/ quality management
via my brother and U of Michigan alumnus Sean by email this morning. He adds this note: “Do yourself a favor and watch this six minute video of John Bacon delivering the Ideal Last Lecture at UM recently. I am not sure if Bo ever read Matthew 18, but he sure understood how to resolve problems with another human being. Bacon’s last three sentences are priceless and excellent teaching material for us all to hang on to.”
News regarding the oldest part of Oxford University’s Bodleian library, called Duke Humfrey’s Library. The university’s Health and Safety Officer has taken away all the stepladders. “Laurence Benson, the library’s director of administration and finance, said: ‘The library would prefer to keep the books in their original historic location — where they have been safely consulted for 400 years prior to the instructions from the Health and Safety office.’”
So the books will be kept where they have been safely consulted for more than four centuries but due to someone looking after the health and safety of bibliophiles, a third of the books in the library will never again be consulted, safely or otherwise. “Of all tyrannies,” said C. S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
Gladwell on Quarterbacks and Effective Teachers
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.
