There are several things written in this piece that raise red flags for me. The most important to me is this:

“Multiple studies have shown that even a single year with an ineffective teacher can set students back for a lifetime.”

I always grow skeptical of claims like this when they fail to actually cite or link to the studies they are talking about. More often than not the studies in question are not peer reviewed, are tragically flawed in their design and/or implementation, or are funded and performed by groups who desire a particular result.

Let’s assume for a moment that teaching, like most professions, has a distribution of well qualified and not so qualified members. Let us further assume that the bottom 10% can be categorized as “ineffective” and the top 10% as “exceptional”.

In a typical students educational career they will have something on the order of 40 teachers. If we are to believe this claim that “even a single year with an ineffective teacher can set a student back for a lifetime” and the 10% number I assumed close to accurate we must conclude the following:

~1.5% of students make it through the educational system and completely avoid all the “ineffective teachers”. So I guess we are supposed to believe that ~98.5% of us have been set back for a lifetime. That kind of a number doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Let’s continue to believe her undocumented claim for a moment and try a different number. Let’s now assume that only 5% of teachers can be classified as “ineffective”. Where does a number like this get us?

Well in a situation where only 5% of teachers are “ineffective” we now find that ~13% of students manage to get through school only having acceptable teachers in their classrooms. In that case ~87% of us have been set back for a lifetime. Needless to say this also doesn’t pass the sniff test.

The author has not presented any evidence to support their claim that one “ineffectual” teacher manages to cripple a student’s education for the rest of their life. Something tells me that if a teacher manages to set back a student for life they have done something that goes way beyond being described as “ineffectual”.

We’ve all probably had some great teachers and some subpar teachers… but to claim that the subpar teacher set you back for life is to fail to take personal responsibility for your own role in becoming a well educated individual. One “ineffective” teacher simply doesn’t have that kind of influence.

There are several other problems with this article, but omitting relevant citations for studies that are supposed to back up the main thesis of what is written is pretty egregious. Good teachers expect their students to show their work, this article was written by someone who apparently doesn’t feel that proper citation is necessary when making rather extraordinary claims. If I was ever asked to grade it, I’d have to give it an F because this author is presumably a college graduate and should know better.

So, the high dropout rates of today versus the 1950s and 60s when I was taught by non-union teachers is coincidence, or totally due to societal influences outside of the teacher's control. I'm not convinced. Furthermore, I don't see why we should pay professional wages to anyone who is not accountable for outcomes.

I'll buy the set back for life if it is understood to mean that students could have achieved more if they had actually been effectively taught. I've experienced it in our generally decent school district, where my daughter got good grades and didn't learn much in first grade. It was a struggle to catch up, but she is well above average intelligence. I'm sure others were harmed more.

There are incompetent teachers who are protected by unions and tenure. I don't think it is as high as ten percent. But go ahead and quibble over lack of proper citations in a newspaper article. It's for the kids.

Agree, Orion, but wanted to use the piece anyway, because I think teachers should have to meet standards beyond hanging around for a long time.

Mark D Says:

"So, the high dropout rates of today versus the 1950s and 60s when I was taught by non-union teachers is coincidence, or totally due to societal influences outside of the teacher's control. I'm not convinced. Furthermore, I don't see why we should pay professional wages to anyone who is not accountable for outcomes."

This might make for an interesting argument if it were true. Unfortunately the data that I can find suggests that more students than ever are graduating from high school:

http://www.supportingevidence.com/Education/H_S_Grad_Rates.html

In fact, according to this chart, in the 1950's about 40% of white students graduated while about 15% of black students graduated.

Contrast that with the present day where over 80% of both demographic groups graduate from high school and your argument more or less falls apart.

Does this mean by your argument that teachers today should be paid between twice as much and five times as much inflation adjusted income as the "non-union teachers" from the 1950's? Because that would be consistent with your argument that wages should track outcomes.

Would you please provide the source you used to conclude that dropout rates have gone up since the 1950's?

The difference between the 50's and 60's compared to today is that we had to actually pass the grade or we repeated the year. There was none of this passing the kid to keep him/her with the peer group. First year Uni was really University, not remedial reading and math.

I can see one bad teacher causing a lot of problems if this was a grade one, two, or three where you have one teacher for the whole day. If you are passed into the next grade way behind in basic reading and arithmetic, you could have a very hard time catching up.

