Malcolm Gladwell's articles are always loaded with fascinating information, but then it's a toss-up whether the inferences he draws are clever or ridiculous. Last week's article in the New Yorker was definitely on the asinine side, so I was disturbed to see it being pushed further by Yglesias.
Gladwell's starting point is the fun fact that apparently it's almost impossible to predict who will be a successful NFL quarterback. The NFL defensive teams are so much faster than in college that the whole strategic picture changes, and it's impossible to tell who will be able to adapt. Ok, fine. (Though actually it doesn't sound like an unsolvable problem to me: instead of watching games, just run some lab tests to find out exactly how fast the guy's vision and reflexes are.)
Then we get a analogy with (elementary and high school) teaching. Apparently there is such a thing as teaching skill: year after year some teachers get demonstrably better results than others on an objectively measurable and consistent basis. (Colour me somewhat more sceptical here.) But as with the quarterbacks, no one can predict who those good teachers are going to be. Somewhat spoiling his point, Gladwell then describes an experience of watching videos of teachers and instantly detecting which ones are successful (videos of beginning teachers at that, so there's no way these judgements could be backed up by the kind of long-term comparative evidence he's just been insisting is probative). Apparently it's a breeze to tell good teachers from bad once they're in the classroom, and it's just as you'd expect: the good teachers are the interactive, confident, responsive, high-feedback ones. Hence my scepticism: the profile of 'good teaching' here sounds suspiciously like what the education industry already assumed it was. But perhaps it is so.
The ridiculous part is the moral Gladwell draws: we need a lot more turnover in teaching. Abolish all entry barriers, and then fire everyone who doesn't perform! Because as with the quarterbacks, you can't predict, you can only sort after the fact. But this doesn't make sense for either industry -- and that's about all they have in common. The problem with selecting NFL quarterbacks is that they need physical gifts so extraordinary that they're freaks of nature even among skilled football players, and the costs of a wrong choice are extremely high. (So it's no surprise that the NFL doesn't in fact use the massive-turnover strategy.) In the case of schools as well, the costs of bad teaching are pretty high. But if good teaching is what Gladwell thinks it is, it's a bag of tricks that any reasonably quick-witted person could learn to master. So why not just teach actual teachers to do it? He's written an article about how to improve teaching which depends on the assumption that teaching can't work.
A lot of writing about education, even by smart guys like Gladwell and Yglesias, has this not-too-well-concealed Fire everybody! agenda. And it's not hard to guess why. Everybody had to suffer under The Teacher From Hell at some point in their lives, and it's an extremely traumatic experience. It's as if every single person writing about health care policy had had a close call with a botched surgery -- of course you get obsessed with the problem of bad apples. And I don't deny that there is such a problem. But if these guys kept in better touch with their high school friends, they'd know that their Teacher From Hell was somebody else's inspirational teacher of a lifetime. It's not a simple business. And it definitely isn't football.
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I think the fire-'em-all approach to educational reform comes not just from semi-repressed memories of crappy teachers, but also from the fact that just about everyone in North America, and certainly every member of the pundit class, has been a participant in formal education, either doling it out or receiving it (and often both), and assumes that this experiential knowledge qualifies one to pronounce on the whole enterprise. I find people are much more confident that they know what's gotta be done to fix the schools than they are about, say, water filtration systems. The same phenom pops up when I teach sociology of gender or soc of family - because everyone in the class has some personal experience with genders or families, this makes them autodidactic experts. The classic formulation is "I make a lot more money than my boyfriend so I don't believe that there's any gender gap in wages". I do a regular digression on the first day of class, which would probably horrify epistemological sophisticates like Dr B, on the difference between truth claims based on individual experience and truth claims based on aggregated experiences, better known as "research", and how both can be equally valid even if one contradicts the other. But I digress once again ...
That sounds very plausible -- I see on the internets that everyone is full of 'expertise' on transit policy too, presumably for the same reasons. Speaking of that whole anecdote-data distinction, I was glad to see you share my esteem for Stephanie Nolen... but alas your image of her and Stephen Lewis jointly spawning sent me temporarily into speechless shock. As someone who actually knows stuff about the place, can you confirm my vague impression that her Zim articles in particular are exceptional not just in being well written and fighting the good fight and all, but in having an unusually high level of factual content, quotations from people who actually know what's going on, etc. -- what they used to call 'reporting'?
But, Spirit, you frighten me. I think, as a non-academic, one of the first things students should have kicked out of them (I would be rather a violent academic, just as well I'm not one at all) is the idea that truth claims based on individual experience are the least little bit valid, or even remotely interesting, much less "equally valid" to aggregate experience.
I mean, yes, one can't deny that something that happened did happen, such as, say, getting one's arm stuck in a TGV toilet while trying to recover one's cell phone (my favorite recent believe-it-or-not episode). But since it only happened to one person one can't actually extrapolate anything worthwhile from that experience at all. It tells you nothing valid about telephone use, TGV use, public toilet safety or French industrial policy. (But it's what counts as "news" in most news outlets from the National Enquirer/Le Parisien on down, so maybe one can't blame students for thinking that the view of their own navel is the equivalent of that of the aggregate population's navel in a gazing survey). Teach your children well: self-referential anecdote is not broader truth. And while we're at it: criticism is not analysis.
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