The State Of The Art of Education - 2009

The State Of The Art is Appalling.

There are many ways to argue about the quality of education, and I am so terribly confident about the above claim, that I will not need to talk about rampant illiteracy in third world countries, about functional illiteracy in first world countries, about embarrassing international test scores, etc.

Let's just Look at a single aspect of the state of the art in the west: Good Teaching

Exhibit 1: In 1996, Sanders and Rivers showed that a teacher's quality has a critical effect on the performance of a student. This can be seen rather dramatically in the following image:

It is claimed, and widely quoted and accepted, that if we take an 8 year-old student with 50th percentile performance, and give them a fairly good teacher (top 20% - not necessarily a star), then in 3 years the student can be expected to perform at the 90th percentile. If, however, we take the same student and give them a fairly poor (bottom 20% - not necessarily a terrible teacher), then in 3 years the student can be expected to perform at the 37th percentile. So, the quality of a teacher - however it may be defined - has a significant effect on the performance of students.
Not very surprising.

Exhibit 2: This (2009) February, Bill Gates gave a talk at TED, and dedicated most of it (starting at timestamp 08:00) to the question "How do you make a teacher great?", and to the fact that we don't know the answer. Maybe some people say they do know, and maybe they really do, but apparently we don't all know. At least Gates - who showed that he has the capacity to do a thing or two - says he doesn't quite know the answer to the question.

Taking these facts together: that the quality of the teacher has a critical effect on the students' performance, and that we don't know how to produce quality teachers, together with the fact that performance is a common goal for education - leads to an unhappy conclusion: As of 2009, humanity's know-how is missing a major building block of education.

Some drama if you allow me: Hundreds of years after the establishment of modern schooling; Thousands of years after the invention of writing and of the city-civilization, which requires schooling, we still don't know how to do it well.
Surprising, and not in a nice way.

In this blog, over the next few months, I will look at ways to ensure a very different future post of "The State Of The Art of Education - 2049". (What, anybody expected a quick fix?)