Steven Brill, a Yale law graduate, is the founder of Court TV, which makes him an obvious voice to whom one should listen when trying to decipher the problems with education, no? But his credentials don’t matter. What matters are his ideas, and frankly, they aren’t very good.
He has a new book out, “Class Warfare”, in which he extolls the virtues of choice (charter schools, mainly) in education, while putting the blame for failures in education squarely where it belongs–on the backs of teacher’s unions.
He makes the claim that student indifference, parental disengagement and poverty can be overcome by effective teaching, while also apparently believing that union membership and effectiveness in the classroom are mutually exclusive teacher attributes.
In the review of his book in the New York Times Review of Books, Sara Mosle capably points out the flaws in Mr. Brill’s analysis, particularly regarding teacher’s unions and charter schools, but avoids as if it were plague-afflicted, the eight hundred pound gorilla in the education room.
What is wrong with Mr. Brill’s claim that effective teaching can overcome any sort of impediment to learning? Ask it this way, could effective teaching make a chimpanzee capable of doing differential calculus? Could effective teaching overcome the handicap of the mentally-disabled such that they might score in the top quartile of standardized tests? Indeed, there are two components to intelligence. Nature provides the raw materials and nurture shapes and forms and (sometimes) squeezes the most out of them that she can. Without the raw materials, without the nature, all the nurturing in the world will be for naught. The chimpanzee will be left scratching its head, wondering why he gets no bananas when he fails to calculate the first derivative of a simple function. In so far as student indifference, parental disengagement and poverty are determined by nature, which might not be the dominant role, but surely is a factor, then all the nurturing in the world is bound to come up short. But only if the metric is a relative standard against one’s peers.
One’s genetic heritage is not necessarily dispositive of intelligence. In the marvelous uncertainty with which two strands of DNA are knitted together to form a new human, it has been calculated that there are any one of seventy trillion combinations possible in each individual case. Sometimes things will be knit together just right, and two parents of abidingly low or middling aptitude will produce a genious. But most of the time, the best predictor of a child’s intelligent quotient is to add together the IQ’s of the parents and divide by two.
It is claimed over and over again that there is no genetic component to intelligence; that nature effectively plays no role. Admitting the reality that it does play a role would confirm what racists and genetic determinists and eugenists have all along said–that some races are genetically superior in intellect to others. Failing to admit the reality leaves the whole education establishment wallowing in a pit of ignorance, uncertain of its way out.
Intelligence, unlike for instance, speed at running, is difficult to measure. In truth, standardized tests mainly measure speed of calculation and the ability to memorize. Someone that is considered smart is basically an intellectual speedster capable of quickly storing and retrieving information. “Dull” or “slow” have not arisen to describe the less intellectually capable for nothing. Saying that someone is intellectually slow does not mean they are incapable of learning, any more than a slow runner is incapable of completing the race. It simply means that it takes longer for them to grasp and understand information; there is an undeniable genetic (but not racial) component at play. To ignore the genetic basis for intelligence makes solving the problem of education almost impossible; without acknowledging differences in the raw material with which teachers work, there is no way to determine whether their students are performing at their maximum capabilities.
What is a good teacher anyway? Is it a teacher whose charges consistently perform at the highest quartile on standardized tests? If performance on standardized tests is ranked according to one’s peers, how could any but just a few teachers ever be considered good? Having students in the top quartile is nice, but someone has to teach the other seventy-five percent. Life is not Lake Wobegon. All the children can’t be above average, though in some wealthy, usually suburban, school districts populated by very high IQ parents, it seems that all, or nearly all, of the students perform above average on standardized tests relative to their inner-city peers. This shouldn’t be surprising. They have usually have nature in their favor. It says practically nothing about the effectiveness of their teachers.
Here’s my definition of a good teacher: A good teacher is one that inspires, demands, motivates, etc., children to perform at the limits of their capabilities. A good teacher is much the same thing as a good coach, or battlefield general.
How does one measure whether a teacher is good or not? In just the same manner that good coaches or successful battlefield generals are determined. Figure out how much innate talent the children have, by whatever means necessary, and determine whether the children are performing at or above expectations based on their talent level. A good teacher understands what Civil War general Nathan Bedford Forrest observed was critical to leadership in war, “Doing the mostest with the leastest”.
