Summary: A good guy to know strives to find common ground on controversial issues. I recently read in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, it’s usually not worth it to fight someone on something they aren’t going to change their mind on. If you really want to win someone over to your ideology, you need to start from a place you can both agree on. So when I decided to do a podcast on the problems with American education, I wanted to try to find some facet of the discussion where there could be some common ground. Education has always been a controversial issue, but in the last several years, with the decline of American students’ performance relative to other nations, and more recently, with all of the excitement in Wisconsin, people are looking for answers on how we can make our system better. So I came across this McKinsey study that focuses on one central question; “Who are we, as a society, attracting to the teaching profession?” Which begs the next question, “What does this mean for the students?” The study systematically compares this to who other countries are attracting to the teaching profession, as well as whom we attracted to the teaching profession 40 years ago. Disclaimer: I have many people very close to me that are teachers and I am pretty sure they are all awesome at it. This post/podcast is meant to summarize McKinsey study and get people talking about one possible way we could improve education. As with any study, there are always many individual exceptions to the trends, (but it’s still valuable to think about the trends) Before I dive into the McKinsey study, we need to make 3 assumptions; Great teachers get results no matter what. Many studies since the 1970’s have shown that the greatest predictor of student success is the quality of their teacher. There is an awesome American Radio Works documentary where one guy says something like, “A great teacher could teach in a cave and still get great results.” Other things are important; family support, poverty, class size, resources, etc. But these pale in comparison to teacher quality. “Success” is hard to measure, but for the purpose of this study, the only real way to measure student “success” is by looking at test scores. Unfortunately, it’s the best way we have to quantify how much students achieve. There is so much more learning and growth happening that doesn’t show up on test scores, but we aren’t going to be able to have any sort of meaningful discussion if we don’t have some sort of indicator of how effective a teacher is. Student test scores become more valuable when they are used comparatively, i.e. compare a student’s score at the beginning of the year, compared to the end of the year and see how much they learned. Not a perfect measure of success, but it’s what we have. Finally, we need to assume that test scores (think ACT/SAT) of graduating college seniors mean something, too. Yes, yes, I know some people are bad test takers, and there are really smart people that do poorly on these standardized tests. But at some level, high performance on these tests indicates higher achievement in whatever profession that graduate chooses. Again, I’m sure there are a million exceptions to the rule, but overall, high test scores tend to point to higher aptitude indivuals, who tend to exhibit higher performance in the real world, no matter what profession. So by now you can probably guess where this is going, remember, we are trying to answer the question “Who are we attracting to teaching, and what does this mean for students?” So McKinsey focused on students in the top third of their graduating classes. (Sample size was 900 “top-third” students and 525 current teachers that came from the top-third) They found that of today’s graduating college seniors planning to become teachers, 23% come from the top third of their graduating class (by SAT scores). I went one step further and found data on the average SAT scores for inte[...]
