It's All About the Teachers

I've been on vacation for the past, well, month, and I had a lot of interesting conversations. Aside from the very personal ones, the most engaging ones were on the topic of teachers. I had lunch with an old class-mate who is now a teacher at a high school. We talked a little bit about evaluating teachers. There isn't really a coherent point to this post, but if there was it would be that there is enormous room for improvement in the way we allocate resources to educate and invest in our next generation.

There is a lot of interesting quantitative data in how we invest in students. My class-mate and I talked about how too many smart people opt out of teaching. As the feminist movement has matured, a lot of really smart women no longer become teachers and the quality of teachers has suffered. I think the take-away is not that the feminist movement is bad, but rather we as a society don't have a great understanding of the importance of good teachers.

Another subject we talked about was the politics of teaching. If you haven't heard it, I suggest the TED speech of Bill Gates, the education portion begins at about 8 minutes. He talks, amongst other things, about how it is illegal in New York to use performance-based data to evaluate a teacher's performance. Coincidentally my old class-mate was for qualitative data like committees but against quantitative performance-based data. She claimed the quantitative data would have too much variance. I think I dissuaded her from this stance, but I do agree that quantitative data is not perfect. Any one metric can be taken advantage of. As an engineer, however, I have more faith in a well-designed system with numbers than a well-designed system with committees.

Finally, we went over the cost of education at private schools. There is a huge debate about whether private schools outperform public schools. The debate is quite contentious, especially when trying to account for socioeconomic and ethnic diversity factors. She said that public schools are critical to integrating immigrants into society. I do not have a great link to summarize this stance, as I haven't seen anything like this online - please comment and send along a link if you have one. I said that I thought public schools were wasteful due to the political pressure and lack of transparency into the teachers.

Anyways, I think the high level take-away is that evaluating teacher performance is a complex problem that has to touch politics and statistics, though a lot of information suggests there are inefficiencies. It would be interesting to attempt to evaluate schools, but creating a non-partisan report that accurately represents the facts seems to be near impossible. The only thing I know for sure is that I don't have a clue how parents choose schools for their children.