Mr. Stamford

You have to understand that I was just not ready for this. I was a teacher's pet. When I got a different answer from Mr. Stamford's, I raised my hand dutifully and asked why I had gotten it wrong. His answer was so far over my head that I just couldn't make sense of it. So that night, when I came home, I asked my parents. They assured me that my answer was right: the teacher had gotten it wrong. A fluke, I thought.

But the next week, the same thing happened. I got an answer which was different from Mr. Stamford's. I asked about it, and he explained why I was wrong. I didn't get it, and he kept explaining until I finally stopped asking. Only once again, I was right and Mr. Stamford was wrong. His explanations weren't "over my head." They were complete nonsense.

It was months before I figured out how to deal with Mr. Stamford. If he got something wrong, I would wait until all the other kids had left the class and then I would show him his mistake. The next day he would say to the class, "I was looking at this problem again last night, and I happened to notice that..." blah blah quack quack. He could understand the correction. He could admit his mistake. But he could not back down publicly in front of a 7^th grader.

Looking back, I have to say that Mr. Stamford did me a favor. He took teachers off their pedestal, and helped me grow up a little. But if the circumstances had been just a bit different—if I hadn't thought of asking my parents, or if they hadn't known the math, or if I had been just a little more insecure—I would have decided that I just don't understand math, and maybe believed that for the rest of my life. Never underestimate the impact that one teacher can have.

My friend Alice could easily have had an equally strong impact on many students in the other direction. Alice and I went to college together. She went on to get her Ph.D. in Physics, and is now a leading researcher in her field. But she's always wanted to teach and she would make an excellent teacher. Last year she seriously considered applying to the high school where I teach now. But she has three kids, her husband is a stay-at-home father, and moving from an industry job to a teaching job would have involved a pay cut of about $30,000/year. So, Alice is still in industry, and the world has probably lost a great teacher.

So why am I telling you all this?

Public education is a hot topic today. Everyone agrees that it's broken and needs to be fixed. Personally, I believe that the most important piece of the education puzzle is the teacher. Put an excellent teacher in an old-fashioned classroom with twenty-year-old books and inadequate supplies, and the students will get a good education. Put a terrible teacher in a fancy modern classroom with next year's textbooks and state-of-the-art electronics, and they will get nothing.

Most people recognize the truth of these statements. But they hesitate when I take this thought to its logical conclusion. If teachers are the key to a good education, then we can't fix education by adding more computers or tweaking the dress codes. We have to take two very difficult steps.

First, pay teachers like the professionals they are. Make salaries competitive so that Alice, and others like her, can seriously consider teaching as an option.

But wait—now we're paying the Mr. Stamfords of the world much more than they're worth, right? Which leads me to the second step:

Fire Mr. Stamford. Identify all the teachers who can't teach, and get rid of them.

That's it. Two steps to a better education for the country: attract good teachers, and fire the bad ones. But it isn't happening. The Democrats propose more money (with no accountability), and the Republicans propose more accountability (with no money). And both sides court voters by paying lip service to the idea that our top priority, as a nation, is educating our children.

She had a similar experience w/ a high-school history teacher.

I'll bet if someone created a Web page where people could just post their high school teacher horror stories, it would be packed.

It's all well and good to say that we should have more accountability, but the question is how do you define a good teacher? No Child Left Behind defines it primarily in terms of the average scores of the teacher's students on standardized tests. Is that the right measure? How can you fairly account for the different populations in different classes? Does that open the door to "teaching to the test," and is that necessarily a bad thing? Who should design those tests? Should we most highly value teachers who pull up the weaker students or ones who challenge the stronger students? I agree with your general principles as starting points, but as always the devil is in the details. Along similar lines, in the charter school article you say that we should fix or shut down charter schools that are doing a bad job. By what criteria?

All fair questions, but impossible to ask in a world in which teachers have a "we can't fire you unless you mug somebody" contract.

I think the criteria would be to make the teachers pass the same test they propose to give their students. Mr. Stamford would have failed it. I think most teachers have taught subjects so long they have developed a "patina" of actual knowledge. They have lost some of the basics IMO.

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