will do an amazing job no matter how bad things get. 10% are shitbags, to be extirpated with prejudice. The remaining 80% will go with the flow. If your school is awesome, they'll approach the heroes. If it's garbage, they'll approach the shitbags. Administration is what decides where the 80% will go.
- acjohnson55 12y ago
  One of the few jobs I want even less than my old teaching job is my old principal's job. The role has insane expectations. The collective administration has to be capable of management, budgeting, academic master planning, public relations, recruitment (of staff and teachers), HR, scheduling, event planning, behavior management, and the list goes on practically forever. The principal has to build a team that can cover all of these bases with no gaps, and in a school district like the one I taught in, they have to do it with a very limited number of people and typically on a very difficult time scale. In a rough school district, turnover is rampant. Few sane people want to take this role or honestly feel qualified to do it, so it tends to attract manic people, with the assortment of negative personality traits that tends to correlate with. You name it: manipulativeness, sleaziness, narcissism, capriciousness, etc. I have yet to see a private school that effectively serves the neediest communities with a model that is actually replicable. Even the best charters tend to weed out the neediest students, in their messaging, their admissions or through high daily expectations with lack of support. The lack of support undercuts high expectations at all levels of the educational system.

omegaham 12y ago

One thing that I've become a firm believer in is that teaching isn't the problem; administration is. A good administrator or group of administrators will make the entire school into a team that can excel. They set a clear vision for what teachers need to know and do. They set clear standards for discipline, which are practiced in a fair, evenhanded, rational fashion. They uphold high standards and remove the non-hackers who can't do the job. They respond quickly to concerns and show that they legitimately care. Incidentally, one of the biggest reasons why private schools do so much better is that their administrations tend to be better. When a kid is acting up in class, he gets punished. When a teacher sucks, he gets fired. When concerns come up, they are addressed quickly and promptly. These things are so important that teachers willingly and happily take a pay cut just so that they can be in this environment. In contrast, a large number of public schools have horrifyingly incompetent administrators. The school then becomes a muddled mess where individual sparks are snuffed out by the chaos. Who would teach in such a place? One of my favorite models of people's performance is the "10-80-10" distribution. 10% are heroes, who will do an amazing job no matter how bad things get. 10% are shitbags, to be extirpated with prejudice. The remaining 80% will go with the flow. If your school is awesome, they'll approach the heroes. If it's garbage, they'll approach the shitbags. Administration is what decides where the 80% will go.

acjohnson55 12y ago
One of the few jobs I want even less than my old teaching job is my old principal's job. The role has insane expectations. The collective administration has to be capable of management, budgeting, academic master planning, public relations, recruitment (of staff and teachers), HR, scheduling, event planning, behavior management, and the list goes on practically forever. The principal has to build a team that can cover all of these bases with no gaps, and in a school district like the one I taught in, they have to do it with a very limited number of people and typically on a very difficult time scale. In a rough school district, turnover is rampant. Few sane people want to take this role or honestly feel qualified to do it, so it tends to attract manic people, with the assortment of negative personality traits that tends to correlate with. You name it: manipulativeness, sleaziness, narcissism, capriciousness, etc. I have yet to see a private school that effectively serves the neediest communities with a model that is actually replicable. Even the best charters tend to weed out the neediest students, in their messaging, their admissions or through high daily expectations with lack of support. The lack of support undercuts high expectations at all levels of the educational system.