The Abell Report

There is precious little useful data in the social sciences. However, Maryland's Abell Foundation has crunched all the available studies to determine what makes a good teacher. Their analysis (http://www.abell.org/publications/detail.asp?ID=59), interestingly, arrives at all the same conclusions I already have, working deductively. The evidence, at a minimum, adds some reinforcement to common sense.

First point: studies show that good teachers do make a difference in student performance. Roughly, the students of a good teacher learn twice as fast as those with a bad teacher. It follows that it is indeed worthwhile to try to improve teacher quality. But how do we do this? Insist that they all have proper training in “pedagogy”?

Well, no. Obviously, the Education Schools have a vested interest in proving this is so, and access to the funding to do the relevant studies. Nevertheless, no study to date, according to the Abell survey, has shown that graduates of ed schools teach any better than those who do not go, in terms of student achievement. Studies also indicate that teachers with higher degrees in education (M. Ed., Ed. D.) do not produce better student results. In fact, a table aggregating sixty studies on the issue (Abell, p. 18) seems to plainly show, on balance, that they produce worse student results—the more education a teacher has in education, the worse a teacher he or she becomes.

Since modern teacher education stands and falls on its supposedly “scientific” basis, plainly, it falls. We should be spending no more money on Education Schools, or on hiring teachers with such qualifications. It is at best worthless, with some indications it is actually harming our children.

So, in choosing teachers, what criteria should we use instead?

No suprises here, at least for me. The single clearest indication of who will be a good teacher is how well the candidate does on a test of verbal ability. The present paper cites directly 20 separate recent studies that produce this same result.

That's what good teaching is, in the first instance: being able to explain things clearly (and, even better, engagingly). The traditional training for a career as a teacher in the past, in the West and in many other cultures, was in rhetoric, and the final exam was often a successful performance in a debate.

Now we need to refer to a fact cited here before, and mentioned again in the present report: those entering Ed Schools at every level regularly score lower on the verbal SAT than those majoring in almost any other subject. Leave aside why this is so—it necessarily means that selecting our teachers from Ed School graduates produces a lower quality of instruction than choosing randomly from holders of any other degree. It is not just that the schools do nothing to teach the one essential teaching skill: they also, for whatever reason, repel those who already have it.

The present study theorizes that the greater verbal ability measured in the best teachers is a proxy for greater intelligence, and that this is the relevant factor. It might well be; nothing correlates better with IQ than the size of one's working vocabulary. And studies also show that the graduates of more “selective” colleges do better as teachers than others. They also show that the holders of avanced degrees in the subject taught produce better student results, at least at high school level.

This too, is simply common sense. Other than an ability to communicate well, the second logical requirement for a good teacher is knowledge of the subject taught. Intelligence is ability to learn quickly; and those who attend a better college presumably also learn more in the same amount of time. And this always matters; you cannot teach what you do not know. Even at the elementary level, a good general knowledge, a wide grounding in the history of human thought, makes a difference. This is precisely the value a living teacher can add: fielding those unexpected questions. Otherwise, the student could do as well on their own with a good book. Moreover, someone who has spent a few years devoted to a given subject obviously has some personal enthusiasm for it: if nothing else, enthusiasm and interest shows, and tends to rub off.

Unfortunately, as the authors of the Abell study point out, academic excellence of this traditional sort is given no status in Ed Schools. When I was going through the system and looked into the possibility of a teaching degree, back in the mid-seventies, there were absolutely no academic requirements for Ed School in terms of marks or schools attended: if you held the general BA, it was purely first-come, first-served.

Rumours hold that the same attitude persists in the marking of students once in. For, the authors of the present study note, the Ed Schools and the teaching profession have developed a distinctly anti-intellectual culture that resents those with other academic qualifications and backgrounds. They are presumably representatives of the oppressor class.

Rather obviously, by circumventing this system, a private school could easily achieve better results at a lower cost. And that is exactly what we find: private schools achieve consistently better student results at roughly half the cost per student; so does home schooling.

In other words: our Ed Schools are a net drag on our society.