Updated: Skoolboy Savages Kristof

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLE TEACHERS?
CLOSE THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP BY PUTTING JESUS IN EVERY CLASSROOM.

UPDATED:

Horn and Bacey at Schools Matter and Diane Ravitch on The Miracle Teacher Revisited

I tend to believe things I read. And I would usually believe Kristof. But when you actually know something about something and see a guy getting it so wrong, I wonder why I should take anything he writes seriously. Word to the wise: Don't write glowing reports about the education reform movement or about how important a good teacher is until you have a real clue. If all it takes are 4 years to erase the achievement gap by having excellent teachers, try an experiment in a bunch of places. But since you are only measuring teacher quality by test score results (rather than things like ability to control kids and nourish them) you can only use teachers who get high test scores.

At Gotham Schools

Nix on Nick Kristof’s Claims

by Aaron Pallas (alias Skoolboy)

Excerpt:

Breathlessly, Kristof reports in Sunday’s New York Times that teachers are “astonishingly important.” “It turns out that having a great teacher is far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good school with a mediocre teacher,” he writes. “A Los Angeles study suggested that four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of the pool would erase the black-white testing gap.”

Wow, erasing the black-white testing gap in four years sounds like a pretty good deal. And just from being taught by some really great teachers! There must be some evidence of this for it to show up in the New York Times, wouldn’t you think? Some study somewhere that actually showed that black students exposed to teachers in the top quarter of the teacher effectiveness distribution for four years in a row can routinely move from the 16th percentile in the test score distribution (roughly the black average) to the 50th percentile (roughly the white average)?