Good coaching is revealed mostly by consistent winning. If a coach wins year in and year out, no matter who are the personnel he’s coaching, then the coach is the obvious reason. Talent levels fluctuate every year. If 2010 national champion Auburn University is somehow able to again be in the running for the prize this year, after having lost all the players critical to last season’s success, chalk it up to coach Gene Chizik. If the Tigers perform miserably as expected, it will just show that Chizik is a very average coach that had the great good fortune to coach a couple of the best players in college football last year.
But a teacher in a wealthy suburban school district should not get a free pass just because her charges consistently perform at a level on standardized tests that is higher than others in poorer school districts. High IQ parents will generally have high IQ children, and will usually congregate in the same wealthy school districts. Average talent levels across school districts vary little from year to year. The teacher in a wealthy school district may very well be doing poorly at pushing her charges to do the most with their talents, while her counterpart in a poor district that almost never has any kids in the highest quartile may be getting more than could reasonably be expected. Good teaching depends on getting the most out of the talents the kids bring to the table. High performance may be indicative of good teaching, but it may also just be indicative of a high talent level.
Race should not even be considered as a relevant factor. Human beings are all the same species, no matter their particular racial heritage. On average, some racial subgroups (so far as they are identifiable) perform better at some tasks than others, which makes perfect sense when it is considered that the various races arose out of adaptations to local environments. On average, an Innuit will be better able to survive an Arctic winter than will an African. An African will, on average, be better able than an Innuit to survive a broiling hot summer. Some of the adaptations undoubtedly concerned intellectual capabilities, but teasing them out is exceedingly difficult, except on an average basis, and averages tell us nothing about individual performances. It is the individual that should matter to the education system. Which is why it is confounding that so many statistical studies elucidating differences in average racial performance abound in education. That there is a genetic component to intelligence can not be denied; that the genetic component is determined at the individual level by the racial group to which one belongs is flat-out wrong.
Good teaching can not make an intellectually slow kid fast relative to his peers, anymore than good coaching can make an innately slow athlete fast. All either can do is create an environment in which the very best speed, intellectually or athletically, is attainable. Good teaching and coaching can help a slow student or athlete achieve to the limits of their capabilities, but it can’t make them necessarily faster than anyone else. So long as teachers are evaluated on the basis of relative achievement metrics and not achievement metrics relative to individual talent levels, there will be no possibility of improving the level of instruction.
The preposterous claim that unionization is the source of education’s problems can be easily dismissed with just this observation: In most states (mine included) all the public school teachers belong to the same public-sector union, yet all public schools do not perform, on average, equally well. If there is always “A” (teacher’s union), but only occasionally “B” (poor performance), then “A” can’t be causing “B”. Somebody with a Yale law degree ought to easily understand that.
But what of the initially posed question? Can effective teaching overcome student indifference, parental apathy and poverty? No, no and maybe yes. Student indifference is usually a product of innate ability. Nature seeks its own nurture. A kid that is good at math will want to learn math. All that can really be done for student indifference is expose them to the curriculum in an engaging way. If a student doesn’t care to learn, he won’t.
As for effective teaching overcoming parental disengagement, it has to be asked, how exactly is such a thing likely to be accomplished? Teachers hardly ever see the parents. A parent, more so than a child, can not be made to care about their kid’s education. Here again, nature probably plays a significant role. Parents that didn’t do well in school are the most likely to be disengaged, which then nurtures their child’s predisposition, because of their own lack of ability passed down from their parents, to disengagement.
But poverty is different. Poverty can arise from many sources. For example, new immigrants are generally impoverished, the fact of which says nothing about their intellectual acumen. It just means they are new. In so far as poverty does not necessarily reflect the innate intellectual abilities of the impoverished, effective teaching can provide a means out that the poverty-stricken would clamor to engage.
But all this…teacher, unions, charter schools, etc., fails to ask the question: What is the purpose of education and the education system? Without knowing its purpose there is no way to know how it might be improved. Alas, a topic for another day.