In a recent TED Talk, Bill Gates talks about the importance of great teachers in shaping leaders. He discusses the incredible variability in quality between teachers and ultimately suggests that a new model needs to be adopted to encourage the professional development of teachers. With his business acumen and demonstrated success in the corporate world, he suggests tools that he is no doubt familiar with:
1) Employing better technology with the video monitoring of classrooms, both for the benefit of surveillance as well as for the benefit of distribution and study.
2) Smarter incentives for teachers.
I really don't like any of these two suggestions. Truth be told, I dislike them with some kind of intensity. The great teachers I've had in my life have always emphasized their respective decisions to become teachers as not being motivated by money. What happens in a classroom is a special thing that exists outside the logic of business operations. That for me is the big picture argument against both 1) and 2).
In theory, video monitoring promises great returns. How else could I have access to all the great lectures distributed for free on TED.com? But TED Talks are a peculiar case. They are lectures and not discussions. Invariably, they are not interactive with the audience. Great teachers respond to the different personalities of different classrooms spontaneously and organically. Great teachers engage the unique interests and backgrounds of their students. Videos do none of these things. Yes, videos can play a role in the dissemination of information, but great teachers do far more than engage in a one-way flow of information from teacher to student. A recorded lecture commodifies a lesson plan. I cannot be inspired by a commodity. In a video, I would never have experienced the palpable passion that Mr. Maggio demonstrated for literature. Any move towards the commodification of education goes against everything that I have learned both as a teacher and as a student.
As for its other purported purpose, surveillance, video monitoring seems to wage a silent war against accountability and trust. The trust and mutual respect in a successful classroom cannot be legislated from the outside. It has to be built from within the classroom, from the ground up. In my opinion, video monitoring would undermine teacher efforts on this moral dimension.
What about smarter incentives? For one thing, incentives require measurements. If teachers are incentivized by the measurable amount in which their students' scores improve on some standardized test, then teachers will begin to teach to the test. There are so many problems with this that I don't even know where to begin. So I won't.
Barry Schwarz says in his excellent talk that we have thus far responded to the financial crisis by trying to improve the regulatory environment and devise smarter incentives. Regulations and incentives are important, but they neglect, according to Barry Schwarz, practical wisdom. The exercise of practical wisdom takes place independently of regulations and incentives. In fact, Schwarz cites a psychological study that demonstrates how the presence of financial incentives can undermine basic goodwill and the exercise of moral wisdom. Interesting stuff. People should behave ethically because it is the right thing to do and not in order to receive some monetary reward.
Bill Gates' suggestions about how we can improve teacher quality are efforts to improve the efficiency of regulations and incentives. Something important is missing. I agree that great teachers should be rewarded and paid handsomely. The service done by great teachers is truly immeasurable. But treating education in a business manner undermines what education is all about.
Nicholas Negroponte, in his talk about One Laptop per Child, discusses his decision to make his organization nonprofit. He says one of the greatest advantages of being nonprofit is that you can attract the best people in the world. Why? Because the people that you attract by being nonprofit are attracted by the merits of the project at hand. Because people who are the absolute best at what they do are seldom motivated by money alone. In my mind, what goes for the nonprofit world goes for what happens in the classroom as well.
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But, then again, Bill Gates also tried to raise Malaria Awareness by letting a box of mosquitoes loose at a TED talks event. So maybe ol' Bill is a few fruitloops short of a box.
You and I are privileged to have attended elite, private schools that have been able to provide above-average teacher salaries. The great teachers that we have encountered during our educational career, therefore, may have indeed been motivated to enter their field out of an attraction to its merits, but are only able to pursue that passion due to adequate compensation. The vast majority of schools are simply not able to attract top talent.
You might argue that the truly passionate are willing to make financial sacrifices for the personal reward of fostering intellects, but this requires students as engaged as their teachers. Sadly, most students in schools the world over, whether it be due to personal disinterest, family circumstances, or other distractions, are characterized more by apathy than a hunger for learning.
The give-and-take of a great teacher personally applying the Socratic method in classes is certainly preferable to viewing a video lecture. But is a class conducted in-person by a common, bad teacher preferable to a video lecture given by the rare great teacher?
I agree with you Clifton about compensation. Compensation needs to be adequate to retain teachers. Of course. But that is fundamentally different discussion from one about incentives.
Banks need to dish out more money to retain top talent. Schools do not and really should not. My main argument is that applying corporate logic to the classroom is not only ineffective but can also be detrimental.
Do I have any solutions or suggestions of my own to offer? No, not really. But I think a big problem for education is simply that the public perception of teaching as a profession, as a viable career, has undergone dramatic changes in the last fifty years. How does one go about changing a perception, a value judgment? I don't pretend to have answers, but I don't think that Bill Gates is on the right track.
For the smooth running of a classroom, the quality of the teachers plays an important role. Teachers should keep themselves comfortable to lead students in the right path. Technologies should be employed in the classroom to motivate students. A great website provides information for teachers to develop their profession.
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