schmave

This graph, shown at 12:50, shows how good four different factors are at predicting whether a teacher will raise the test scores of her students, and they are:

1) Past Performance (presumably, whether the teacher raised his students' test scores the year before, although it's not defined)

2) Whether or not the teacher majored in math

3) Whether or not the teacher participated in TFA

4) Whether or not the teacher has a Master's in Education

The best predictor is #1, which just means that the best predictor of whether a teacher is good at raising test scores is to see if they were good at that last year too. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.

As a few other people here have suggested, standardized test scores are a pretty narrow measure of education quality. Bill Gates mentioned that everyone in the room had probably had a few great teachers to get them to where they are now. When I think about the great teachers I have had, I certainly don't think they were great because they raised my standardized test scores. They were great because they gave me a much deeper understanding of a topic, or opened my eyes to something I hadn't seen before.

Yes, the best teachers I had may have increased my standardized test scores some as a side effect, but it would be an insult to them if that's why I admired them so much as teachers.

Test prep can be done in a factory, but not education.

Production is solved for now, but our solution (at least in the US, as I understand it) depends on abundant supplies of fossil fuel and fossil water, which are not going to be around forever.

So, there is plenty of work to do to see that this problem stays solved.

If you are interested in what he has to say about education, you might also like the writings of John Taylor Gatto:

* http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm

* http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

This article throws the term "hook" around. Do they mean binary rewriting or some other kind of hooking? That's awesome if Xobni went the rewriting route.