Steamer,

To be quite honest I had already anticipated that this was where the conversation was going to go. It is a classic example of shifting the goal posts.

First the unsubstantiated claim is made that more students than ever are dropping out of school because the educational environment is so poor.

Then when it is pointed out with evidence that in reality there are more students graduating than ever the equally unsubstantiated argument is suddenly made that while more may be graduating, it's only because standards have dropped and there is too much social promotion.

There are several flaws with this argument as well. Firstly, you have also neglected to presented evidence to back up your case, which is a disturbing trend I have noticed amongst people who argue about problems within the educational system.

If the individuals criticizing education were even remotely interested in fixing the problems it would behoove them to do a little research first and get their facts straight. That is what well educated people would do after all right?

I've actually done a substantial amount of reading on the subject and while there are definitely problems to be resolved they tend not to be even remotely related to the problems that most people pluck out of thin air.

For example, you might be interested to know that teachers are not primarily responsible for the following problem:

“The difference between the 50's and 60's compared to today is that we had to actually pass the grade or we repeated the year.”

When students need to be held back it usually isn’t the teachers or the school administration who ends up resisting that process. It is instead parents who tend to adamantly refuse to let their child be left back a year. Similarly, parents of children with special needs also tend to refuse to have their child pulled out from the general population and placed within classes that can better address their particular issues and provide more attention.

Parents of children who need to be left back tend to be in denial of the problems their children are facing and instead blame the school or the teacher.

No matter how you slice it though, the current generation is on average more well educated than the generation that went through school in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I know people from that time don’t want to hear it because it doesn’t fulfill their confirmation bias, but nostalgia doesn’t change the facts.

There is a reason why parents in their 60’s and 70’s often don’t have a clue what to do with modern technology and defer to their children and grandkids for even the simplest of technological tasks. This doesn’t happen because they are brilliant and their children are a bunch of incompetent and uneducated fools. It happens because their children have learned an entire set of skills that are unfamiliar to many people from that generation.

The skill sets that people from that generation complain about young people no longer having tend to be antiquated and unnecessary in the modern age. Students no longer learn how to use a slide rule for example, but that’s because they learn to use symbol manipulating calculators instead.

Just as a point of reference. It was Bill O’Reilly who claimed on national television that we didn’t understand the fundamental mechanism behind the tides. This is the same guy who goes around calling everyone a pin head and he didn’t even have the slightest clue about something that I clearly remember learning in elementary school. So either that kind of information wasn’t covered for that generation, which implies that the younger generation may have had a more comprehensive education… or people from that generation aren’t quite as intelligent as they think they are.

For your own edification I highly recommend that you take a modern standardized test like the SAT and see how you perform. If people educated in the 1950's and 60's are even half as smart as most of them think they are they should be able to pass any of them with flying colors. It might be an eye opener if you end up scoring in the average range.

There are things to bear in mind here:

1. That in the 50's & 60's you could still drop out, get a job, and have a good future. So someone dropping out then was not necessarily going to ruin themselves. Today, if someone is dropping out, it probably isn't to go and do a job.

2. Are students today "better educated"? I have my doubts. Grades would do for a fine measure except that it was our teachers who gave me and other children my age at the time "An A for effort". Literally, I didn't have to actually master the material to get a good grade. Did this happen in the 50s?

3. That parents and grandparents come to their kids about technology does not reflect an improved education, it reflects a more technologically enhanced upbringing. My son had learned how to use the dvd player by the time he was 3. My 5 year old daughter can use an iPad, her college educated mother who speaks 5 languages and can read in 6...is confused as can be over a tool that is a toy to a child.

4. More people go to college...but are they learning anything useful?

Of course, all of those things deserve mention, but here is the bottom line:

Teachers unions are protecting teachers at the expense of the right of students to get the best education possible. Bad teachers stay employed because they held on long enough, and good teachers get cycled out just because they're new to the system. This system cannot benefit students or tax payers, and it only encourages the incompetent to remain in position and fuck up year after year after year of new students. They don't just give a bad education to grade 6 of the class of 2010, they're repeating that shit performance in 2011, 2012, 2013, etc.

The school systems now exist to protect the interests of those who work within it, not those whom it is supposed to SERVE.

Interesting comments, folks. Thank you.

Robert,

Thank you for numbering your points, I’ll try to follow your organization.

