Education's Essential Truths (Part II) - Judging Teachers and Assessing College

“Begin with the end in mind.” That’s great advice. Know why you’re doing something – the problem you’re solving – before expending valuable time and energy attempting to solve it.

So what problem does education solve? What’s the point? Well, we dedicate multiple decades of time and large portions of our personal fortunes in the hopes that our children will contribute to and not detract from society. That’s it. We want our kids to grow up and contribute, because the more people contribute, the more successful society becomes. What our children ultimately contribute or withdraw will determine the fate of American society.

Over the next decade, the U.S. workforce will need 22 million college graduates – about three million more than U.S. colleges will produce. This shortfall comes as two out of every five college students fail to complete their bachelor’s degree programs within six years of starting them, and while one out of every four high school students drops out of high school, expecting to earn $130,000 less over his or her lifetime than the three peers who finish high school, and to cost the U.S. government (literally “us”) more than $200,000 in lost tax revenues and increased support payments.

So what can we can do?  Part One of this essay made two points: 

(1) Mothers Matter Most. Involved, educated mothers matter more than teacher quality, school quality, more than socio-economic status, you name it – mothers matter most. 

(2) We already know the Answer. Learning only happens after we expend some effort. Learning is a “menace” we must work through – not around. But if we apply the right approaches, our kids will feel the addictive sensation of learning often enough to want to keep going.

Part Two: What else can we do?

(3) We need a Fair System to Reward Great Teachers. Teachers impact outcomes about as much as parents and students do, but teachers are the part of the “Education Triad” that policy-makers can influence most; so we often ask ourselves what can be done to make them better.  Our challenge lies in first identifying our best teachers, and then properly recognizing and rewarding them so they’ll want to keep working their “magic” on our kids and improving the effectiveness of their colleagues.

So far, the most popular metric for teacher performance is measuring how much a teacher’s students improve their test scores over the course of a year. But the “quality” of parents and students that a teacher is presented with can vary widely from year to year and this variability can confound our ability to accurately gauge one particular teacher’s performance over the course of one particular year. A great teacher, for example, may draw a group of parents and students with an extraordinary amount of distracting “issues” – drug addiction, domestic violence, etc. – that cause her students to improve less than ones belonging to less-talented colleagues, even though she did a better job teaching that year...

Over time, however, class quality evens itself out and a track record of comparative test score improvements – 10 years or more – becomes an increasingly accurate measure of teacher quality.  So we should use historical average test score improvement metrics to promote veteran teachers to the “rank” of Senior Teacher or Principal, reward them handsomely — a salary worth 10 years of extraordinary effort to obtain — and then make them responsible for evaluating our  “junior” teachers, coaching the ones that can be helped, and equitably removing the incompetent ones that cannot.

(4) We must select Colleges and Majors based upon Sound Business Plans. While name brand colleges tend to help students get higher paying jobs right off the bat, that “success gap” gradually disappears as people ultimately rise or fall to levels of success (or failure) that match the totality of their talents. So as long as a student is continually challenged, i.e. doesn’t (easily) score straight A’s, any college is fine – don’t believe the hype and overpay for some “name brand.” 

The college one chooses – or the decision to forego college altogether – must be a logical component of an overarching business plan. University of Maryland Economist Peter Morici puts it this way: “Total college costs have actually leaped above the total extra income that most graduates will earn over their working lifetimes.  Many diplomas do not offer a positive return on investment, as measured by graduates' ability to service their debt.  What students do in college really matters. A worker with a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering earns about $120,000 while a degree in counseling psychology fetches just $29,000. Even business degrees differ dramatically in value — finance, accounting and supply chain majors are worth a lot more than general business and human resources management graduates.”

Does this mean everyone should study engineering?  No, but by the same token, any money spent on a math tutor is money very well spent – very well spent, indeed.

Part III – April 2nd.  In part III, we’ll wrap this subject up by examining charter schools, vouchers, and the hot controversy over pre-school, including a look at America’s $7+ billion Head Start program.