by David Safier
(TASL)
I always keep an eye on what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing in the education arena. They spend a hell of a lot of money, so they're real players, which makes their giving patterns important. But I also sense that they have no political agenda. Bill Gates wants his legacy to be, he changed the world for the better. He's not satisfied being the guy who made gazillions by selling computer software. Since the Foundation is trying to do good regardless of which education camp supports their efforts, and they have lots of money to get things done, what they say and do tells a lot about what might work in the real world.
The Gates Foundation has focused lots of money and effort on creating school environments that are more conducive to learning. It believed small schools are a big part of the answer. Now it's
not so sure.
In remarks at last week’s gathering, Mr. Gates said the foundation had seen success with some of the small high schools it helped create through its emphasis on that school improvement strategy, but that much of that work did not deliver the academic gains the foundation had hoped for.
“To be successful, a redesign requires changing the roles and responsibilities of adults, and changing the school’s culture,” Mr. Gates said. “You can’t dramatically increase college readiness by changing only the size and structure of a school.
So now the Foundation plans to focus more of its energies on "teacher effectiveness." That means trying to identify what makes for effective teaching, but it also means finding ways to "retain and compensate teachers based on their effectiveness, and help ensure that high-quality teachers are place in schools that need them the most."
So teachers are more important than playing around with school size and structure, eh? What a surprise!
The holy grail for lots of non-teaching educators is "teacher-proof learning." That means you create a program that is so good, housed in a school building that is so well designed, that even a bad teacher can't screw things up. The goal is the perfect "lesson plan in a can." If the teacher is handy with a can opener and knows how to scoop out the portions and give them to the students, the boys and girls will consume the nutritious lessons and become educated.
But it doesn't work that way. All of us had teachers who could make potentially dull material exciting and other teachers who turned dynamite material into sludge. Some teachers left us with lasting lessons and even changed our lives. Others were quickly forgotten along with their lessons, or we remember them only because they turned terrible teaching into an art form.
Populate a school with gifted teachers, give them plenty of materials and not too many students, and you'll get good results. If you add a gifted principal as well, you might get great results. But put a bunch of mediocre teachers into the best possible situation, and the results will be mediocre, guaranteed.
We need to figure out how to get more gifted teachers into the schools. One way is to attract more gifted individuals. I'm not saying that brilliant people who know and love their subject matter will necessarily make great teachers, but I'll give them better odds than mediocre people who have a passing understanding of and little passion for the material.
The problem is, those brilliant people have plenty of job opportunities, probably for more money than they would make as teacher, so we need to make the job of teaching more attractive by paying a decent salary, giving the teachers the materials they need and the latitude to try new things, and a work load that is stressful — teaching is always stressful — but not mind-numbingly so.
It's simple. Just find potentially gifted teachers, add money and good administration, and bingo! Our education problems are solved. On paper anyway. In the real world, it's a wee bit more difficult than that.
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