Bloomberg’s comments that he wishes he could “cut the number of teachers in half…weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers” opened him up to considerable criticism. While I usually like joining in this phenomenon, the notion that larger classes with quality teachers are better than smaller classes with poor teachers (assuming these really are the only options dictated by our situation) makes sense to me. It’s the difference between trying to make something that works less efficient versus trying to make something broken effective. In the end, quality, once again, defeats quantity.
The question then becomes, how do we determine quality? One of Bloomberg’s main methods is to measure how much a teacher raises student’s scores. That way, the city can add a value to performance in determining which teacher’s stay and which go. Problem solved, right? Probably not. A few issues have been raised with this system. For one, some teacher’s may just have better students than others (who will then outperform their peers). A more serious problem is that this almost certainly causes teachers to “teach the test” rather than properly teach the concepts, which has been shown to have negative results down the line (Chetty and Friedman, 2011).
This highlights an issue we have with our overall approach to education. Teachers are supposed to impart more than a fleeting memory of a bunch equations, never to be used again. A GOOD teacher is one who fundamentally changes something about the way a student thinks. A teacher who is passionate about a subject, and can convey that passion to his/her students, will always be more effective than an instructor who follows a process for the sake of progress. At the end of the day, getting students excited about a topic is what will get them to learn it. I don’t have an easy fix to this, but it may be a worthwhile exploration.
