MOM is a teacher

Yesterday, Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about “The Value of Teachers“. He cited new research from economists, Raj Chetty (Harvard), John Friedman (Harvard), and Jonah Rockoff (Columbia) to highlight how important a good teacher is to the future possible earnings of each child:

Having a good fourth-grade teacher makes a student 1.25 percent more likely to go to college, the research suggests, and 1.25 percent less likely to get pregnant as a teenager. Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime — or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class — all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That’s right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year’s students, just in the extra income they will earn.

I agree: it is of urgent importance that good teachers are recruited and retained in the profession, and bad teachers are asked to leave.

It is his proposal for how this can happen that I cannot buy into. He writes:

And, increasingly, we’re getting solid evidence of what reforms may help: teacher evaluations based on student performance, higher pay and prestige for good teachers, dismissals for weak teachers.

In today’s Times, we read about what these conclusions about what works in education reform look like in NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s proposals:

Mr. Bloomberg proposed enticing top teachers to remain in the profession with a $20,000 salary increase if they are rated “highly effective” for two consecutive years.

He said the city should offer to pay off up to $25,000 in student loans — $5,000 a year, for five years — for top college graduates who teach in the city’s schools.

And, seeking to break through a stalemate between the city and the union over a teacher evaluation system, he said the city would form committees to evaluate teachers at 33 struggling schools based on classroom performance. He said this would allow the city to “replace up to 50 percent of the faculty” at these schools, and to reclaim nearly $60 million in federal grants that have been withheld because of the lack of an evaluation system.

This is a simplistic carrots-and-sticks approach without an understanding of human motivation and the collaborative nature of teaching and learning.  This is also the kind of approach more aligned with the individualized rewards and punishment environment in banking and finance- and look what that got us into. Within financial institutions, the potential for handsome individual rewards got bankers to create ever riskier and more complex products that eventually brought the US and global economy to its knees.

Enough said.

Teaching is work that is highly creative, emotional, and collaborative. It is not a job in a factory where productivity can be measured simply by the sheer increase in say, the number of bottles that are produced. Kids are not digits, or bottles.

Daniel Pink in his book Drive and in his TED talk below  summarized incontrovertible  research in motivation showing how the carrots and sticks approach “dulls thinking and blocks creativity.”

Imagine ourselves as the high-achieving teacher who is recruited at $150,000 a year to teach in classes with 50-60 students (assuming Bloomberg’s suggestion of firing half the teachers and doubling the class size comes true). What would happen is that within a year, you and I would be frustrated that we aren’t working with the kids and affecting their individual lives and learning – too much to grade, too many students to manage, the conditions and environment of teaching have not changed. The salary might be so good that, like make bankers I know, it attracts us to stay teaching even though we are less and less satisfied with the work.  This is why after some years, so many lawyers and bankers I know start dreaming about becoming yoga instructors, starting their own bakeries, making films, and even going into teaching, because they need something that feeds their souls, not just their wallets. How would kids benefit from such teachers?

What’s my proposal you say?

• Teacher recruitment has to be rigorous, and once recruited, all teachers get paid a good salary.

• The conditions of teaching has to support what makes good teachers do their best: small class sizes, collaborative and collegial environments, time and focus on continual professional development, teacher autonomy in terms of curriculum development and assessment, supportive mentorship.

• Teacher evaluation has to consider a basket of goods that takes into account the collaborative nature of teaching: student work, lesson plans and assignments, principal and peer evaluations, degree of collaboration, degree of contributions to the community, level of support for diverse learners, communication with parents and community.

There is only one way that I feel test scores should be used in teacher evaluations – not for identifying the best teachers.  There should be a very basic test score that a school can identify as being necessary for all students.  When a teacher performs badly in the evaluation of the basket of schools listed above, below acceptable test scores can be used as part of the the evidence package to let a teacher go.

Most people that I know who go into teaching have some level of desire to help children learn. The best way to recruit, retain and motivate these teachers is to provide all the possible conditions for them to work together with each other to help children learn, not to create a system of individual stars and losers.

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Dr. Yen Yen Woo is Associate Professor of Education at Long Island University, C.W.Post and the creator of the Dim Sum Warriors comics app,  available through the App Store in 2012. Read a comic, learn a language! www.dimsumwarriors.com.