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Heroes are not Replicable
You know the plot. Young, idealistic teacher goes to inner-city high school. Said idealistic teacher is shocked by students who don't know the basics and who are too preoccupied with the burdens of violence, poverty and indifference to want to learn. But the hero perseveres and at great personal sacrifice wins over the students using innovative teaching methods and heart. The kids go on to win the state spelling/chess/mathematics championship. c.f. Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds etc.
We are supposed to be uplifted by these stories but they depress me. If it takes a hero to save an inner city school then there is no hope. Heroes are not replicable.
What we need to save inner-city schools, and poor schools everywhere, is a method that works when the teachers aren't heroes. Even better if the method works when teachers are ordinary people, poorly paid and ill-motivated - i.e. the system we have today.
In Super Crunchers, Ian Ayres argues that just such a method exists. Overall, Super Crunchers is a light but entertaining account of how large amounts of data and cheap computing power are improving forecasting and decision making in social science, government and business. I enjoyed the book. Chapter 7, however, was a real highlight.
Ayres argues that large experimental studies have shown that the teaching method which works best is Direct Instruction (here and here are two non-academic discussions which summarizes much of the same academic evidence discussed in Ayres). In Direct Instruction the teacher follows a script, a carefully designed and evaluated script. As Ayres notes this is key:
DI is scalable. Its success isn't contingent on the personality of some uber-teacher....You don't need to be a genius to be an effective DI teacher. DI can be implemented in dozens upon dozens of classrooms with just ordinary teachers. You just need to be able to follow the script.
Contrary to what you might think, the data also show that DI does not impede creativity or self-esteem. The education establishment, however, hates DI because it is a threat to the power and prestige of teaching, they prefer the model of teacher as hero. As Ayres says "The education establishment is wedded to its pet theories regardless of what the evidence says." As a result they have fought it tooth and nail so that "Direct Instruction, the oldest and most validated program, has captured only a little more than 1 percent of the grade-school market."
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on September 27, 2007 at 08:20 AM in Data Source, Economics, Education, Film | Permalink
Comments
This reminds me of Robin Hansen's "drinking your own kool-aid" post. What teaching approach empirically works best to teach economics at the university level? How much of the university economics instruction market has it captured?
It's not an idle question because it seems possible to me that better university instruction on economics fundamentals might have a stronger positive impact on our well-being than better high school instruction on the high school curriculum.
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous at Sep 27, 2007 8:39:43 AM
I suspect that many, many job outcomes could be improved by following a script. I bet that for most people and not just teachers, having a set script to follow would improve their performance. I know I set myself a schedule every day, to get things done, and rehearse/script what I need to say if I suspect I am going to need to say it dozens of times in the next months about particular aspects of my job.
Also, for this particular case, who wrote the script? I haven't read the book.
Posted by: mickslam at Sep 27, 2007 8:42:18 AM
Isn't this much the way the Japanese and other Asian education systems work?
Posted by: spencer at Sep 27, 2007 8:52:10 AM
DI might be effective, but it sounds inhumanely boring.
Posted by: Nate at Sep 27, 2007 8:58:31 AM
When Meryl Streep shows up to make a movie, they hand her a script. But when a new teacher shows up to teach her first class, in many school districts they ask her to invent her own lesson plan. What gives?
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Sep 27, 2007 9:20:11 AM
When Meryl Streep shows up to make a movie, they hand her a script. But when a new teacher shows up to teach her first class, in many school districts they ask her to invent her own lesson plan. What gives?
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Sep 27, 2007 9:20:41 AM
My husband pointed me here on the theory that, as I'm a teacher, I usually have long ranty comments whenever this blog touches on education. But, uh, I pretty much agree with you here.
As it happens I really hate the genre of book/movie that says "We could save education if all teachers were insanely inspired people perfectly happy to spend 80+ hours a week on a job with no cultural or institutional support, no time for friends or family (which conveniently they are too young to have), buying their own supplies out of a stupidly meager salary!" Because, yeah, that'll work.
Posted by: Andromeda at Sep 27, 2007 9:29:02 AM
Oh, and -- mathematicallycorrect is fun for cranky contrarians like me to read, but it's not where I would be looking for a linky, as the math wars are SO politicized and that's, so far as I know, the major site staking out that side. All kinds of bias issues. There's some fun stuff at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ , but I don't really know who these people are.
Posted by: Andromeda at Sep 27, 2007 9:33:19 AM
My dad worked with one of those heroes (modeled in a movie). He was a great teacher, but my dad couldn't get him to do lunch-time supervision ('not my job'). It was hard on the school because if teachers wouldn't do it, they had to budget temps for just lunch hour.
(I tell you that just because it is one of the things that makes me think life's funny.)
Posted by: odograph at Sep 27, 2007 9:43:08 AM
So why not develop exactly 13 curricula? Every day, a technician at a national broadcast center turns on all 13 programs. At 7:00 a.m., all students, K-12, sit down in front of their televisions and watch the scripted instruction. This could take place in a classroom or at home.
