January ’09: Blog Response to Most Likely to Succeed article

I think that this article has a lot of merit. Good teachers are hard to find. I also agree with the author, Malcolm Gladwell, when he suggests that once a good teacher is found, you need to pay to keep that teacher there. I was surprised at the statistics suggesting that it is better for a student to go to a bad school with excellent teachers than to a good school with bad teachers. It was also interesting to see the difference in the amount of progress that a good teacher achieves verses a bad teacher.

No one is going to spend the necessary amount of money to hire good teachers. Most people say that they value education; however, they do not spend money to support their so called belief. Lawmakers must realize the importance of education and put it in the fore front in order to make a difference in the quality of education. I agree with the author as well when he points out that capping a teacher’s salary is another way to discourage good teachers from entering the field. The field of education needs to become more competitive. This competitiveness prevents the good teachers from becoming complacent and it also encourages the mediocre teachers to step up. This whole scenario reminds me of my Build Your Own School District Project. When I had to create my own school district and money was not an option. I built a model that allowed an extensive teacher pay growth over time.

I have mixed feelings about paying teachers according to their students’ progress. On one hand the teacher is able to show what she has done over the last year. Consequently, children are risky variable. One teacher may be blessed with children who care about education and want to learn. Another teacher may not be so lucky. Is it fair to pay the teacher with the educationally inclined attitude more, because her student progressed more? The other issue with paying teachers according to student progression is the method in which student progress will be measured. I won’t dwell on that issue for the sake of time.

The last intriguing point of this article occurs in the last paragraph when the author and the football scout were discussing a bad play that the quarterback made. The author suggested that after this bad move, it was the end of his never-beginning NFL career. The scout simply stated, “In a great piece of the pie that was just a little slice.” Some teachers who enter the profession are not great their first year, but learn from their mistakes to become a good teacher. When scouting for “withitness” observers must realize that even good teachers make mistakes, but the point is that they learn from those mistakes in order to do their jobs more effectively.