I just got back from a Manhattan Institute event on teacher quality. Many of the comments I have mirror those I expressed regarding Charles Murray’s Real Education.
I thought Murray was a little too pessimistic about raising kids’ test scores, because there is a good deal of evidence that good teachers are capable of doing this (though, thanks to unions and tenure, it’s hard to sort out which teachers do this before it’s too late). The panelists tended to reaffirm my judgment this morning — the event’s most interesting statistic was that bad teachers might only advance their kids half a grade level in a year, while good ones might cram in a grade level and a half. That’s a whole grade level each year.
And here’s a point that (to my dismay) the panelists tended to ignore:
If it’s impossible to make students learn any better [as Murray suggests], how is it that Japan and Finland do just that? The undeniable, if unseemly, answer [which Murray fails to provide] is that America’s low average is the result of its racial diversity. In 2005, the University of Pennsylvania’s Erling E. Boe and Sujie Shin separated U.S. scores by race, and found that American whites hold up perfectly well in international comparisons.
Most panelists seemed to assume that if Finland’s kids outscored the U.S.’s kids, it must be something to do with the way Finland hires its teachers. But in reality, our main problem is that we don’t educate blacks and Hispanics to the same level we educate whites, and Finland can’t help us on that front.
Regarding education schools, Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, had some interesting comments. She (like most critics) thinks ed schools are doing a terrible job of training teachers, and she respects alternative avenues like Teach for America and NYC’s teaching-fellows program. But she pointed out that even the few teachers who start in those programs have to take ed-school classes, and argued that therefore, we can’t ignore these schools — as many on both sides of the debate seem to want to do.