The XX Factor: What women really think.

Voted Most Likely To ... Rehaul Education?

Obama gave a speech about education yesterday, and I was glad to see he tackled the issue of rewarding better teachers and weeding out bad ones. According to Politico, Obama said,

“Let me be clear: If a teacher is given a chance, or two chances, or three chances, and still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. ... I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”

This notion dovetails with Obama's pragmatism, which I've writen about, and his liking for evidence and results. And siphoning off bad teachers is one of the ways we can most quickly improve our education system. I remember when I first learned, as a teenager, that if you went to public school, you might get a "tenured" teacher. My friend J. who went to Stuyvesant was telling me about one of his, a Latin teacher who was totally checked out and would go around the room calling on students in order to translate. One day, J.'s friend wasn't in class, and this teacher ended up translating the lines for him, attributing the student's "silence" to confusion and failing to notice that he just wasn't there.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell had an excellent piece about the price of bad teaching and the upside of good teaching in The New Yorker last fall. In it, he observed that an economist at Stanford estimates that, for students, the difference between a very good teacher and a very bad teacher amounts to a year's worth of learning. Here's another key bit from his essay:

Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

No wonder Obama is stressing teaching as the key to improving our education. Of course, the trick is going to be implementing this system, not just talking about it.