1 – That in the past someone could drop out of high school and still get a job and have a reasonable future is true. However, this does not reflect changes in educational standards or educational attainment so much as it reflects a culture where employers and society at large have fully embraced an arms race of credentials and qualifications. I personally work in a job that now only even bothers to interview you if you have earned a PhD. When I was brought on, my manager specifically told me that the last time he remembered them even interviewing someone with a bachelor degree was over 15 years ago. This isn’t because the candidates suddenly got less intelligent, but instead because industry is more than happy to let academia sift through candidates on their behalf and then only look at those candidates who go through an increasingly rigorous training period. I’d have been thrilled to get a job like this fresh out of undergrad, just like people could have done 20-25 years ago… but they won’t even look at your resume unless you’ve jumped through more educational hoops than all of your peers. This is indeed a problem, but it isn’t one caused by teachers at the high school and elementary school level. It is an across the board problem and has been instituted by the very same generation than now assures us all how much better educated they apparently are even though they have far fewer years of education than the current generation. I call BS. If my generation is so poorly educated take a wild guess which generation raised and educated us. My suspicion is that the previous generation, in an attempt to guard their own advancement, placed many more hoops in the way of those younger than them… and yet even after we jump through all of those hoops they still insist that they have been better educated. To begin with, I don’t believe for one second that any of that is true, and if they actually do believe it is true, why don’t I ever hear anything from them about how as a generation they have failed to pass on the qualities that were passed to them by the previous generation?... It’s not their fault of course… my generation might be better educated on paper and across all the metrics we have available… but gosh darn it, we are less intelligent because they say so, but it’s not their fault even though they were our parents. It’s the teachers they say (who incidentally also came from their generation). All of this is of course asserted without a shred of corroborating evidence to back up any of it. But who needs evidence when you are 50+ years old and have a hunch?

2 – I don’t know what school system you went through, but I was never given “An A for effort”. I had to battle it out with hundreds of other students for the honor of being able to graduate in the top 10% (a competition mind you where an unweighted average of 100% didn’t even getting you close). To even get into that top 10% you had to take advanced placement classes for potential college credit and then take standardized exams that were put together and graded by university professors. If you did well in those courses, the additional 5 point weighting to your average could put you in contention for getting into the top 10% if you managed to also maintain your performance across every discipline above the 98% level such that your final adjusted average was in the area of 103%. If you only took “regular” classes you were essentially shit out of luck because apparently you weren’t working hard enough. However, let’s not pretend that grades alone would get you into a good college. You also had to be the editor of the school newspaper, the president of the student council, volunteer at the local hospital or animal shelter, or do like I did and perform research at the university level in your spare time. However, even that doesn’t make you well rounded enough, you also needed extracurricular activities that include things like a musical instrument or a varsity sport. How on earth is any of that being given “An A for effort”? Students now are expected to do more than ever before in order to compete, far more than was expected of them 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Yet somehow 50 years ago they were better educated?... again, I call BS. The annoying part though is that even when you do all of this and then go through university and beyond we constantly have to hear from those who came before us (those who put all the flaming hoops in place for us to jump through) how much better their own education was. I’ve got news for you… if it was so much better then with so much less to do, then I would have loved it if they would have stopped wasting my time with all that extra stuff that apparently didn't mean anything. In what sense were you given “An A for effort”, because I honestly don’t know what you are talking about and am finding it difficult to believe. When you took high school physics did your teacher pat you on the head and give you an A after you scribbled on the table instead of solving the problems? Where I went to school that would have gotten you a big fat zero, effort didn’t count, performance counted and we all knew that. I'm honestly dubious that many of the people who complain the most vocally about the current state of education could actually hack it with the current expectations.