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric used by the powers that be in education, but it nicely frames a discussion of DI.
Posted by: lardlad at Sep 27, 2007 9:44:02 AM
I have taught as a supply teacher in schools in Finland. We often get the highest PISA scores and yes, we basically teach from a script. That is to say that there are set materials and lesson plans and we generally stick to them. That said, there is significant freedom too for those who want it - which are usually highly motivated and experienced teachers.
This said, there is much to improve here. The system works well for the majority but it is still sad to me that the gifted, imparticular, are not well supported.
Posted by: Finnsense at Sep 27, 2007 9:47:04 AM
DI may well not be replicable either. It might work very well as a research project, but once the state controls the content of instruction down to this level you know that the PC crowd will go to work on prescribing the content, stuffing it with elements that have nothing to do with imparting skills.
There is no clever way around the teachers' unions. It's a thumbsucking illusion to think that there is. Either we continue to concede control over education to them or we break them.
Posted by: ZF at Sep 27, 2007 9:48:37 AM
Why should there only be one method of teaching? Maybe a DI works well on average but a good/well trained teacher should be able to see when it's not working and adapt. I would like to see a breakdown of the data seeing which methods are good for teaching which subjects and pupils.
Posted by: Phil at Sep 27, 2007 9:52:21 AM
Isn't DI what the military has used during and since WWII for their instruction?
Posted by: Al Abbott at Sep 27, 2007 9:52:37 AM
Isn't there a dynamic effect question here? Knowing that they'd have to use DI, might we find fewer and fewer teachers?
Posted by: Joel W at Sep 27, 2007 10:01:14 AM
And as ZF says the question of what to teach children is a highly politicised one. So the restritive and prescriptive nature of DI could be negative if the content is chosen badly.
Posted by: Phil at Sep 27, 2007 10:04:06 AM
Joel, with DI maybe you could have bigger classes, and teachers would need less training, if that doesn't work then increase wages.
Posted by: Phil at Sep 27, 2007 10:06:23 AM
This is basically the argument that Atul Gawande makes about Cesarean sections in the relevant chapter of Better ("The Score.") Obstetricians used to have all sorts of clever and fancy forceps techniques for delivering babies in various difficult positions. But those techniques required a lot of reading to learn; even more practice to master; and a natural level of spatial intuition, coordination, and judgment that not every doctor had. Shifting to routine C-sections may have sacrificed the ability of truly outstanding obstetricians to deliver even misaligned babies without surgery, but it gave average obstetricians a single standard script they could follow to make most deliveries a matter of routine.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann at Sep 27, 2007 10:10:02 AM
I keep thinking that there's a market opportunity.
Posted by: Brent Buckner at Sep 27, 2007 10:20:12 AM
Actually the complaint that i hear from teachers is that their teaching is TOO scripted. They say that they have no freedom to teach the way that they would like. Perhaps the problem is that the same script doesn't work with every child. For example some children don't do well, just because of the (imho) crazy demand that little kids sit quietly in desks for hours at a time.
Anyhow, what I don't understand is that Libertarians point out that part of the problem is "teachers are ... poorly paid and ill-motivated" and yet complain when someone suggests raising their pay (or if heaven forbid their union does).
Let us postulate that highly motivated teachers would be better. If you support higher pay for ceos how come you don't support higher pay for teachers?
Of course this would have to to be higher starting pay, not higher pay for slogging it out to senility.
I personally think that we would have much better schools if the starting pay was 75k. I don't think people realize how much teacher quality has declined since we gave women a choice for employment outside of teacher/nurse/wife.
Posted by: RobbL at Sep 27, 2007 10:23:25 AM
"I personally think that we would have much better schools if the starting pay was 75k. I don't think people realize how much teacher quality has declined since we gave women a choice for employment outside of teacher/nurse/wife."
That was also one of my dad's opinions, after 35 years in public schools.
Posted by: odograph at Sep 27, 2007 10:37:53 AM
What if school performance doesn't matter? That of the factors that predict individual success, school quality is somewhere around foot size? If you want to raise school quality, raise the quality of the immigrant.
Posted by: bjk at Sep 27, 2007 10:43:01 AM
Measured on an hourly basis and considering their excellent retirement benefits most teachers are not underpaid. Oh and both of my parents were educators.
Posted by: a guy at Sep 27, 2007 10:52:54 AM
The most sensible thing in the world is for a 1099 consultant to marry a school teacher, then they can both enjoy cash flow, health insurance, and guaranteed retirement benefits.
... should I mention that I'm 1099? ;-)
Posted by: odograph at Sep 27, 2007 11:02:45 AM
RobbL, I can't channel libertarians perfectly, since I'm not one, but I think there are plenty of libertarians that would be all in favor of greatly increasing teacher salary as long as you couple that with the ability to freely hire and fire teachers, and set their salary on the basis of performance. (And the "real" libertarians might get the state out of the education business altogether...)
Posted by: Alex R at Sep 27, 2007 11:06:27 AM
