Kristof And The "Great Teachers" Myth

Sometimes I look at the garbage Nicholas Kristof writes in the NY Times and think "Oh, my God, one of the DUMBEST people on the planet has a column on one of the most read pieces of op-ed real estate in the world!"

Today was one of those days.

It was education day at the Kristof corner - specifically a day to trot out the old Gates Foundation myths about "Great Teachers" and "Only The Teacher Matters."

Kristof, who somehow has won journalism awards for his work, essentially rewrites Gates Foundation p.r. releases and Bill Gates op-eds for this morning's column.

You see this often when the journalism "greats" like Kristof or Jonathan Alter or Tom Friedman turn their attentions to education issues.

The tip-off for these columns is the presence of the phrase "We know we works" or some variation thereof to talk about K-12 policy.

The other tip-off is that whatever the journalism "greats" like Kristof, Alter or Friedman write sounds like it came from a Gates Foundation press release.

Let's conduct a little experiment. I'm going to quote from both Gates and Kristof in the next couple of paragraphs and you tell me who wrote each of the pieces.

Here's the first:

One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.

Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.

A teacher better than 93 percent of other teachers would add $640,000 to lifetime pay of a class of 20, the study found.

Here's the second:

In K-12, we know more about what works.

We know that of all the variables under a school's control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. It is astonishing what great teachers can do for their students.

Yet compared with the countries that outperform us in education, we do very little to measure, develop and reward excellent teaching. We have been expecting teachers to be effective without giving them feedback and training.

To flip the curve, we have to identify great teachers, find out what makes them so effective and transfer those skills to others so more students can enjoy top teachers and high achievement.

The first piece of claptrap was "written" by Kristof and published in today's NY Times.

The second piece of claptrap is from a February 28, 2011 Bill Gates op-ed published in the Washington Post - a newspaper company that owns both a test prep company for K-12 standardized testing AND for-profit higher education schools (so they have a stake in promoting Gates' test heavy agenda AND his "Everybody Needs To Go To College!" agenda.)

They both promote the same jive-ass agenda - only the teacher matters, "great teachers" can perform miracles with the achievement gap and drop-out rates, if teachers would accept new, more rigorous methods of evaluation, they could be paid more (but only if they agree to take more children per class.)

But this agenda is misleading.

In the view of these men, there is no problem with the economic system that has seen an increase in poverty rates in children from 6%-22% over the last two decades, that has seen a continued erosion of middle and working class wages so that a middle class family MUST have at least two incomes in order to make ends meet, no serious consideration of the societal problems like long-term unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, physical abuse, depression or despair that are so prevalent in impoverished areas of America.

Nope - none of this stuff matters because "Great Teachers," like Jesus in the Bible, can make all the stuff disappear AND raise test scores for children.

How do Gates and Kristof know this?

They claim "research" that supports the "Great Teacher" myth - for example, Kristof cites a Stanford study that says if a teacher who is better than 84% of other teachers is placed in a class of 20, those students will make $20,000 more during their lifetimes - adding $400,000 of "value" to the country.

Leaving aside that Kristof is either too stupid or too elitist to know that class sizes in public schools are NEVER 20 (try 24-34, Nick), leaving aside the validity of the stats and data Kristof is using (it comes from a Stanford researcher famous for saying that the bottom 10% of teachers need to be fired to improve public education) and leaving aside the impossibility of putting a teacher who is better than 84% of his/her fellow teachers in EVERY classroom, explain to me how adding $20,000 to each child over the course of a lifetime MEANS ANYTHING?

Serious, let's do some math.

$20,000 divided by the expected worklife span of children these days - 21-65 - comes to $454 dollars a year - or $37.83 extra a month.

Now I dunno about where you live, but here in NYC $454 additional dollars a year might buy you a couple of months worth of Starbucks lattes, but it certainly isn't going to decrease the wealth gap between the richest 400 people in the country, who own more than the bottom 150 million combined, nor significantly improve your own economic quality of life.

Hell, real estate in Manhattan has gone up 2 dollars per square foot over the past few months, meaning if you have a 225 square foot apartment in Manhattan, your $454 just got consumed on one month's rent.

And I dunno where you live, but here in NYC an extra $37.83 a month barely covers the increase in subway fares that seem to occur every year now.

$454 a year sure doesn't go far, does it?

You know, if Gates and Kristof and Alter and Friedman and the rest of the education deform jiveheads wanted to actually improve the economic lives of children in poverty, they would fight for an economic system that isn't constantly squeezing more and more work and productivity out of the working and middle classes while providing fewer benefits and lower wages.

They would find a way to spread the economic wealth around this country beyond the financial parasites on Wall Street who consume so much of it now (like this guy.)

They would fight for a liveable wage, benefits that would provide health care and pensions for all so that people could lead long, healthy lives and enjoy long, healthy retirements.

They would fight for economic justice in global trade so that people in China aren't working as wage slaves making Microsoft products for a couple of dollars a day while working 12-16 hour shifts.

But that's just it - Bill Gates is a hypocrite through and through with this stuff - exploiting millions of people on the one hand in the making of his Microsoft products while acting all philanthropist on the other hand.

The REAL problem is not education, as Professor Krugman, another inhabitant of the NY Times op-ed real estate corner, found the other day. The problem is economics:

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

I dunno if Kristof is simply stupid or just doing his part to promote the neo-liberal New Feudal Order for his corporate overlords, but the garbage he writes on education is truly odious. Sure, there are problems in public education, and sure there are problems in the American economic system, but it is rampantly dishonest to say that "bad" teachers are the reasons for them and firing those teachers and hiring "good" ones will fix the problems.

Further, it is complete idiocy to think that a teacher "better" than 84% of his/her fellow teachers can be put into EVERY classroom.

First, can you be sure the "objective measurements" you're using to assess that level of expertise are actually practical? This NY Times Michael Winerip article on value-added assessments suggests that is NOT possible right now with the mechanisms being used (though both Gates and Kristoff think it is.)

Next, if you're putting a teacher who is better than 84% of his/her fellow teachers in EVERY classroom, what happens to the other 84%? Do they get fired? Are they put on notice that if they don't get into the top 16% in a year or two, they will be fired? And if you do fire all those folks, can you be sure you're not firing lots of good teachers?

Finally, does anybody in their right mind think adding $20,000 to somebody's lifetime earning potential makes a significant improvement upon somebody's life?

Hell, Bill Gates makes $20,000 a minute off his Chinese wage slaves pumping out the Microsoft Xboxes that explode after they're on for a few hours.

This is ludicrous stuff from Nick Kristof, and given the level of jive I see in his education columns, it makes me thinks his other columns where he writes about non-education issues may be as loaded with jive as these.

Perhaps he can address the myth of the award-winning journalist in a future column?

UPDATE: Blue Texan at Firedoglake takes on Kristof too. He asks the question:
Why is Nicholas Kristof Bashing Teachers’ Unions?

To which a commenter replies:

You mean aside from the fact that he’s an idiot?

Yes, but he's an award-winning idiot!