Bill Gates and Teacher Spaghetti Sauce

Bill Gates is at it again.  For such a smart guy, it is amazing how dense he can be when it comes to education reform. To wit:

We can “flip the curve,” raising performance “without spending a lot more,” if we “measure, develop and reward excellent teaching." ... of all the variables under a school’s control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. To flip the curve, we have to identify great teachers, find out what makes them so effective and transfer those skills to others so more students can enjoy top teachers and high achievement.

SO, Billy, we have to identify great teachers and find out what makes them so effective. Then we have to transfer that to other teachers. That will flip the curve.

Hey !  "Find out what makes them so effective"???

If you don't know WHY the great teachers are great, how in Bloomberg's Bloomers can you say definitively that

1. You can identify these great teachers and find out what makes them so effective.
2. These unknowns are transferable.
3. This transference will raise performance “without spending a lot more."

Sometimes life is like judging pasta sauce.

There might not be a best, only a best for you. That teacher might not be the BEST because you can't define best for more than one type of student. There are more types of teachers than there are types of spaghetti sauce. Go watch the Malcolm Gladwell talk at TED.

Cheating starts with The Administration

From the NYTimes

One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average. But it’s not because they are all working harder.
The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

No. The goal is to make the school look more attractive. The student benefit is secondary.

Colleges have been playing this game for years: paying students to retake the SAT to raise the USNews rankings, gaming the enrollments to increase "diversity", fiddling with grading to improve student "satisfaction", and now they're out and out lying about GPA calculated from the inflated grades of watered down courses presented by professors who have lessened their requirements and overlooked more.

Changed to pass/fail so the pressure is reduced but "This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview." Total bullshit.

and we wonder why the students feel entitled?

Tough Times for Unemployed Teachers - or not.

According to the NYTimes: Teachers Facing Weakest Market in Years, it's tough to get a job because of all the other teachers out looking. Of course, this IS Westchester County, Long Island so it's not surprising that there are 3000 applicants for 8 jobs.

With all these teachers available, I wonder about the other complaint floating around the blogosphere: that of unavailable people to fit into charter school jobs. Charter schools were complaining to the Wall Street Journal about the oh-so-onerous restrictions on hiring non-teachers that I wrote about the other day. Either they can't find SchoolSpring.com or are simply offering too little money for too much work. Gotta keep up the salaries of the administration - inexperienced teaching at any cost.

Read More:
Back to the NYT and that glut of talent ... I wanted to know how many of these applications were from qualified people? Certified in some state? Certified in NY? Certified by Teach for America? Certified by the Online University of Wheaties Box? Reading further in the article reveals that there seemed to be qualified applicants; 200 were winnowed out of that 3000 and asked for interviews. Then they were given a timed writing test to further demonstrate ability, which shows the school's confidence in their resumes. There are probably 50 qualified people in that pile. Now at about 6 per job, how many would really fit the position and enjoy working with the kids?

Applying is not like it used to be. It's easy to apply for multiple positions on SchoolSpring.com - click a button and done. No fuss, no expense, no effort. Click on one, click on fifty. No Problem.

Any mention of a position really brings out the flakes, whackjobs and mouthbreathers. Some aren't qualified to drive to the school, never mind teach. Others are frantically clicking "Apply" without even reading whether they've got any training for the particular courses. I guess the thought is "I can click, why not apply?" The answer, for those not catching the sarcasm, is "because you're applying to teach math and you got Cs and Ds throughout college and never once took a class higher than Algebra for Non-College Bound Students."

What's tough is for truly qualified teachers who are suddenly laid off is to get through that enormous crowd and make it into the final stages. Once there, they have a great chance because quality is so rare these days.

PELHAM, N.Y. — In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.

Football for College Credit.

Everyone seems to be all up in arms about this but I don't agree. I think the football players should be able to legitimately get a credit in football.

One credit. Two. It doesn't really matter.

I got a credits for athletics when I was in college - kayak was 1 and archery was another. We had to have two PE credits. You showed up. You learned a few terms, shot a few flights, took a silly multiple choice exam. It was a nice break from the 18-21 mechanical engineering credits per semester (on top of the ROTC and the stuff for commissioned officers).

What's the big deal? I like it that the rest of the school can have its courses without the lunkheads slowing everything down. They would never have made it to college other than for football, so it's not like they're being deprived of anything. Any players who do have brains will get their education regardless of what the lunkheads do.

With all the people majoring in FillinTheBlank Studies or some other touchy-feely joke, I can't think that 100 football players is going to skew the median all that much.