Further Response to Peter Morgan’s Post 'Quality Education'

When Peter stated “Researchers suggest that teacher quality may account for up to 20 percent of student performance.”  I was thoroughly confused.  I have no idea what this means.  When I research high performing schools such concepts are never mentioned.  Successful educators and those who study them usually credit their success on several factors working together.  And they often state that these factors are not specific to education. 

For instance Teach for America has found (Farr: Teaching as Leadership) that the teachers whose students learn the most are those who have a passion for achievement, a history of achievement and inculcate that drive in their students.  David C. McClelland wrote about studies on this in 1946.  Developing a need for achievement and having a record of achievement are significant indicators for successful lives in general.  Researchers have long known that successful people in many vocations have a habit of mastery and are achievement oriented.  Education is no different.  But education per se is process oriented not achievement oriented.  Look at teacher qualifications.  You can be qualified to teach kids and not be able to teach a frog to jump by lighting a fire under him. 

Similarly people like Doug McCurry of Achievement First have set up a system of accountability called Athena.  All other highly successful schools of which I am aware do something similar.  As Arne Duncan said “Data does not tell us the whole truth, but it certainly does not lie.”  Testing is in fact one of the only two teaching strategies that the US Dept. of Education found strong evidence that they are effective. 

I once had a shrinkage problem with inventory in a business I ran.  Small things disappeared.  I started to keep an inventory and a log of usage.  Shrinkage stopped and some stuff that was missing suddenly showed up.  Accountability works.  I never accused anyone of anything.  I never had any idea where the missing stuff went. Holding people accountable worked like a charm.  Most leaders of first-rate schools have similar stories in education.  Ben Chavis in  “Crazy Like a Fox” has some great examples.  By the way schools he founded are listed as number one and three among California Jr. Highs and his High School is ranked 32^nd in the country.  The truant officers for these three schools are the local drug pushers because police do not patrol except in force the neighborhoods where his students live.

The third characteristic of high performing schools that is common outside of education is high expectations.  In the book “First Break all the Rules” the most successful managers set high expectation of their people.  The better the employee, the more the manager expects from them.  High performing schools work the same way.  One of the most amazing things to me is that when you see multiple comparisons of schools, high performing schools are near the top on many categories.  In California, many of the top schools academically are among the most fit.  By the way this is the second of the two teaching strategies that the US Dept. of Education found to have strong evidence of being an effective teaching strategy.

Often I hear educators deride competition as being beneath them.  They have a weird idea that competition is the opposite of cooperation.  But when Game Theory is applied to business strategies as well as to everyday life, this proves to be nonsense.  In fact my daughter in graduate schools took a graduate course in this very subject.  The best strategy is most often the combination of competition and cooperation.  High performing educators use competition and cooperation simultaneously in their schools.  They have winners and losers.  But better and older students help younger and weaker students.  In some cases they are paid.  The tutors and the students complete to see who improves the most and who can catch up the fastest.  But at the same time the students are cooperating.  Again, Game Theory applied to business decisions produces similar results.

Peter states, “[T]here are a lot of other characteristics, like parent involvement, environment, proper facilities, and good curriculum that contribute to the other 80 percent of education quality.”  To me this is an excuse.  High performing schools are often termed "No Excuses Schools."  Parental involvement is only marginally under control of the schools.  Environment is code among some educators such as Diane Ravitch for saying that the schools cannot succeed unless we develop a cradle to the grave nanny state, a kind of socialist utopia.  Some curricula are better than others. But many studies of curricula such as Project Follow Through show a wide range of outcomes within each curriculum mostly ascribed to teacher quality. I know of no study that shows a relationship between facilities and student achievement. In fact every study I have seen shows that such a relationship does not exist.

The basic idea is that there is no 20 percent.  There is only 100 percent.  All these factors and more (such as collaboration) work together to produce great schools.  But all of this is no different than a great convent, a great pizza joint or a great Internet company.