3 – On this point you almost seem to get it, but I think your children are still just a little too young for you to see the full impact of the educational system on their development when it comes to interfacing with an increasingly technological world. What I can tell you is that the ability of younger people to handle technology isn’t simply born into them and it isn’t simply absorbed from the surrounding environment either. That your 5 year old can proficiently use an iPad is great, but there is nothing inherently challenging about moving your finger on a screen to fling a bird at a construct filled with pigs. That your highly educated wife is totally befuddled by this device, which is specifically designed to be user friendly, should tell you something very important. It should tell you that there is a set of skills she lacks that even a 5 year old can easily develop. That being said, there are probably several skills the 5 year old version of your wife had that your daughter doesn’t have. The skills relevant to your generation and the skills relevant to your daughters generation do not completely overlap. That being said, the advanced functions of your iPad are not things that I suspect your 5 year old can do. Don’t be surprised down the line if she learns in school how to design her own app. When I was in elementary school we learned very rudimentary computer programming skills by using things like logo writer and basic. These are skills that couldn’t have come from my parents because we didn’t even own a computer until I insisted we get one because we kept using them at school. My parents still couldn’t examine a simple computer program and ascertain what was going on or if the syntax was correct, but they are both highly educated and highly intelligent individuals. There are skills they have that I don’t have also, for example my father pretty much has entire client lists devoted to memory, if I were in his shoes I’d have set up a huge spread sheet instead and organized things by creating nested hierarchies of file folders. He developed a skill set that was well adapted to his career environment and it has worked well for him, I’ve developed a skill set that is well adapted to my career environment and it was worked well for me. That those skills sets are different from one generation to the next should not surprise anyone given the pace of technological advancement. However it is stupid to believe that learning how to do all of these things is somehow absorbed out of the ether, it isn’t… students are introduced to these things in school. I’m sure that parents would be happy to introduce them to new technologies, but as you admitted… your highly educated wife can’t even use an iPad effectively, how is she ever going to teach your daughter how to program and design a web page, or how to link multimedia into a power point presentation which is probably how she will be required to give presentations in school? I think you will be very impressed with what your children end up learning over the next 15 years.

4 – Some learn things that are “useful” in college and some do not. How is this relevant to a discussion about high school and elementary school teachers? If your daughters grow up and decide to major in under water basket weaving when they go to university are you intending to hold their 2nd grade teacher accountable? At what point are they responsible for making a stupid decision, and at what point are you responsible for failing to teach them fundamental things like choosing a career path with the potential to make them self sufficient in life?

“Teachers unions are protecting teachers at the expense of the right of students to get the best education possible.”

You are missing a critically important point here and it is a point that seems to be overlooked by just about everyone. Teaching isn’t simply a career like being a journalist, an engineer, or a scientist. Teaching is actually better equated with being a lawyer or a doctor. Now before you start to argue against my point, let me explain the critically important parallels.

If a journalist gets fired by their boss they are free to apply for a job at a different news outlet. If an engineer loses their job they are free to apply for a job at another company. If a scientist loses their job they aren’t stripped if their PhD and are free to seek employment at another laboratory. People in these professions don’t lose the legal certification to perform what they have been trained to do when they have been fired, even if a prior employer deems them to be incompetent.

Doctors, lawyers, and teachers by contrast are certified by the government to perform their role. If you want to disbar a lawyer you must go through an administrative hearing. If you want to take away a doctor’s medical license you need to prove in front of the medical board that they have committed an act of gross negligence.

We acknowledge as a society that when you are taking away a professionals government certification to perform a particular job, the bar is set MUCH higher than when someone is simply fired.

I don’t know what you do for a living, but wouldn’t you expect a higher bar to be set for termination if losing your job meant you could never work in the field again? You might as well flush your own education down the toilet at that point because something you’ve trained your entire life to do you are no longer permitted to do by the state.

It is actually worse for teachers in that sense than for doctors and lawyers, because if a lawyer or doctor is let go from an individual firm, private practice, or a specific hospital, they are still free to perform the functions they were trained to. Only in the event of gross negligence or an act of proven wrongdoing are they stripped of their credentials.

When a teacher loses their job within a public school system because an administrator fires them (i.e. it isn’t simply a budget issue) also lose their teaching license. Getting fired means that they lose their ability to go down the street and apply at a different school. If you get fired from one school, you’ve been fired from all of them.

As a result the standard for firing a teacher is substantially higher than for many other professions. All tenure does is it guarantees due process before someone is completely stripped of their ability to continue with their profession. It is born out of the same philosophy which tells us that it is wrong to strip a doctor of their medical license just because the hospital administrators decide to let them go. If you want to strip them of their medical license the bar is set MUCH higher and you've got to prove your case.

So many people seem obsessed with talking about how horrible it is that school administrators can’t simply fire whoever they want, yet they continually neglect the associated problem that just because an administrator wants to fire a teacher doesn’t necessarily mean they are unqualified to teach in the school down the block. Sometimes administrators want to fire someone due to personality conflicts or due to differences in teaching style and not because the teacher in question is guilty of gross negligence.

This is why unions protect teachers… it’s because the stakes of being fired are significantly higher than in most other professions.