Matt Posner's Blog: You've Been Schooled - Posts Tagged "teachers"

These ideas about education need to be in the public discourse.

Here they are, from me.

The primary responsibility for a child's education lies with the parent's ability to make the child care about education. A motivated child will prosper even with a below-average teacher. Children don't do well in school these days mainly because they don't value school but see it as an obstacle to their pleasure in life.

While there are some poorly-performing teachers, they are a very small minority, probably a smaller number than the number of poorly-performing people in the general workforce.

Economics are an undeniable factor in school performance. To make kids better at school, improve the economy. Improve the nationwide standard of living; get people out of poverty. When parents are home at night and kids have food and clothes and don't have to get jobs, school performance will improve.

It is not necessary for education to be standardized, with every child being taught the same way. Every child should have a variety of teachers with different approaches and personalities, which is reflective of the variable and even chaotic experience the child will have out of school. As long as every teacher has skills and is not a bumbling incompetent, it should work out on the average.

Independent thinking and reasoning skills are necessary, but kids who care about their education will develop them by osmosis not only by seeing teachers demonstrate them, but by seeing THEIR PARENTS demonstrate them.

Children don't learn in terms of discrete packets, but in wildly varied ways. A child may not grasp something until years after it is taught, or may get it only after failing a test. Some children can't test well. Using testing as the dominant determination of student learning is an abomination for students. Using it to measure teachers' job performance is a cynical gimmick.

The standard classroom arrangement, with desks in rows and the teacher delivering content or giving silent work, is preferred by most students and works better. When assigned to learn on their own in groups, most students shut down or goof off. There are classrooms with kids who do better in that scenario and are lively, but they are unusual. You can't expect such peak classroom performances to become the norm.

The goal of educating students should not be to prepare them for corporate and office jobs. Not everyone belongs in that sort of job. In the present system, we are trying to train them to do analytical reasoning at a complex level, but not teaching them practical skills like cooking, typing, or balancing a checkbook.

It should not be necessary to go to college in order to get ready for a job. College is for people who are good at more complex learning tasks. People who aren't at ease performing such tasks should receive another sort of career professional training. Somewhere down the line, politicians or the media have confused two ideas. One, the correct one, is that college should be open to everyone, meaning that it shouldn't be closed to lower classes, minorities, or women. The other, the incorrect one, is that because college graduates make more money, everyone must be a college graduate. That isn't necessary! All you need is to have training schools for jobs that also make more money. The liberal arts curriculum is a waste of time for people whose personalities aren't suited to absorbing it. In present conditions, colleges are turning out large numbers of unemployable graduates. The job market can't accommodate a situation in which all Americans have college degrees and expect office jobs. That's ridiculous.

Teachers should have secure jobs because when their jobs are threatened, they don't perform well. Teachers should have secure jobs because they undergo large amounts of training and preparation for a moderate- to low-paying profession and are subject to the vagaries of chance in terms of the classroom. Teachers should have secure jobs because on the whole, excepting a few villains, they care about children and do extra to care for them. It's a profession that serves society and that has the potential for inherent nobility.

Detailed lesson plans are just paperwork. Some teachers need more detail than others, depending upon how their minds work. It also varies from lesson to lesson, day to day, class to class. The focus on lesson plans and unit plans and other such stuff is really about accountability, which is a corporate concept. It doesn't make sense in education.