David Cameron will today unveil his plan to revitalize the teaching profession by making it more elitist — open only to those with good degrees. He will say that his policy is “brazenly elitist — making sure only the top graduates can apply… With our plans, if you want to become a teacher — and get funding for it — you need a 2:2 or higher. And we will also make sure we get some of the best graduates into teaching by offering to pay off their student loan. As long as you’ve got a first or 2:1 in maths or a rigorous science subject from a good university, you can apply.”
That all sounds very interesting, but quite apart from whether Mr Cameron can find enough Maths graduates with a good degree to fill schools’ recruitment needs, an important question must be asked: does it matter?
In fact, Mr Cameron is wasting his time. A degree, or the quality of a degree, is no better at predicting a person’s likelihood of success as a teacher than the colour of that person’s hair.
Malcolm Gladwell, writing for the New Yorker, explains:
A group of researchers — Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress — have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost very district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications — as much as they appear related to teaching prowess — turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a [college] quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans [as a method of assessing his ability to play in the NFL]
Being a good teacher is about more than academic ability or even intelligence. Indeed, many of the skills, the ability to room manage, to grab attention, to maintain discipline, to communicate effectively, and to make students feel involved, aren’t cognitive at all, and are very difficult to instill.
The logical conclusion to this is that, once qualifying basic standards such as a degree of some sort to indicate proficiency in a specific subject, and the ability to talk, it might be as effective to pick at random as it is to select based on academic qualifications.
And given this, there is another, ruthlessly simple, utterly revolutionary way of improving the quality of teachers. Gladwell again:
Financial services firms don’t look for only the best students, or require graduate degrees or specify a list of prerequisites. No one knows beforehand what makes a high performing financial adviser different from a low performing one, so the field throws the door wide open.
[…]
[Financial services company] North Star Resource Group interviewed about a thousand people, and found forty-nine it liked, a ratio of twenty interviewees to one candidate. Those candidates were put through a four month “training camp,” in which they tried to act like real financial advisers… Of the forty-nine people invited to the training camp, twenty-three made the cut and were hired as apprentice advisers. Then the real sorting began. “Even with the top performers, it really takes three to four years to see whether someone can make it,” [co-president Ed] Deutschlander says. “You’re just scratching the surface at the beginning. Four years from now, I expect to hang on to at least thirty to forty per cent of that twenty-three.”
[…]
In teaching, the implications are… profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.
The Parallax Brief would like to take this opportunity to offer his heartfelt congratulations to Liz Truss for her victory in her battle against the slobbering puritans of the South West Norfolk Conservative Committe, who had put her through the political ringer of a deselection hearing and vote for no other reason than that she once had an affair with a married man while married herself. She won the vote 137-37.
It’s amazing how much money that so-called fiscal conservatives are willing to lavish on the armed services. The Parallax Brief believes our armed forces are grossly underfunded and overstretched for Britain’s current foreign policy brief, but what always shocks him is the willingness of those who spend the vast majority of their time engaged in a monotonous, aggressive siege of what they see government largesse (that is, all government spending) to not only join him in being against military cutbacks, but to argue that any it’s wrong to even question MoD spending.
Daniel Hannan, Conservative Party MEP for South East England, has resigned his post as party European legal spokesman in protest at Conservative leader David Cameron’s decision to recant from his promise to hold a referendum on the ratification of the Lisbon treaty. Mr. Hannan has become an immensely popular figure within Tory circles, due to his hit book, 
The Parallax Brief maintains that the only party that can stop the Conservative Party winning the next election is the Conservative Party. Labour has been in power too long, the economy is in too much of a mess, and its poll figures have stubbornly refused to budge for too long to imagine that Gordon Brown can work out a way to get himself back into 10 Downing Street next spring or summer.
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